Cow's Singularity

Enrique Castro-Cid approached the emerging language of computer-aided design not as a tool for efficiency but as a generative force—something capable of rethinking the very structure of pictorial space. He often started with human and animal figures proportioned with classical precision. But once these figures entered Castro-Cid’s computational environment, they became subject to an entirely different physics. Using differential geometry, computational conformal mapping, and multilinear perspective, he reconfigured the flat image into a field of multidimensional planes. The figures are pulled, stretched, and folded as if caught in the gravity of an unseen singularity.

Castro-Cid’s preliminary sketches for Cow’s Singularity—included in a catalogue published by Fondart, the Chilean National Fund for Cultural Development and the Arts—reveal the process at its most elemental: figures plotted onto a grid, their outlines tested, extended, and warped as he worked through the distortions that CAD software made newly imaginable. The finished mixed-media work imitates a woven textile whose threads have become unruly—pulled taut in some areas, drifting loose in others. The linear structure of the cow erupts outward, arcing into space.

What results is not merely a depiction of distortion but a visualization of the transformation process. Castro-Cid shows the moment when a familiar form succumbs to the pressures of higher-dimensional thinking, when classical anatomy yields to computational geometry. Cow’s Singularity makes visible the tension between the stability of tradition and the destabilizing forces of a new technological imagination—an imagination capable of turning a body into a horizon of possibility, or a canvas into the threshold of another dimension.