XD
ADC Bottle
AI Concepting and Experimentation — Cultural Expression
Agua de Carnaval is a multimedia exploration of Panamanian cultural identity through the lens of Carnaval — a hand-blown glass bottle holding the tradition's real materials, from confetti to river stone, reimagined as a collectible object. The piece moves between physical prototype, digital rendering, and moving image, tracing how celebration, memory, and place can live inside a single vessel.
Through Runway AI, I'm exploring bottle design in service of a larger project on Panamanian cultural visibility — because, as we say, the only thing Panamanians take seriously is Carnaval.
The Challenge
This project has been in development since 2010 — nearly fifteen years of research, cultural inquiry, and material experimentation into what Carnaval means as a vessel for Panamanian identity. It had its first solo exhibition in 2018, which grew into a participatory installation in Panama City and concluded with a video art piece. The concept — small sculptures reimagined as products for cultural export — has been fully formed for years. What I lacked was a tool capable of rendering it at the level the vision demanded.
Runway didn't create this idea — it finally let me see it. Fifteen years of conceptual work became visible in a single afternoon, not because the thinking was fast, but because the tool was finally fast enough to keep up with it.
The Process
Hand Sketch and digital rendering 2010 — The Concept Foundation
The earliest sketches of the bottle were rough — hand-drawn studies on canvas, working out proportions, the crystal sediment, the swirl of the handles, long before I had any way to render them properly. Those first drawings weren't polished, but they held the idea intact: a vessel that could carry Carnaval's materials — mud, confetti, indigo, river stone — as something both sacred and collectible. The physical bottled was prototyped at the Pittsburgh Glass Center in 2019.
To guide Runway, I referenced the different textures and materials in the bottle. Some of the initial generation was not to my liking: I was looking for perfectly imperfect and with a hand-made wabi-sabi touch.
Through Runway AI, I'm exploring bottle design in service of a larger project on Panamanian cultural visibility — because, as we say, the only thing Panamanians take seriously is Carnaval.
Through Runway AI, I'm exploring bottle design in service of a larger project on Panamanian cultural visibility — because, as we say, the only thing Panamanians take seriously is Carnaval.
The Impact
Runway didn't create this idea — it finally let me see it, rendered at the level the vision always deserved. Working with a dynamic tool like this meant I could test and explore more of the project's potential than fifteen years of static sketches ever allowed — trying colors, compositions, and contexts in hours instead of years, without losing the concept those years had already built.