Unveiling New Dimensions inside the Fluid Worlds of Raquel Villa

In the realm of digital artistry, Raquel Villa creates dynamic, otherworldly landscapes that defy physics and provoke curiosity. Based in London but hailing from Madrid, Villa stands out in the digital art scene for her ability to craft immersive simulations that navigate between the architectural and the organic. Her work, meticulously constructed in Houdini, oscillates between moments of stillness and cinematic flow, invoking a sense of surrealism that feels both familiar and strange.

With a background in architecture from Madrid's Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAM), Villa channels structural precision into realms where reality is willingly suspended. Her four-year tenure at XK Studio, working with tech giants like Google Deepmind and Apple, has informed her approach to digital design, enabling her to experiment with parametric systems and speculative physics. This distinctive mix of technical mastery and imaginative freedom has garnered her an impressive international portfolio, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Stockholm, and Buenos Aires.

Swipe down to join us in an immersive and fluid dive in inside Raquel Villa works of digital art!

Villa self-initiated the project 'Submerge', while working at XK studio. In this artwork, the viewer is invited to drift into a state of meditative calm. Commissioned by Stockholm Konst, this piece features an abstract underwater creature moving slowly, almost breathing in sync with a hypnotic rhythm. The forms appear bathed in dim, deep-sea lighting, creating a tranquil yet slightly eerie environment. The creature, seemingly bashful, releases a glossy, metallic liquid as a form of self-defense, blurring the lines between vulnerability and strength. Submerge captures Villa’s talent for transforming abstract shapes into characters that evoke empathy, making it easy to imagine her creature not as a digital rendering but as a real, sentient being hidden in oceanic depths.

Villa’s Daydreaming series, spanning from 2017 to 2024, takes a more playful and experimental approach. Each piece is a tribute to the act of daydreaming itself—a whimsical exploration of textures and forms that feel as much tactile as they are visual. Tonsillitis, a standout from the series, draws inspiration from her sister’s inflamed tonsils, transforming a typically unpleasant ailment into a glossy, organic structure that resembles fleshy, bubble-like forms. Villa’s ability to extract beauty from the banal and transform discomfort into visual delight shows her deftness at balancing humour with meticulous design.

SentimentSuperSet, a collaborative installation with Lukas Rafik Mayer, takes viewers on a journey through a digital pleasure garden. It blends oceanic tides, flowing lava, and tiny breathing entities in a lushly complex ecosystem, each entity independent yet interconnected. Initially commissioned by Untitled Project Space in Berlin and later featured in MUTEK AR’s 6th Edition festival, this piece serves as an ode to symbiosis, capturing the harmonious rhythms of Villa’s distinctive visual language. It’s a testament to her skill in creating landscapes that, while surreal, feel innately coherent, as if bound by their own unspoken laws.

Froggy Eye Stare by Raquel Villa & Lukas R. Mayer

Last but not least, Layers of the Same World, a collaboration with Ariel Ting Wei Lu for Taupe Magazine, exemplifies Villa's fascination with cross-disciplinary pollination. This project, combining her vast landscapes with Lu’s soft robotics, transforms the screen into a seamless exchange of textures and movements, a “cross-contamination” that embodies a digital symbiosis. Here, Villa’s landscapes inform and shape the simulated “skin” of Lu’s robotic creatures, creating a dance of inputs and outputs that mirrors the interdependence of ecosystems.

Layers of the same world by Raquel Villa

Raquel Villa’s digital worlds are more than just simulations; they are expressions of an insatiable curiosity for the oddities of nature and technology. In a RED-EYE perspecitve, her work at is a hypnotic plunge into an alternate dimension where physics bends and imagination thrives. Through her layered textures, soft oscillations, and speculative entities, Villa reminds us of the beauty found in the unknown and celebrates the transformative power of art in the digital age.

Article by @danieleverse

Image Courtesy of @baghmeh

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