About
How a person born in the Canary Islands became someone who fuses biosensors with urban climate models
I am Gerardo Ezequiel Martín Carreño. I was born in the Canary Islands, trained as an environmental scientist at Granada, and finished two Master's degrees at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in sustainability science and the sustainable intervention of the built environment. I then spent a year retraining as a full-stack engineer through General Assembly, before completing an MSc Urban Spatial Science at UCL Bartlett with a dissertation, Shaping Cool Cities, on multi-source data fusion for urban heat mitigation across six European cities.
Today I work at TJX Europe as a full-stack spatial data scientist, leading geospatial analysis across European markets. The professional work is a cloud-native spatial workflow that compresses a manual site-selection process from two weeks to less than a day. I presented the work at the 2025 Spatial Data Science Conference in London.
Outside work, I build what I call practice-based research instruments. Derive is the largest of these: a psychogeographic drift PWA that fuses Polar H10 heart-rate variability, granular and spectral audio synthesis, ambient acoustic classification, a UK GDPR Article 9 hash-chained consent ledger and six register-adaptive Claude narrators. Geospatial Careers is the smallest: a career-intelligence platform for the geospatial community, free, no signup required, indexing 7,000+ jobs against the UN SDGs and planetary boundaries.
What holds the work together
One question: what makes a place felt, not mapped. Place is the unit of analysis across the environmental science, the spatial data, the urban planning, the software engineering and the embodied practice. The instruments I build are attempts to render place felt through different sensory and analytical registers.
Methodologically I am a multi-source data fusion person. Satellite imagery plus 3D city models plus street-level computer vision; heart-rate variability plus ambient soundscape classification plus weather telemetry; quantitative urban science plus practice-based research. The fusion is the work.
Theoretically I draw on Doreen Massey's place-as-event, Karen Barad's intra-action (derived from Niels Bohr's quantum complementarity), Tim Ingold's wayfaring, Tim Smith's attentional synchrony, and Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch's crip technoscience. I treat my own lived position — visual impairment and ADHD — as epistemic resource, not biographical accident.
Where I'm going
Toward a practice that lives between the studio and the city, between the dataset and the body, between the consultancy commission and the artistic residency. Toward a doctorate that lets the next phase happen at proper depth. Toward a studio whose toolkit becomes infrastructure others can use.