Alfonso
de Orte.

Before there were theories about crossing systems, there were two languages, two cultural environments — and a rabbit.

I grew up moving between Brazilian/Lusophone and Paraguayan/Hispanic worlds: close enough to feel familiar, different enough to require constant translation.

One childhood note makes that visible in a way no résumé could.

Written in Spanish to my inseparable toy rabbit, Conejo, it preserves a small scene from that childhood.

The note survived.

So did Conejo.

The codes changed over time.

The act of crossing them did not.

By adolescence, movement had already become a form of education.

Travel meant entering unfamiliar environments, observing how they worked, finding a place inside them and learning from direct contact.

At seventeen, during the Festival de Cultura de Ouro Preto, I encountered experimental animation and direct intervention on film.

In 1973, I also completed an introductory cinema course in Curitiba, taught by Ademar Carvalhaes and Carlos Vieira.

None of this became “a career in cinema.”

That is precisely why it matters.

Curiosity repeatedly moved me from observer to practitioner.

See something. Enter it. Understand it from inside. Carry something forward.

The route from image to physics passed through a lens.

I was studying Communication and Journalism when professional photography pulled me toward optics.

Image was no longer only composition, light and visual effect.

It became a physical question.

And that question led me to Physics.

Photography remained.

Communication remained.

What changed was the depth at which I was investigating the same act of looking.

A medium became a question.
The question became a field.

In 1978, while still a student, another recurring operation became visible.

A known problem in special relativity suggested a different question.

What happens when the familiar structure is extended?

A new version of the length paradox involving a sphere and a ring was later published in the American Journal of Physics, with the article explicitly acknowledging that the form of the problem had been suggested by student Alfonso de Orte.

The importance of the episode is not that it belongs to Physics.

It is that the same operation appears elsewhere:

take a settled structure; change the frame; look again.

Physics soon moved from abstraction into consequence.

Medical physics and radiation protection demand more than understanding.

Measurements must correspond to reality.

Risk must be interpreted.

Technical information must become action.

Over decades, I worked across clinical, institutional, regulatory and judicial environments.

I participated in public-health work, dealt with radiological protection, worked in the context of the Goiânia cesium accident, founded NUCLEO and spent twenty-six years as a court-appointed technical expert.

In 1994, newspaper coverage already showed me publicly arguing for stronger prevention, technical rigor and regulation around X-ray use.

Different institutions.

Different rules.

The same recurring demand:

understand how the system actually operates, not only how it is described.

I have long used a particular form of hacking.

Not intrusion.

Reconfiguration.

Understand how a system works.

Identify what it leaves unused.

Change the arrangement until it performs better — or becomes capable of serving an entirely different purpose.

The tools changed.

Early programming appeared in flowcharts, branches, loops, inputs and outputs.

Today, much of the same reasoning appears in vibe coding.

The code may be generated differently.

The act of designing the flow is familiar.

The same operation appears outside software.

A technique becomes a tool for another field.

A limitation becomes an opening.

An infrastructure created for one purpose becomes the solution to another problem.

Understand the structure.
Find the unused possibility.
Reconfigure.
Elevate.

Drawing.

Photography.

Scientific imaging.

Voice.

Watercolor.

Graphite.

Digital work.

Blockchain.

AI-assisted processes.

The media changed repeatedly.

The underlying operation did not.

Each new medium became a prospecting field.

What can it do?

What does it make possible that the previous one could not?

What happens when it is combined with something from another domain?

A handmade image can become digital.

A photograph can become a new spatial object.

A digital image can return to physical form.

An AI output can become raw material for further human intervention.

The medium is rarely the destination.
It is material for another transformation.