Daniel Aguilar (b. 1978) is a generative artist working under the name Protozoo, using computer code to create abstract compositions that balance structure with unpredictability and draw on themes from multiple domains to suggest new associations and meanings.,Born and based in Barcelona, he spent about two decades as a freelance web designer and developer before turning to long-form generative art around 2022.,
Aguilar began coding as a child on an MSX home computer in the mid-1980s and started working professionally with Flash and web development around 2000. He later spent several years at the Barcelona design studio Bestiario, where he worked on museum and data-visualization projects and collaborated with the mathematician Santiago Ortiz on several installations.He also co-founded Mosi Mosi Metaverse, a project that translated ideas from the virtual world Second Life into promotional work for brands. In 2022 he took part in the Genuary daily-prompt challenge and minted a piece during the Tezos4Tezos event on Objkt.com that sold out within hours. Encouraged by the response, he adapted the piece into Rhythms, his first fxhash project.
His 2022 project Effluence, built from thousands of translucent lines drawn within concentric circles and shaped by Perlin noise, grew out of a period of regular meditation and evokes exploding stars and mandala-like forms. Obliqua (2023) was his first project to use collector-adjustable parameters. Its title refers to the idea of “Mirada Oblicua”, or oblique gaze, drawn from the writer José Saramago. Aguilar has said the piece was inspired less by Jared Tarbell's Substrate, which some viewers compared it to, than by the paintings of Derek Lerner.KOKO (2023) layers several flow fields at different scales and resolutions to explore motion and stasis, symmetry and spontaneity.Tetra, released through the platform Alba in December 2023, builds its compositions from subtly deformed squares that resemble a quadtree, producing textures Aguilar compared to flocks of birds.
He has also released collaborative projects on fxhash, including Hidden Intersections with aebrer.Aguilar's work was shown at “NFest at Lezar House” and at “Responsive Dreams” in Barcelona in 2023.He returned to the Barcelona generative art exhibition “MAGBa” at Palo Alto in both 2024and 2025.In 2025 he showed Sendas, a project developed from hexagonal Truchet tiles that trace paths across the grid,as a project showcase at the Responsive Dreams festival in Barcelona.
