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Zenith of
Digital Installation · AR · New Media · San Antonio Public Library
Zenith of
Zeigarnik
Solo Exhibition — San Antonio Public Library, Central Branch, 2025
Digital Installation · AR · New Media · San Antonio Public Library
Solo Exhibition — San Antonio Public Library, Central Branch, 2025
Zenith of Zeigarnik is a digital installation about unfinished memory, unresolved transformation, and the strange pressure of things that never fully close. At its center is a drawing made about a decade ago — a snake twisted into a knot. That original contour drawing becomes the seed for the entire work.
The title brings together two ideas: zenith — the highest point of tension, where memory, pressure, and identity become impossible to ignore — and the Zeigarnik effect, the psychological tendency to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks more strongly than completed ones. Together: the highest point of the unfinished thing.
The work marked the San Antonio Public Library's first-ever augmented reality exhibition — and, as far as is known, the first AR exhibition by a San Antonio artist in the city.
Exhibition Details
The Symbol
The snake is already a symbol of transformation: shedding skin, danger, survival, rebirth, instinct, and hidden knowledge. But this is not just a snake. It is a snake in a knot. That changes everything. The knot suggests survival that is not clean or graceful, identity folded in on itself, memory that loops. A body trying to escape its own entanglement.
By rebuilding the original drawing in Blender, the work translates something intimate and hand-made into a digital, spatial world. Not "digital art" as a style, but as a way to resurrect, distort, preserve, and transform memory. The 3D-rendered snake becomes an artifact from the past and a living signal from the present. It sits between drawing and sculpture, memory and simulation, body and architecture.
"Zenith of Zeigarnik transforms a decade-old contour drawing of a knotted snake into a moving digital environment, using 3D rendering and scanned fragments of San Antonio to explore memory, unfinished transformation, and the psychological pull of what remains unresolved."
The Installation
The work is presented across four screens, each framed by a large neon flame structure in a different color: red, orange, purple, and green. The viewer does not receive one fixed image. They experience a moving scene distributed across multiple surfaces, in fragments.
Memory does not arrive as one clean file. It arrives in pieces — flashes, places, textures, objects, signs, old rooms, old names, old symbols. The four screens create a sense of surveillance, broadcast, ritual, and altar. A digital shrine to an unresolved image, installed in the soaring atrium of San Antonio's Central Library alongside Dale Chihuly's permanent glass sculpture overhead.
Zenith of Zeigarnik — installation view looking up toward the library atrium
Installation views. Photography: Arturo Vilchis
San Antonio as Scanned Memory
The digital environments in the work are built from scanned San Antonio spaces — taquerías, old buildings, signage, local textures. These are not just backgrounds. They become evidence of where the self was formed.
The scanned environments act like memory fragments. They carry the city, the neighborhood, the visual culture, the architecture, and the emotional atmosphere that shaped you. The piece asks: what does a place leave inside the body? What does the body do with it over time?
Digital render — scanned San Antonio taqueria with 3D snake creature, built in Blender
Process
The original contour drawing of the knotted snake was rebuilt from scratch in Blender using curve-based modeling, then given material, texture, and environment. Scanned fragments of San Antonio — photogrammetry captures of real locations — were imported and positioned as the spatial world the snake inhabits.
The digital tools let the original image become unstable. It can move. It can be staged. It can exist across screens. It can become environment instead of object. Each world on each screen is a separate environment, a separate fragment of memory.
Blender process — knotted snake modeling, scene construction, and scanned environment integration
Augmented Reality
Beyond the four screens, the installation includes an AR component activated by QR code. When visitors scan in, the knotted snake appears in augmented reality in the physical space of the library — rising from the floor, occupying the real room. A separate experience from the screens, the AR component completes the arc of the piece.
A decade-old drawing, rebuilt in 3D, broadcast across four screens, finally existing in the viewer's own space through their phone. The unfinished thing, momentarily visible.
AR knotted snake in the library atrium; MR signature in augmented reality on the library floor
"This is, as far as I know, San Antonio's first augmented reality exhibition by a San Antonio artist. There's a whole concept on how to view art, and this kind of breaks that barrier."
— Miguel Rodriguez, KENS 5, September 2025