Profile & Statement:
Vanessa Castro (b.1993)
New York, New YorkIn my hybrid analog-digital media practice, I make videos, stills, and music that chronicle the spaces between self and other, past and present, and the real and imaginary. I’m excited by the capacity of technology to ideate and showcase new worlds and possibilities. Often mediated through digital media, I create narratives that examine the intersection of nature, technology and collective imagination.
My methodology is research-driven and iterative. I begin with archival research, collecting archival and personal images, texts, and sounds. From there I physicalize the concepts and images from my research through illustration, instrumentation, or creative writing. Eventually these elements move through cycles of digital manipulation like layering, animating, or reiterating, with each version reshaping the next. I draw on the process of computation technology itself so that my work exists between these physical and virtual worlds.
It is my intention as an artist to remind others that technology has been both a tool of expression and extraction throughout history. We can use technology to physicalize the dream and infrastructure to build a loving, better world, but ultimately, it’s the unfurling towards that fantasy (the story, the relationships, the hope, action) that holds more importance. Channeling our imagination plays an important role in engaging with our feelings about the real, physical world.
I see people and place as foundational to technological work, so my artistic motivations are heavily informed by modern DIY subcultures that traverse time, taste, and mediums, like Brazil’s Tropicalia in the ‘70s, New York’s 80s avant-garde and Japan’s Superflat in the early 2000s. Brazilian modernism’s anthropophagic principle, the idea of cultural cannibalism as a language itself, is a touchstone for me as I approach artmaking.
Projects:
New Game (2022)
Directed by Amy Zimmer
Visuals by Vanessa Castro
Film Duration: 7 minutes 55 seconds
A short film on Adult Swim about a woman who struggles to play a new video game to pass the time, and finds out some new things about herself and the world around her.
My task was to invent the digital world around the footage so that a nature-based game could exist. I worked backwards, taking real footage and constructing a story world around it, researching the biomes of each location that it was shot to inform the visuals. The process immersed me in 2D and 3D animation and taught me how to blend spirituality, humor, and play through digital space in hopes of encouraging reconnection to nature.
The user interface for the gamewas inspired by natural forms, nu-age graphic design, and sleek, first-person style videogames.
Seeking Mavis Beacon (2024)
Directed by Jazmine Jones
Animated and Assistant Edited by Vanessa Castro
Clip Duration: 1 minutes 58 seconds
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing taught millions globally, but the software’s Haitian-born cover model vanished decades ago. Two DIY detectives search for the model while posing questions about identity and artificial intelligence.
The goal was to shape a verité e-girl detective story through animated, desktop realism segments. Working off of archival footage sourced entirely from the internet, I built the computing environment around them to create a seamless integration between the stories of the narrators in both their virtual and physical lives. It became an opportunity to take a close look at the sociopolitical role of digital media in terms of race as well as labor exploitation, deepfakes, and access to imagery on the internet.
The user interface for the game was inspired by the computing systems from our daily life, and personalizing them to the characters, themes, and ideas in the film. Each window became an opportunity to a cite a source, inspiration or new research rabbit-hole.
Player 1 (2023—)
Directed by Vanessa Castro
Animated and Edited by Vanessa Castro
Clip Duration: 5 minutes 38 seconds
Player 1 is a work-in-progress, 3D animated, post-apocalypse narrative made on Blender, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Premiere. I intend to complete this project during my grduate studies.
The story is about our protagonist, P1, returning to now-abandoned Earth after an escape-ship malfunction. Earth is left stranded with depleted resources because industrialists imprisoned the planet's keepers, the Sources. P1, curious and now with plenty of free-time, is sent on a journey to find a new vessel for the Source to restore balance on Earth, and make it habitable for those who are still around.
His journey is impossible to accomplish without the help, wisdom and suspicions of other characters he meets along the way. It’s a story about the necessity of friendship, the maintenance and appreciation of nature, and curiosity as essential tools to survival.
