Marcello Mercado (Argentina/Germany, b.1963) is an interdisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, installation and algorithmic systems.
He develops long-term artistic systems that operate at the intersection of drawing, painting, photography, performance, bio-processes and artificial intelligence. His practice treats the human body —and its residues— as archival matter: scanned, fragmented, encrypted and re-materialised through algorithmic, material and procedural operations.
Across portraits, installations, artist’s books and generative images, Mercado constructs speculative infrastructures in which biological traces, historical trauma and technological governance intersect. Rather than narrative illustration, his work privileges procedural logics, material persistence and slow transformations, foregrounding the temporal and political dimensions of images, bodies and archives.
Working between Latin America and Europe for more than three decades, Mercado has presented his work in major museums, biennials and media-art contexts, and has received numerous international awards, grants and residencies. His long-term research platforms —including the Das Kapital series and ongoing investigations into post-human archives— articulate a sustained inquiry into institutional memory, technological rationality and the persistence of bodies within computational culture.
Conceptual Framework
Generative Archives and Posthuman Memory
Marcello Mercado’s artistic practice explores the transformation of the archive in an age shaped by algorithmic systems and artificial intelligence. Across video, installation, drawing, sound and computational processes, his work examines how images and cultural memory are produced, stored and regenerated within technological environments that increasingly operate beyond the scale of human perception.
Rather than treating archives as repositories of the past, Mercado approaches them as generative systems—structures capable of continuously rewriting themselves through iterative processes. Artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in this framework, not merely as a tool but as a mechanism that reorganizes the conditions under which images and sounds emerge. Algorithmic processes do not simply reproduce existing material; they generate new configurations from accumulated datasets, allowing the archive to behave as a dynamic and evolving organism.
Mercado situates these processes within a longer history of image production. From prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary neural networks, human culture has repeatedly translated experience into systems of visual storage and recombination. Artificial intelligence may represent the most recent phase of this trajectory, operating on an unprecedented scale of data and computation.
At the same time, his work highlights the tension between biological and algorithmic perception. Human sensory experience is shaped by memory, emotion and cultural interpretation, while artificial systems analyze information through statistical correlations and computational structures. These two perceptual regimes coexist without fully overlapping, producing parallel ecologies of meaning.
Through images, archives and algorithmic processes, Mercado’s work reflects on the future of cultural memory in an increasingly posthuman technological environment.
CV
Education
Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), Cologne, Germany
Media Arts / Experimental Film and Media Art
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
Film Studies
Selected Exhibitions
ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
Kunsthaus Dresden, Dresden, Germany
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
51st Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, USA
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil
La Caixa Forum, Barcelona, Spain
Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil
Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Awards / Grants
Grand Prix, Vidéoformes, France
First Prize, Videobrasil, São Paulo (1998, 2001)
Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (2012)
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Grant
Rockefeller Foundation, Grant
Fundación Antorchas, Grant
Konex Award, Argentina
Residencies
Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany
Centre International de Création Vidéo, France
Digital Synesthesia Group, Vienna, Austria
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