How do you think would the relationship between interactive media and the society change in the future?

My educated guess would be that society is going to interact exponentially more with interactive media, whether we like it or not. There is a lot of momentum building up with pervasive computing technologies and this is going to affect so much of our daily lives. There are significant concerns and challenges in the short term with issues like global warming, information overload, privacy issues but I think good multi-disciplinary design will emerge to address these issues.

I’m not entirely happy about this though: our current ways of doing business and consuming are not sustainable. A lot of consumer attitudes need to change if we want to keep us all on this planet in the long run. Having said that, the future does look good for interaction designers, as they should certainly play a role in this change.

Tell us about your concept for this month’s SHIFT cover design.

I haven’t animated anything new in a while so I wanted to go back to some of those roots. I used to do 1- or 2-second loops for my VJ sets that played with abstract geometries and colors. When thinking of Shift as a theme I thought of two ideas: a movement of displacement and the notion of color shifting. I could relate to these ideas in animation well so I went with a design that played with a reveal of the word “shift” and mixed with a kinetic overlaying of colors.

We heard that you or your family are originally from Caracas, Venezuela, and you also made some work about the place. Could you describe what kind of place it is for people who never visited there? What sort of aspects does Venezuela have an effect on your creativity?

Venezuela is my home – I still have most of my family there. The country is stunning and lush with sunlight. The greenery is just everywhere and I miss that part, as well as the warm spring-like weather all year. The landscapes change a lot, we have snowy mountains next to Caribbean turquoise sea beaches. People there are happy with life in general although the current president we have has divided society to some extent.

I’m very influenced by Venezuela’s sunlight, landscape and colors. Also by famous key native artists like Armando Reverón, Jesus Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, who designed my alma mater.

Please tell us about your future projects.

I’m looking forward to working on more projects involving cities, environments, mobile and embedded computing. I have a couple of ideas for urban installations using wifi servers on sites hooked to microcontrollers and sensors, relaying events to a website.

Another temporary art project I want to do is a big, on an urban scale, that uses little technology but will be quite expensive and lengthy to produce. I would like to get more design work for clients in the realms of urbanism, architecture, interior design, retail and events, but so far I’m mostly getting asked to work on mobile devices. It would be great to do a project in Japan one day – this way I could finally come and meet the place. Also I really want to start my own studio with partners.

Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena
Address: 17 w 54 street, New York, NY 10019
Tel: +1 212 765 4364
https://www.med44.com