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
work in progress for 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 lost and forgotten? In the age of infinite reproducibility, aura can be carried by pixels via screens, capturing the temporality of a moment or a story that will be left in darkness once the battery dies. What does it mean to create or generate images that will only stay online? The digital 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? Through visual language, images that lean into the uncanny resemblance of work generated by AI, projections, and a film staged differently amongst audiences, this thesis will aim to develop conversations concerning aura, authenticity, connection to creation, and AI’s relationship to technological dependence, authorship, and permanence.
CONTACT
Email: marto029@thenewschool.edu
