Exploring the gap between objects and their representations in the age of computational deception, this text takes as its starting point the operational nature of images. It describes the unstable production of reality and the capacity of events to dislocate from space through their artificial presence in real time. In a context where the algorithmically calculated future and the quantified past seem to merge, the plausibility of an action has more impact than its concrete manifestation. Such representational instability produces a kind of blindness based on the presumed computational objectivity and excessive faith in data.

As part of the Museo Tamayo’s educational program, Materia Abierta was invited as a resident project to share its bibliographic collection and other materials that have informed our pedagogical practices. The gallery walls displayed a series of diagrams — spatializing some of the themes explored during the Materia Abierta’s editions. These sketches reflected the investigative concerns resonating collectively within the school’s organizing team. Throughout the residency, various activities were developed around practices that explore the possibility of sustainable worlds and the independent production of publications for the circulation of knowledge endemic to specific territories.

This installation features a series of timelapses displaying flowers blooming and decaying with auto-generated captions added by a custom-made program. The project explores the in-transferability of meaning between images and text and the politics behind organizing visual content into semantic structures. A technical reenactment of NeuralTalk, an early model designed to write sentences that describe images, this adaptation exposes the limits of object recognition technologies — its inaccurate outcomes make explicit the unstable relation between images and their conceptual representations. By applying the software to videos of plants in stages of transformation, this exploration makes cite of the anthropocentric mischaracterization coded into computers and the limited capabilities of machine vision when confronted with information that falls outside of a specific worldview.

This essay recovers Gustavo Esteva’s ideas on the deprofessionalization of learning and the possibility of escaping from education as a pillar of colonial modernity. It exposes the principle of scarcity as the economic pulse that organizes capitalist societies and the homogenizing violence of schools as producers of meritocratic fictions. It also explores how, through linguistic devastation, schooling has impeded the continuity of the endemic knowledge of Mesoamerican communities and the sustainable care of their territories.

The Library of Imagined Symbols (LOIS) is a collection of fictional symbols in literature. It archives text descriptions of marks representing entities within nonexistent social orders — from holographic logos across Tokyo-Bay in William Gibson's Neuromancer, to David Foster Wallace's cartoonish Mister Squishy, to Ayn Rand's dollar signs stamped in gold on cigarettes. The library studies the symbolic power of graphics as they render as mental images in the collective imagination.

This text presents a series of ruminations, divergent reflections, around the imprecise exercise of organizing Materia Abierta, a prototype school that seeks to overflow beyond linear temporalities. Accompanied by a series of diagrams that set in motion conceptual relationships involved in escaping these time traps, the essay focuses on the principle of recursivity to address the ethics of future-presents that are yet to emerge.

This is the first installment of a mini-series focused on machine reading and modes of illegibility. It recovers the history and development of OCR technologies, to ultimately propose an understanding of letterforms as images and images as programmable artifacts with the capacity to manipulate computational infrastructure and surveillance pipelines.

This work brings us closer to the museum apparatus itself as an economic context: a mural arrangement presents us with color variations resulting from the attempt to match the synthetic terracotta tone present in the museum's architecture through commercial color formulas. In addition to this particular operation a video anecdotally reassembles memories from the museum's staff regarding events related to the company responsible for sponsoring the painting of the venue and its desire to use these same walls as a set for an internal corporate photo shoot. Between the regulation of an earthy tone that alludes to both the landscape and the idealized assimilation of traditional aesthetics within modern Mexican architecture, the present of the museum is revealed as a complex vortex: a continuous oscillation between the artifice of modernity, the colonial traces of neighborhood in which the building is located, the incessant winds of the northeast and the always complex link that the city of Monterrey in Mexico maintains between its cultural institutions and the private sector.

—Christian Camacho

Transparencia Index is a custom-made platform that automatically scrapes data from the Plataforma Nacional de Transparencia, a system through which people can request public information from the Mexican government. The software identifies existing requests associated with topics of common interest that were previously denied on the basis of containing information classified by authorities. This ever-increasing flow of unanswered civic concerns are organized as an interactive website that aims to register, through labyrinthine hyperlinks, the bureaucratic opacity and strategic silence of the country’s administrative institutions.

During this performance, a series of poems generated in real time by a system designed to imitate the poetic style of Rosa Espino, an imaginary poet who served as a pseudonym to general Vicente Riva Palacio, was read collectively. Giving continuity to this historical act of literary deception, a computer program analyzed the vocabulary, themes, and grammatical structure of the body of work authored by Rosa Espino to generate new texts. For this event organized in a domestic patio, the system produced passages with floral motifs that were read by local poets and the attending audience.

This article studies the first large scale surveillance system with facial recognition installed at a governmental level in Mexico. The investigation reveals a series of technical and legal inconsistencies in its implementation as it documents the cooperation across the border between police and indirect use by the FBI of a technology that was blacklisted by the United States. The promise of security is once more a political tool that responds to local commercial interests and that ultimately threatens the rights of citizens.

