¡Harken! is 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! Juan Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life. The AI responds with hallucinations and distortions based on secondhand accounts written by colonizers 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.
As part of the salon series Collaboration as Resistance, join Modesto Flako Jimenez for a salon-style conversation among collaborators and the audience to explore all the layers of collaboration nestled in ¡Harken!, between Juan and the Dutch, Juan and historians, Flako and Juan, Flako, Juan, and AI. Are we excavating a lost truth, returning to a myth or finding a new horizon with the added tool of “intelligent” technology?
