Martian life is the best life

Notes on Life in Mars, by David Delgado Ruiz

Photography, due to its close connection with reality, has cemented the verisimilitude of countless stories throughout history. From the first nineteenth-century captures to the images that saturate digital streams today, photography has been considered a reliable witness to what is presented before the lens. This quality reaches its maximum expression in reportage and photojournalism, whose purpose is to capture the event in all its fullness.

The widespread acceptance of the image as a promise of direct contact with reality has even led to the consideration of low-resolution images—from home video cameras or surveillance systems—as a privileged form of certainty. One of the axes of research by David Delgado Ruiz (Madrid, 1975) is to question the status of veracity of photography, interpellating a contemporary eye that, having become passive, digests with voracious immediacy any visual data it receives.

Throughout various series, he has lucidly examined how, in this phase of visual hyperproduction, photography has ceased to function as a mere vestige of the past in the present, especially because, with the emergence of new technologies, an image can come into existence without even having come into contact with reality.

From this question emerges Life on Mars, in which Delgado Ruiz articulates two complementary lines of work. On the one hand, he returns to the tradition of avant-garde montage through the juxtaposition of photographic fragments, in which elements distant in space and time converge.

On the other hand, it addresses the complex aesthetic question of creation applied to the resources of artificial intelligence: can an algorithm, limited by its data and internal rules, surprise us with something new? As Juan Martín Prada has pointed out, what we obtain from neural network models in AI is essentially a more or less random reworking of the characteristics present in the set of photographic images that made up the training dataset.

This submission to the given does not represent a limit for Delgado Ruiz's poetics, whose interest lies precisely in working with pre-existing data to configure an intermediate universe between the known and the unusual, where the imaginary mixes with the real to generate a "tear", in Gérard Lanne's definition of the taxonomies of the fantastic.

“Photography is radically different from other sign systems, both verbal and visual. Due to its basic technological nature—rays of light passing through a lens or objective are captured on a photosensitive material (plate or film) or a digital sensor—this sign maintains a relationship of physical—and metonymic—contiguity with the object, since the latter's presence determines its representation as an image.”

Gustafsson, J. (2018). The Image, the Real, and the Fictional: Photography and Narrative (Theoretical Reflections). Latin American Dialogues, 27, 127–139. 2 Du Sautoy, M. (2020). Programmed to Create (p. 364). Barcelona: Acantilado. 3 Prada, J.M. (2023). Art Theory and Digital Culture (p. 78). Madrid: Akal. 4 Lanne, G. (1974). Fantastic Cinema and Its Mythologies (p. 27). Madrid: Anagrama.

In his photocollages, Delgado Ruiz recreates spaces and situations that, at first glance, seem almost identical to those of everyday life: industrial areas, natural landscapes, crowded beaches, or highways that stretch to the horizon. In the most subtle compositions, only the strange morphology of a moon—transformed into a blue planet—reveals that we are witnessing an unexpectedly distant setting, where even Google Maps ceases to be a cartographic reference.

In AI-generated images, algorithms and data shape Martian landscapes that distill the canonical imagery of space exploration and science fiction—launch pads, astronauts, moon landings, self-sufficient colonies. To achieve these compositions, Delgado Ruiz interweaves digitally altered NASA archive footage with scenes created ex nihilo using textual prompts in DALL·E.

Delgado Ruiz's interest in AI-powered creation is a logical step in his project to rethink traditional concepts of authorship and authenticity. Now, he also blurs the lines between amateur production and professional practice, inviting us to reconsider the prestige of "the artist's gaze" versus algorithmic perfection—available to any user. But, above all, he uses AI to assert the need, now more than ever, for an attentive eye: AI-generated images emerge from a digital ultra-polished surface—that smooth, flawless surface that Byung-Chul Han associates with the power of the "like"—capable of making any story credible.

However, beneath that satiny sheen, tiny flaws emerge—disproportions, inconsistent reflections, or impossible shadows—that reveal the system's limits. Far from being simple errors, they may be the seeds of an unexplored creative horizon, a territory where the possibilities of the image expand toward the truly unimaginable. A new Martian normal.

