Title: L’espérance d’une variable aléatoire [The Expectation of a Random Variable] I and II
Medium: Generative HTML
Author: Julio Velasco

Description:

Note on the title: In French, espérance carries a dual meaning: it refers both to the mathematical expectation of a random variable and to the concept of hope, a nuance that is not fully captured in the English translation.

Work I – Animated Barcode:
This piece is entirely generated using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with the assistance of AI in the creative process. The artwork consists of vertical lines resembling a dynamic barcode. Each line oscillates subtly, creating a shimmering, ever-changing visual field across the screen. AI-generated abstract imagery influenced the choice of color, amplitude, and frequency, contributing to the living, breathing quality of the animation. Displayed full screen, the viewer is immersed in a constantly evolving pattern that balances structure and randomness.

Work II – Progressive Animated QR Grid:
The second work presents a large QR code-like grid, also created via HTML/JS with AI-assisted design. Each cell slowly shifts in opacity, creating subtle, progressive changes across the grid. AI-generated abstractions informed the randomness and visual rhythm, producing patterns that feel both algorithmically precise and organically evolving. Presented full screen, the work invites contemplation of variation, impermanence, and the emergence of order from stochastic processes.

Conceptual Background:
Both works explore random variables and their expectation, referencing probability theory. They are conceptually linked to Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, where infinite textual variations exist within a structured framework. Similarly, these animations generate infinite visual variations constrained by lines or grid cells, combining algorithmic rules with AI-assisted creativity.

Link to Codes:
The animations’ visual language draws on barcodes and QR codes, ubiquitous symbols of digital information. By transforming these functional forms into dynamic art, the work creates a relationship between encoded data, abstraction, and human perception, while highlighting AI as a collaborative tool in artistic creation.

Links:

https://julio-velasco.eu/Expectation_01

https://julio-velasco.eu/Expectation_02

BIO: Julio Velasco is a Franco-Colombian visual artist and researcher based in Paris and Berlin. He holds a PhD in Arts and Art Sciences from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His work explores friction zones between art, science, and society through experimental contemporary forms — installations, sound works, videos, AI and HTML-based animations.
His research focuses on:
bio-art, botanical representations, critical ecology,
uses and deconstruction of uses of AI,
post-media approaches to sound practices,
sensitive geographies of cities and transforming territories.
His artistic practice follows an experimental approach: anchored in analysis, open to instability, and questioning the very conditions of production and circulation of images and ideas. His works often emerge from long processes, documentary materials, or specific contexts — yet always aim to generate a sensory experience and an active reading of the present.
Through publications, seminars, and workshops, he links visual practice to a deep reflection on the mechanisms of contemporary art and its regimes of legitimation. This site presents a selection of projects, texts, collaborations, and ongoing research.
These creations include installations such as Les Voi.es.x de la carte (2023) and Noices of Water (2014), AI projects such as Bogota Hills (2025) or code research such Vices Boxes (2012). These artworks are echoed in publications such as Bio-Art: Varieties of the Living in Artworks from the Pre-modern to the Anthropocene (2024), L’artiste comme stratège. Topographie et création plastique contemporaine (2021) and Art and ecology: a necessary questioning (2018), which explore themes of representation, ecology, and digital cultures.
https://julio-velasco.eu/