octxio
(OCTAVIO MARTINEZ ESTRELLA)
THE X IS THE A AND THE V…
TRANSDISCIPLINARY DESIGN MFA CANDIDATE @ PARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN PORTFOLIO
Octavio Martínez Estrella (b. 2000), known artistically as Octxio, is a transdisciplinary artist and designer based in New York. Raised between the border of San Diego and Tijuana, he draws from both Mexican and American cultures to navigate multiple visual languages and ways of seeing. This bicultural perspective informs a practice that engages with the intersections of the personal and the political, the intimate and the structural.
Octxio leans into the uncanny, creating works that appear generated by AI but are deliberately crafted to provoke reflection on digital imagery, authorship, and trust in the image. His work moves between satirical and surrealist critiques of commodification, spectacle, and power, and reflexive explorations of memory, faith, and lived experience. By shifting between these registers, he embraces vulnerability as much as confrontation, crafting images that challenge perception while opening spaces for shared reflection.
Through this dual movement, political and personal, critical and introspective, Octxio builds a body of work that unsettles the familiar and reveals the cultural and emotional forces shaping contemporary life.
ARTIST BIO
THESIS
wip abstract of - the digital ether: ai, the cloud, and the library of alexandria
What is the afterlife of images uploaded into the digital ether when the cloud has replaced the Library of Alexandria, an archive that once celebrated recorded human experience, but was lost to fire and time? The vulnerability of the containers of our digital records, reek of the deja vu of burning of papyrus. What is our relationship to work that lives beyond the tactility of our finger tips, beyond a black crystal and natural conditions of preservation, and that are fully sustained by a seemingly physical and metaphysical cloud? In the age of infinite reproducibility, aura can be carried by code, files, and pixels, capturing the temporality of a moment or a story that will be left in darkness once the battery dies. The camera’s invention marked the moment when creation itself began to leave human hands and became a negotiation between maker and machine. What is AI’s role as a creative assistant in a medium whose permanence hovers above the natural, no longer defined by associated Aristotelian notions of art by means of lived experience? Through speculative storytelling, I aim to curate an exhibition that imagines a museum of a dystopian future. A future where today’s technology has lost its power, whether through obsolescence or survival beyond the apocalypse. By creating images that lean into the uncanny resemblance of work generated by AI and artifact-izing and transforming hardware, I will present these objects as relics of a world that once depended on them.
CONTACT
Email: marto029@thenewschool.edu
