Galo Canizares (b. 1989), also known as itsgalo, is an architect, designer and artist whose work interrogates the socio-technical effects of code, screens and software culture.,Rather than placing pixels individually, he builds chunky, low-resolution imagery through real-time GLSL shaders that quantize and downscale the image.He was born in Madrid, Spain, to an Ecuadorian family, and has also lived in Scotland before settling in the United States.,
Canizares holds a master of architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor of environmental design from the University of Colorado Boulder. He received the LeFevre '29 Emerging Practitioner Fellowship in 2016–17 and the Christos Yessios Visiting Professorship at Ohio State University in 2018.He teaches as Assistant Professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky's College of Design.,In 2019 he published Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet, a collection of essays on computation, art and design.He has coded since he was about 14, when he was introduced to HTML and JavaScript, and folds that background into an architecture practice that studies how creative software shapes design.
Canizares discovered NFTs through social media in early 2021, after artists he had followed for years began sharing work they had minted on newly emerging platforms such as Foundation and Hic et Nunc.His COMPUTATION series generates looping animated GIFs from a modified version of a JavaScript program he originally built for a long-form project on fxhash. The series was shown in “The Pixel Generation” in 2023 and references imagery ranging from early punch-card programs to low-resolution video game graphics.He also releases work through screenspace, an ongoing project of custom painting interfaces built in Processing that let him paint and process the paintings with shaders in real time. He describes these pieces, usually minted as 1/1s, as “automatic paintings”.
His WRAPPERS collection, 96 pieces, was minted live at a 2023 fxhash event hosted with Unit London.Canizares released SKEUOMORPHS on Art Blocks.His work has also been included in the exhibitions “Imperfections” at Verse in London, “Parallel Rules” at A83 Gallery in New York, and “Bit by Bit” at the Seattle NFT Museum.,Through his architecture firm Office CA, he also explores how NFTs might document or disseminate architectural designs.
