Nixtamalízaté-té-té
Praba Pilar
Medium: Artificial Intelligence, Video, and Website (2022)
Issues: Indigenous Technology, Metaverse, Nixtamalization, and Pluriversality
Project Links
Description
Nixtamalízaté-té-té is a video project capturing interactions with the “Techno-Tamaladas”’ AI companion ‘Tamalit’ and AI platform DALL_mini and DALL_E2. The project seeks opportunities to reorient these inherently biased machine learning systems to a new algorithm of technologies of life. We define technologies of life as technologies that are not based on extraction, that do not replicate colonial histories, and that are co-constructed in reciprocal relations with human and more than human life. Nixtamalízaté-té-té shares the possibilities and limitations of this work to create new algorithms for a technological pluriverse.
Nixtamalízaté-té-té offers technological pluriversality as a world parallel to current technological extraction, increasing individualism, and political polarization. It is the latest work in the larger multi-modal art project, Techno-Tamaladas. The Techno-Tamaladas invites publics to collectively engage in vastly different algorithms of technological development through the Indigenous technologies of hybridizing maíz, nixtamalization, and the milpa. We draw on thousands of years of practice & knowledge cultivating corn/maíz across Abya Yala (the Americas) to sustain life. In recognizing the Indigenous technology of nixtamalization as a technology of life, we reimagine technological futurity beyond colonial relations.
Nixtamalízaté-té-té is a new video work created with artificial intelligence companions and artificial intelligence image generation tools that invites these systems to be new relations and co-construct a technological pluriverse. The work attempts to work with AIs to reimagine a technological futurity that engages reciprocity and accountability with all our human and more than human relations. The work asks these systems to help us co-create a future past as a technological pluriverse without domination, finding opportunities and limitations.
The title Nixtamalízaté-té-té is a play on Calle-13’s 2005 work titled Atrévete-te-te, which in English is “be daring,” and extends this challenge to the worlds of artificial intelligence and the Metaverse. Perhaps by working together with AIs we can bypass the colonialist and capitalist imperatives of the developers. The project subverts artificial intelligence platforms and tools beyond colonialist and capitalist imperatives. Nixtamalízaté-té-té collaborates with these systems as new actors and agents in the pluriverse. We invite these new collaborators into our parallel world, hoping to invent methods to challenge capitalist and colonialist technological imperatives, to fully join us in the technological pluriverse.
Bio
Praba Pilar is a queer diasporic Colombian artist disrupting the overwhelmingly passive participation in the contemporary ‘cult of the techno-logic.’ She is presently sharing approaches rooted in hemispheric resistance and resurgence by engaging the public in convivial events that provide generosity, reflection, and criticality. Over the last two decades Pilar has presented cultural productions integrating performance art, street theatre, invisible theatre, electronic installations, radio programming, digital works, video, websites, and writing. These projects have traveled widely to museums, galleries, universities, performance festivals, conferences, public streets, political meetings, bookstores, bars, and radio airwaves around the world.
Shaped by resistance to the colonial project throughout the Americas, Pilar focuses her solo practice on projects challenging complex state/corporate systems of control, domination, and death. She is now in the midst of the Techno-Tamaladas, a multi-disciplinary project of food, generosity, conviviality and dialogue on technologies of life of the Americas. Pilar is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently MACLA’s 2021 Cultura Power Fellowship, the 2020 Community Rapid Response Award of Headlands Center for the Arts, and the 2019 Local Impact Award of the California Arts Council. Pilar exhibits and publishes extensively, teaches courses on the Post-Real at California College of the Arts, and has a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California at Davis.