Rudolfo Quintas (Porto, 1980) is a Portuguese media artist. He creates interactive, generative and data-mapping audiovisual works that invariably take the form of performances, installations or sculptures. These digital media environments form a subtle balance between control and randomness, defined by Verónica Metello as "sensitive contexts". Such contexts establish a continuous dialogue between the digital and the non-digital. They are an open window onto the world, where the artist unveils new perspectives for reflecting on human behaviour.
In a continuous dialogue between design, science and technology, Rudolfo Quintas' work alternates between the individual and the collective. He has extensively explored cognitive feedback processes involving the audience's self-exploration in works such as Displacement (2004), Absorption (2014) and Black Hole (2018), among other performative works such as Swap (2005), Burning the Sound (2007) and Without Darkness (2016). Recently, Quintas has taken these feedback processes to a larger scale, portraying society through visualisations of big data, as in his latest work News Feed (2019).
Over the last decade, he has been invited to give lectures and workshops internationally, as well as on juries for academic publications. In Portugal, he was a lecturer at the ESAD Caldas da Rainha School of Arts and Design (2005-06) and at the Department of Communications and Arts at the University of Beira Interior (2009-12).
Quintas has shown his work nationally and internationally in galleries, cultural spaces and art festivals, such as the Transmediale/CTM festival (Berlin), the Todays Art festival (The Hague), the Dox Gallery and the ENTER festival (Prague), Fundació "La Caixa" (Barcelona), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), STEIM (Amsterdam), the "Uncharted" exhibition at Santralistanbul (Istanbul), the Pixelache festival at the Kiasma museum (Helsinki), NIME (Sydney) or the Royal College of Art in London. In his native Portugal, Quintas recently presented his work at the Index of Art and Technology festival in Braga as part of the Braga Portuguese Capital of Media Arts, at the FOCO art gallery in Lisbon, at the Convento de São Francisco cultural centre in Coimbra and at the Criatek festival in Aveiro.
His artistic work has been honoured nationally and internationally through grants, artist residencies, scholarships and art prizes such as the DGarts (Directorate-General for the Arts of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture) Portuguese Spotlight grants or the Transmediale Distinction Prize from the Transmediale Festival in Berlin. His work has been published in Performance Research (Routledge), research articles such as NIME - New Interfaces for Musical Expression, and art editions such as "Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory" co-edited by the New Museum New York and Phaidon Press, among others. He currently lives and works in Lisbon, with his studio based at MONO Lisboa.