Looking for a venezuelan futurism
2025 (Ongoing)This work explores the intersection of ritual, AI-generated memory, and cultural resistance. Using LoRAs and Runway, the video reinterprets Diablos de Yare and Giros de San Benito (Venezuelan folkloric traditions) through locally AI-trained imagery, generating shifting figures, masks, and movements that blur the line between tradition and machine perception.
The AI misreads and reshapes customs, symbols, and gestures, highlighting the gap between embodied knowledge and computational processing. The soundscape merges traditional percussive rhythms with AI-generated distortions, creating a layered dialogue between human devotion and algorithmic interpretation.
Rather than documenting folklore, the piece reconfigures it, treating AI as both a translator and a disruptor. The models, trained on limited data, pull in elements from other cultural traditions, exposing the lack of specificity and representation for these traditions in AI training sets. This underscores how Western frameworks homogenize cultural diversity, while also exposing biases in AI technologies, where AI systems trained on incomplete or Eurocentric datasets fail to accurately represent or differentiate the complexities of non-Western traditions.
“looking for a Venezuelan futurism” questions how technology archives, alters, and reinvents ancestral memory, proposing a Caribbean Futurist vision that, while evolving, grapples with AI’s inherent biases and limitations. As these technologies fail to accurately represent specific cultural traditions, they risk reinforcing the very homogenization they seek to challenge, revealing the tensions between speculative futures and the constraints of existing digital frameworks.