Love (2023)
79x35” Digital Banner
A digital banner iterated from the work on my in-progress short, Player 1. It includes the main character, P1, and his friend the peacock, along with text and illustrations from personal journals, as well as stills from moving images.
Big Red’s Adventure (2025)
Directed by Vanessa Castro
Music by Fascinating Chimera Project
Clip Duration: 4 minutes 27 seconds
Fascinating Chimera Project wrote this song as a theme song for their neighborhood cat, Big Red. They used to see him out and about on warm days he would occasionally come right up to their porch for a visit and some pets. It is a video game-inspired animated music video that follows a day in the life of Big Red, an orange tabby cat, told through his point of view.
The video uses game mechanics to explore the idea of choice, how much of a day is shaped by intention or coincidence. Bound by shared themes of selfhood, place, change, and survival, as well as a love of nature and retro video games, I set out to center non-human lives, and the landscapes that carry them, as vital members of the community. The video reimagines Big Red’s world as one where critters are citizens and everyday moments become pixelated adventures. Animated over nine months entirely in Blender and After Effects, Big Red’s Theme invites viewers to reflect, play, and embark on their own neighborhood quest.
Built to the track of the song, the narrative was choreographed to the music instead of the narrative.
My CGI videos are a mix of ready-mades (Free 3D Models), original digital sculptures, scanned ephemera, and stsite-specific research. For example, all the animals and fauna are local to New York State, where the artists are from.
Sou (2021)
Music by Vanessa Castro
Album Duration: 27 Minutes
All songs written and performed by Vanessa Castro with contributions from Dara Hirsch, Arian Shafiee, and Andrew Emge.
Composed between 2017 and 2020, Sou layers loops of lush guitar and percussion with Castro’s introspective lyrics and a variety of synths, both analog and digital. Drawing inspiration from the Brazilian music of her childhood, as well as electronic and dance music, Castro sings in both Portuguese and English to chronicle the spaces between self and other, past and present, and the real and imaginary. The result is a bricolage of pine trees, tropical plants, and weeds bursting through concrete; a collage of the mountains of Minas Gerais, the view outside castro’s bedroom window in Ridgewood, Queens, and the forests of Haukijärvi, Finland, where many of the lyrics were written during a residency in 2019.
Inspired by questions of belonging and love, Sou documents geographies, intimacies, and family legacies; traverses biomes and boundaries; and constructs a map of a landscape in transition, one that never attempts to pin down self, place, or meaning, but instead finds harmony in uncertainty.
Smoke (2021)
11x17” Giclée Print
Magpie (2021)
5x7” Giclée Print
Columns (2021)
11x17” Giclée Print
Prints photographed and illustrated during an artist residency in Finland in 2020. It exemplies work of mine that goes beyond computer generated imagery, focusing on magnifying moments that highlight the social and natural infrastructure of the location, via photography, illustration and collage.
Sol Poente From the Front (2022)
5x6” Giclée Print
Sol Poente From the Back (2022)
5x7” Giclée Print
Urutu From the Front (2022)
5x6” Giclée Print
Urutu Poente From the Back (2022)
5x7” Giclée Print
A virtually immersive study of the color, light and forms created in the paintings of Brazilian Modernism’s most forefront female artist, Tarsila do Amaral.
Landscapes created on Blender based off of Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings, “Sole Poente” or “Sunset,” and “Urutu.”
False Promise (2025)
45x80” Digital Art
I like to combine computer generated imagery with textures that come from real life and my personal life, especially notes, diary entries, and illustrations. The spontanaeity and physicality of these instances bring out the humanity of the otherwise sleek, digital imagery I’m making, because image-making is anything but sleek or clean.
In this case I wanted to translate the feeling of being misunderstood into the cinematic trope of the monster that comes and destroys the city metropolis. I wanted to strip “Godzilla” of its clichéd monstrosity and bring forth the innocent imagery of the seedling as an alternative. So much of our pain comes from the most innocent part of ourselves that was just trying to grow.