¡Harken! : A Lost Truth or a Return to a Myth?
Annie Saunders
A transfiguration of the flawed and fragmented pieces of history written about Juan Rodriguez – a mixed-race Atlantic Creole who arrived in 1613 from Santo Domingo as a fur trader for the Dutch. In Harken!, Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life.
The AI responds with hallucinations; distortions based on second hand accounts written by colonizers and chroniclers and accepted as “history.” Using generative AI, audience prompts, face-swapping, and image generation, Harken! audiences help Rodriguez re-write his story by ‘feeding’ the AI new information, generating new images and landscapes in the process.
Join creator and theater maker Flako Jimenez in conversation with Adaora Udoji as they navigate the storytelling of Rodriquez amidst the layers of versions of the story while applying the new tools of technology. Does that lead to excavation of a lost truth or a return to a myth?
A MAXmachina 2024 Program
Sunday, November 10 - Sunday, November 10, 2024
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
409 West 14th Street New York, NY 10014
Artist Profile
Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez
Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised, multi-hyphenate artist. As a poet, playwright, educator, actor, producer, and director his work exists in and explores the intersections of identity, language, mediums, cultures, and communities found in his personal life and beyond.
Jimenez’s art addresses the social and political changes affecting the Latin American communities in his Bushwick neighborhood. His 2021 play, Taxilandia, draws on his nine years of experience driving a taxicab in New York City and his documentation of conversations with passengers, residents, locals, and immigrants. He has worked with companies all over the country, including La Jolla Playhouse, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, and he founded and is the Artistic Director of Oye Group. Jimenez also works as a Community Programmer at The Bushwick Starr and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and leads poetry and theater workshops for teens through Oye Group.
Artist Profile
Victor Morales
Victor Morales is a Multidisciplinary Artist whose work includes theater direction, video design, animation, text, sound design, and digital puppetry. He has collaborated with international artists such as Chris Kondek (Berlin), Joseph Silovsky (NYC), Flako Jimenez (NYC), Wolfgang Mitterer (Austria) among others. Since 2003, Victor has been obsessed with the art of video game software tech and his work is an exploration of video game engines as simulation environments, where “digital” death and physics are transformed into dramatic and comedic real time performance. Lately he has been poking into the world of AI generated media. Victor teaches technology applied to arts and animation at NYU and Montclair University.
In 2019 his multidisciplinary project Esperpento was selected to be part of Sundance 2019 New Frontiers, also in 2019 the installation of Esperpento was awarded with “Best Immersive and Time Based Art” at the B3 Biennial awards at the Buchmesse in Frankfurt, Germany.