Imicca Tanima (La Muerte del Alma)

Now exhibiting in Electric Artifacts “Uno, Nessuno, Centomilla” with curation by Umanesimo Artificialle

“Like a painting
we will start fading.
Like a flower,
we will dry up
here on earth.
As a vestment of the plumage of a zacuan bird,
of the precious bird with a rubber neck,
we will run out
we’re going to his house.”

– excerpt from “Percibo lo secreto” by Nezahualcóyotl, written around 1400 d.C.

‘Imicca Tanima (La Muerte del Alma) (EN: The Death of the Soul)’ is a series of neural network generated artworks which explore themes of self and the ephemerality of existence. In this series, artist Moisés Horta utilises recursive composition alongside a Generative Adversarial Network trained on pre-hispanic artefacts from México.

Flow, non-linearity and the cyclical characterise ‘Imicca Tanima’, and are posed as a critique to transhumanism’s future promise of human immortality. Instead, the artist embraces the ephemeral and fleeting as conceptual frameworks for co-creating with an Artificial Intelligence which has learned to synthesise images from ancient heritage artefacts that attest to a history of colonialism in the Americas.

Press:
Towards Decolonizing AI: Propositions by Isabella Salas, Nora Golic and Moisés Horta Valenzuela (MARCH 26, 2021)
Death and Forgetting: Resisting the Singularity with Lorem and Hexorcismos (MARCH 19, 2021)
Umanesimo Artificiale and Electric Artefacts present: Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (FEBRUARY 9, 2021)
From Poetical Science to GANism: A Selective History of the Art in Artificial Intelligence (FEBRUARY 2, 2021)