“Before I was an artist I was a curious person, and I think this is the most important thing.”
-Sergio Albiac
We met Sergio Albiac in 2015. A native of Spain and resident of Barcelona, he was visiting Napa Valley for the first time and was introduced to Realm by a mutual friend and customer who followed his work online. After a long wine-fueled lunch, Sergio visited our then-office in St. Helena…this was right about the time we released our 2012 wines with our new labels.
Sergio: "They showed me the line-up of their wines and one of the things I remember most vividly was how aesthetic the labels were. They were not traditional. They were very minimalistic and contemporary."
A few months later, after we’d made the Hartwell purchase and moved into our new home on Wappo Hill in the Stags Leap District, we contacted Sergio about creating a new label for our estate wine, Moonracer. We wanted it to be entirely different than the other labels, and after explaining the derivation of the Moonracer name, we asked if he had any ideas. He said, “Yes, we have to do something foolish and new.”
Sergio is an artist who uses computer code as his medium. With a background in computer science and artistic traditional media, he once pursued a career as a tech consultant but changed course after several years to pursue art full time. At first he used traditional media such as oils, acrylics, etc. Eventually he started using code in his practice as a way of sketching before painting, to see how a work might look if he changed the algorithm. When he realized how code accelerated the creative process, how it opened up thousands of possibilities, he began using code as his artistic medium.
Sergio: "Once I have a visual idea in mind, I translate that idea into an algorithm. Basically, algorithms are like recipes, so when I create the images you see on the Moonracer label, for instance, I have to think about how the program itself – not me moving my hand – creates those lines. My algorithms are abstract descriptions, visual ideas. The ‘Moonracer code’ contains virtually infinite individual labels. This leads to a simple but powerful concept: the algorithm itself is the work of art. Code is Art."
For Moonracer, Sergio’s narrative and visual idea was to take data points from the sensors in our Stags Leap Estate vineyard - temperature, wind force and solar radiation - plug them into his algorithm and allow the computer to generate the artwork. For each vintage he utilizes data from that growing year. And because our vineyard sensors take multiple readings each day, Sergio has millions of potential combinations with which to work. And here’s the “foolish” part: each label on our Moonracer bottles is completely unique. No two labels are the same.
To date, Sergio has created labels for six vintages of Moonracer, 2014-2019. The vintages are differentiated by color accents, for instance, red for the 2014s, purple for 2015s, blue-green for 2016, etc. Each year he generates approximately 18,000 images and spends weeks combing through them one by one to select the approximately 15,000 that are the most aesthetically interesting.
Sergio: "Even if you’ve been tweaking the algorithm to ensure you have good overall quality, you still sometimes have beautiful surprises. I search for the most strangely beautiful ones, the images that besides being part of the label set, will also become museum-quality unique single prints."
The prints are a related project. Over the past several years Sergio has created over 150 42x60 cm prints, each one corresponding to an existing Moonracer label. Like the labels, no one print is the same. To control every detail Sergio prints the artworks in his studio, using pigmented inks rated to hold their color for more than one hundred years. Each print is dated and signed by Sergio and presented with a certificate of authenticity. Every Realm employee has received one of these prints, as have several long-time customers who have reached certain milestones on their journey with Realm.
As a collaborator, they don’t get much better than Sergio. Lately we’ve been talking to him about developing an interactive artistic installation at Realm that could best be described as a photo booth, though “portrait” booth may be more accurate. The idea is still incubating but could involve visitors to the winery posing for a portrait that gets combined with real time sensory data from our estate vineyard or perhaps from dates they select. We’re also intrigued by Sergio’s recent portraiture that incorporates AI, which he’s been experimenting with since 2018.
Sergio: "Instead of me writing the code, I’m actually creating the architecture of a neural network that will learn how to program and generate art itself. The network is a blank slate, like a child, and I select what that network, that machine, will learn. With AI and neural networks, I can achieve a level of complexity impossible when I simply write the algorithms myself."
Though it’s hard to say now how future projects with Sergio will manifest themselves, we know we love working with him, and fortunately for us, the feeling is mutual.
Sergio: "Realm and I have a very trusting relationship, and I admire the clear vision they have as winemakers. Their vision extends to everything they do, including the art on their property. Like me, there is a lot of experimentation behind the scenes that people don’t see or know about. They’re open to risks and experimenting. For an artist, that’s heaven."
For more about Sergio Albiac and his work:
www.sergioalbiac.com
