DXARTS Ph.D. student, Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, will exhibit his current art research titled Realidad Mutada in Paris as part of the ISEA 2023 exhibition program from June 6th to June 18th and at the CURRENTS Art & Technology Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from June 16th to June 25th.
Kisic Aguirre’s Realidad Mutada was selected “following an international call for entries, (where) more than 1400 applications from 70 countries were examined by an artistic and scientific committee of 200 international experts. The theme of this edition is Symbiosis. In this time of global health, ecological, economic and democratic crisis, symbiosis is a polysemous notion that allows us to explore in a transversal and interdisciplinary way the mutations and transformations underway in the digital age, to question the meaning supposedly given to progress, especially in the current environmental and health context, and to imagine possible and viable futures for our planet and our ecosystems.”
Realidad Mutada (‘Mutated Reality’) is a hybrid, part-human, part-machine, multidimensional sculpture. With this project, I invite participants to become one with the Dispositivo de Realidad Mutada (‘Mutated Reality Device’) by inhabiting the artifact while surrendering sensorial perception. On the outside, visitors witness the human-machine hybrid as they interact with and emanate an expression of the interior experience. On the inside, the narrow borders of the micro-capsule are counterbalanced with a holographic acoustic experience that renders the illusion of a borderless alternative world based on the Peruvian Amazon. This way, Realidad Mutada creates a real-time symbiotic imaginary outside while rendering an alternative reality inside.
This alternative world results from experiments in linguistic disobedience employing a “Machine Unlearning” model I developed to render mutations of Spanish. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), I am raising a dataset with a collection of works of literature that poetically distort Spanish, my native language. For example, I have included César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía because it highlights the poetic “distortions” of the Peruvian Amazonian dialect. At the same time, Calvo narrates a magical realist story set in the Amazon, heavily influenced by the sacred experience of Ayahuasca. My “Machine Unlearning” process cultivates new–often invented–words and meanings by reconfiguring speech frequently unrecognized by the “official” European Spanish Royal Academy. Consequently, language appears mutated, and the reality it reflects also mutates.
At CURRENTS Art & Technology Festival, Realidad Mutada will be featured among 85 artworks by 70 artists, ranging from large-scale Installations, Robotics, A.I, Extended Reality, Experimental Video and Animation, and Multimedia Performances happenings both indoors and outdoors.