Hello web traveller! I’m Cristian Rohr, a son of the exponential age and a self made generative artist.

Background

My background is in bioinformatics (National University of Entre Ríos, Argentina) and data science (University of Granada, Spain). I have a full day job as Head of Product Development with a strong focus in research and development in Heritas a precision medicine company from Argentina.

I’m on twitter (@cristianrohr) and LinkedIn (cristianrohrbio).

Art

When I discovered generative art, I got hooked.I can spend my entire day admiring generative artworks or trying out ideas on sketches.

My tool of choice in the beginning of the artist way was R, today there are great exponents of Rtistry (@djnavarro, @thomasp85 who is also a former bioinformatician, and many more).

Nowadays I’m more focused in p5js.

Son of the exponential age

My journey in the exponential era started when I was about 10 years old, I was a fan of science fiction movies. At my parents house I found a book in English with code in it (I assume it was basic), I couldn’t read English, I couldn’t read code, but somehow probably thanks to so many movies I knew it was computer code and I was stubborn enough to make it work on the old 486. That was the beginning of my passion for programming.

The next thing I remember that marked me in this trip was to know linux, when I heard about this free and open source operating system, which in the case of Ubuntu sent you an installation CD for free from the other side of the world I immediately wanted to try it. The love was instantaneous and basically Windows was on the family PC just for them, I spent my day experimenting in the bowels of this operating system.

With the presentation of the first draft of the human genome in 2001, the discipline of bioinformatics was born. Incredible as it may seem, a university in Latin America started the bioinformatics degree course in 2006 and there I was on the first day of the course with a backpack of illusions on my back, because of all the promises that this new discipline would unlock in the future. Genomics and bioinformatics are exponential disciplines.

About the same time I got my hands on the motorola rokr Z6, a cell phone with Linux! the endless nights I spent in the bowels of that phone, creating custom packs, porting PC games to work on that little screen, I was obsessed with gaining knowledge through experience.

Both during my education and later in my professional career, I have always been very concerned about how to convey information, ideas, findings, and whenever possible the graphical representation is the best, we fall into the commonplace that a picture is worth a thousand words, as trite as it is, it is still true. The “problem” is that in most cases I was not only interested in the most effective way to present the graphics, but also in making them as beautiful as possible, in other words I was always interested in making my graphics artistic and functional.