MUTUALISMX arrives as culmination of the multidisciplinary experimentation of Moisés Horta Valenzuela, better known as Hexorcismos. For the last seven years the sound artist, technologist, and electronic musician has worked with generative artificial neural networks as world-building tools to amplify a plurality of views and voices across image and sound synthesis, offering an alternative approach to artificial intelligence that privileges collective understanding over the biases inherent in contemporary A.I. models and datasets. This research led to the creation of SEMILLA.AI, a “small data” neural audio synthesis tool designed to mimic and transform the sonic fingerprint of the user. Aligning the “technopoetics of generative computation”, decolonial aesthetics and efforts to rethink A.I. interfaces, SEMILLA.AI draws parallels between the Deep Learning practice of using ‘seeds,’ integer numbers used to generate other, pseudo-random numbers, and the Mesoamerican Mixe divination practice of ‘Mook pajk wëjwë, which loosely translates as ‘maize seed divination’ and from which the tool takes its name.
The tool serves as the kernel of MUTUALISMX, for which Hexorcismos invited a planetary-spanning collective of artists, including KMRU, Ale Hop and El Irreal Veintiuno, to use the tool, either with their own personal data, or sharing in the data of the group in a gesture of computational and compositional polyphony. On ‘Anhaga’, Hunanese-American artist Kloxii Li laces textural swathes of crystalline noise with portentous chimes and machinic dissonance, providing us with an ethereal glimpse of the sounds possible with SEMILLA.AI. Working in response to each of the tracks collected on MUTUALISMX are Chilean artists Hypereikon, who utilise generative artificial neural networks to blur sound and image to collapse advanced technology into the natural world. “Our creative process for this project was centred on exploring a dataset constructed during the visual imaginary process of MUTUALISMX,” they explain. “We began by researching artifacts, tools, weapons, and divine symbols from precolonial cultures, initially focusing on Mayan and Aztec civilizations. However, our exploration soon broadened to include technologies from ancestral cultures worldwide
“Instead of relying on archaeological information from specific sites, we decided to delve into the materiality itself and uncover the common language of different cultures concerning mineral materials and their technological uses,” they continue. “Our intention was to generate speculative and abstract technologies, expanding the idea of the use of minerals and gemstones for utilitarian and mystical purposes, reflecting reality as a matter of eternal return, atemporal and cyclical.” Using a variety of A.I. tools, including Midjourney, AnimateDiff and Runway’s Gen2, Hypereikon work the textures of Kloxii Li’s sound into imaginary materials and mythopoetic minerals, themselves forming speculative ancestral tools, superimposing ancient, precolonial technologies over emergent, decolonial technologies.
‘Anhaga’ is out now, taken from MUTUALISMX, which arrives on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People on February 15, 2024. You can download SEMILLA.AI now.
You can find Hexorcismos, Hypereikon and Kloxii Li on Instagram.
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