The story told in Life in Mars is part of a broad narrative that ranges from the misinterpreted canals described by Giovanni Schiaparelli6 in 1877, through Percival Lowell's vision of arable land on Mars (1896), the endearing stories in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), to the many audiovisual representations that have shaped our imagination about life on the red planet.

However, the possibility of human life on Mars cannot be reduced to a fantastic fetish. Although the results of NASA's Viking probes in the 1970s confirmed what many suspected (an extremely cold Mars, with almost no atmosphere and devoid of any signs of life), the desire to establish human colonies on the Moon and, later, on Mars persists today, with the idea of ​​laying the groundwork for a future human life on Mars.

Han, B.-C. (2015). The Salvation of Beauty. Barcelona: Herder.

The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made detailed observations of Mars and described certain lines on the surface that he called canali, an Italian word that can be translated as “natural channels.” However, a mistranslation fueled the idea that Mars might harbor an intelligent civilization capable of excavating and maintaining these alleged “canals.” This assumption greatly increased public and scientific interest in the planet and influenced the literature and popular culture of the time, giving rise to numerous stories and speculations about Martian life. The rise of a promising new economy.

All of this is still in the research and planning phase, but there are already organizations working on technologies that, over time, could facilitate the establishment of human colonies. In fact, as I write these reflections, during Holy Week in 2025, several news stories are overlapping, making the hypothesis of life on Mars and other planets disturbingly real. However, for Delgado Ruiz, the sources of his work do not come from the aspirations of NASA or SpaceX, nor from the latest scientific surprises, but from film, television, comics, series, advertising, or video games: those "reality encoders"—as Christian Ferrer called them—that have forged our way of imagining life beyond Earth. In this collective archive, the artist subverts our expectations: instead of the striking and exotic (aliens, flying saucers, or complex colonization machines), he is interested in skies crossed by celestial bodies and atmospheric phenomena foreign to the Earthly gaze.

The result is a transmuted everyday life, governed by a “new Martian normality” that redefines the familiar without needing to fall into that disturbing mix of the intimate and the uncanny that Freud identified as the uncanny. In his study of the origins of fantastic art, poet and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith emphasized that it is not enough to analyze works in isolation; it is essential to place them in their historical context and the environment in which they emerged. 11 If we apply this reflection to Life in Mars, it is essential to note that the series was born in 2020, in the midst of the lockdown phase during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, when our environment was transformed into a vast arena of isolation and enforced distancing. That global experiment in the “new normal”—built through the redefinition of the intimate, the increase in control systems, and the questioning of our most basic routines—intensified the need to imagine other worlds.

In this context, the “new Martian normality” proposed by Delgado Ruiz transcends the mere exercise of fantasy to become a critical mirror of a social scenario marked by the decline of the utopia of progress, the wear and tear of the 7 The most optimistic deadlines speak of the decades of 2030–2040 for the first crewed missions, and of the middle of the century for the first settlements —as long as enormous technical, logistical, health (radiation, low gravity) and, of course, budgetary challenges are overcome.

Nieves, J.M. (April 17, 2025). NASA finds Mars' missing CO₂, boosting chances of finding life. ABC. https://www.abc.es/ciencia/curiosity-encuentra-co2-perdido-marte-dispara-posiibilidades-20250417150514-nt.html

AFP. (April 17, 2025). Astronomers detect the most promising signs of life beyond Earth to date. ABC. https://www.abc.es/ciencia/astronomos-detectan-indicios-vida-tierra-prometedores-fecha-20250417022517-nt.html

Ferrer, C. (2000). Evil Eye: Critique of Technical Violence. Barcelona: Octaedro. LucieSmith, E. (1975). The Waking Dream: Fantasy and the Surreal in Graphic Art, 1450–1900 (p. 7). London: Thames and Hudson. Political ideologies and environmental decline.

The artist uses science fiction as a platform to rethink contemporary subjectivity and channel the complex mix of desires and fears that permeate our present. Through estrangement, he posits a possible future whose disturbing proximity to our present questions the dominant logic: a turbo-capitalist globalization that imposes a frenetic pace of technological innovation sold as inevitable. Life in Mars does not aim to predict the future, but rather to sense the present in all its intensity.

Carlos Delgado Mayordomo, 

Curator of the exhibition.

DDR ART GALLERY , Calle de la Encomienda 21, 28012, Madrid. 

info@ddrartgallery.com

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