Mauro Cosenza and the Generative Art that Reinvents Flora

What happens when the body learns the language of machines before learning to write code? For Mauro Cosenza, a multidisciplinary artist based in Montevideo, this question is not rhetorical. Trained in circus arts, physical theatre, and contemporary dance since 2007, he arrived at TouchDesigner and Python via the same path that led him to the stage: the need to create systems that respond to human movement and presence in real time.

The exhibition Neo Botanica. An Atlas of Artificially Generated Flora, presented at the Load Gallery in Barcelona between February and March 2025, was the most distinct point of convergence in this trajectory. With works such as Pelargonium zonale, Etymon, and Flowers Hum, Cosenza produced generative art videos that reconstruct plant morphologies from data readings, visual effects, and sound synthesis. The flora is not an aesthetic reference: it is a pretext to investigate how living systems, whether biological or computational, share logics of growth, repetition, and transformation.

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What distinguishes Cosenza's work in the field of digital art is not the technical mastery, although solid, but the performative layer that remains even when the body leaves the scene. There is a physicality to the systems he constructs: interactive sensors, immersive atmospheres, and algorithmically generated tracks that behave less like installations and more like organisms. This approach places his production in a singular territory, between new media art, experience design, and movement research.

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Cosenza's international trajectory spans over a hundred festivals in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. From the SESC Festival Internacional de Circo in São Paulo to the Intervals Fest in Nizhny Novgorod, passing through Dubai and Miyashita Park in Tokyo, what he carries between contexts and geographies is not a format, but a question: how can technology expand, and not replace, the intelligence of the body?

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