This work investigates the possibility of adding to Google Maps a monument that does not exist. An interactive website displays 3D scans developed with Julieta Gil from fragments of the monuments of the Calzada de los Poetas in Mexico City. As an illustrated tale, a voice tells the story of a man searching for an image from his past: a monument to Rosa Espino, an imaginary poet used as a pseudonym by general Vicente Riva Palacio to write poetry. Traveling through the city and its digital maps, the character reflects on the institutional mechanisms through which memory and history are constructed within the limits of information devices.

Published as a sort of editorial parasite, this piece explores the boundary between the production of an image and its reproduction. The paintings were commissioned in Dafen, China, a town dedicated to the commercial making of oil copies. This form of production reflects a broader ecosystem where intellectual property is not protected but rather technical knowledge is shared to contribute to common development. Taken from La Jetée, a film by Chris Marker about the possibility of time travel through pictures, this frame is reproduced irregularly throughout the pages of the magazine. The repetition of the paintings in the publication challenges our capacity to notice their subtle variations — making us see images we have seen before but recognize them as different.

In a landscape where the technologies governing our lives are increasingly obscured, this publication aims to reveal the underlying processes of a machine learning program. It seeks to mediate machines' sight and human comprehension. The book documents the technical capacities of an algorithm trained to analyze the formal patterns of the alphabet while it imagines other letters from that knowledge. The resulting outputs — letters without semantic value — embraces and emphasizes the meaningless results of the machine: it is the human input and framework that imbues sense to these forms.

Interested in investigating the possibilities of technology approaching the materiality of language, Federico Pérez Villoro developed a program that recognizes the formal patterns of the alphabet and imagines new letters from that knowledge. The results are presented in this exhibition as characters that transform into ethereal mutant entities leaving vaporous traces of that which came before with each variation. Although this process is the foundation of his research, this exhibition is not limited to a mere typographic work. It is, rather, the origin of an exploration of the language of chimeras formed by humans and machines.

—Paulina Ascencio Fuentes

This essay uses a centuries old manuscript on the occult that hides sophisticated ciphers to explore our changing relationship to what societies consider to be magical. It studies how magic has shifted over time from being prohibited within societies ruled by religion to being wielded as a tool for commerce by techno-governing bodies. The text charts how the unknown has taken on new faculties when evoked to entice consumers with technologies that work beyond our understanding, but also as a strategy to obfuscate the inner workings of computational products. It ultimately looks at the intertwining of State and corporate powers, as private companies increasingly take on civic roles — determining the spaces and grammars through which knowledge is built and the perception of what is real is permanently negotiated.

These works explore the impact of machine vision models used to identify people, and the datasets with which they are trained. Putting into question the very act of organizing images as conceptual classes, they address both the in-transferability of meaning between images and concepts and the amplification of social biases always present in such a process. Under an ongoing search for what we understand as “fugitive images,” these explorations are artifacts at the margins of algorithmic vision and speculate on the possibility to escape the logics of computational representation.

Gradually moving from English to Spanish, two performers demonstrate examples of speech hesitation phenomena as they aim to translate puzzling “nonsense” poems. Through filled and unfilled pauses, invented words, and other paralinguistic markers, performers spontaneously engage with the text structures as they express the spaces between semantic interpretations.

This publication explores a form of steganography embedded in most commercial printers. In addition to the intended content, many printers secretly encode metadata as a pattern of matrices of near invisible yellow dots. The project investigates the presence of such codes in a NSA classified report that was leaked to a news media outlet. Posted online as a scanned PDF, the document had such encrypted marks with a timestamp and the serial number of the machine that was originally used to print it. Shortly after the report’s publication, the Justice Department charged Reality Leigh Winner, an Air Force veteran and NSA contractor, under the Espionage Act. This technology has been enforced by the U.S. government to prevent counterfeiting and make printouts forensically traceable. However there are no clear regulations around it nor wide knowledge of its uses—becoming a threat to anonymity and political dissidents. The publication includes instructions to decode the yellow dot pattern as it explores the legibility of yellow ink over different lighting conditions.

This project features a program that struggles to clearly label color nuances in moving images. The piece explores the ways in which colors are organized semantically and the patterns within the history of when color terms appeared over time in different languages. More specifically, it focuses on the linguistic separation of what we now identify as “green” and “blue” and the roots of such distinction as a process of epistemic Western dominance and a result of the impact of industrial technologies on human perception.

This book is conceived as an experimental reprint of Futura, the seminal collection of concrete poems edited by Hansjörg Mayer. Enhanced with a custom made 3D-printed mechanism (or machine prosthetic) that enables automatic manipulations to the printer’s encoder strip, the book re-interprets the poems by means of mechanical mediation, outputting the originals through a set of controlled and chance operations. The resulting work is a set of new, altered text pieces that reflect on the elasticity of words within a printed page. The project explores the ability of language to deliver meaning at the boundaries of intentionality when text is pushed over into image or object as it is reproduced.

This piece consists of a performative reading of speech distortions produced by loops of computer to computer dictation of the Harvard corpus — a set of phonetically balanced sentences designed to hit all the possible sounds of the English language and as voice synthesis research during WWII. Two performers simultaneously read the erratic outcomes in the same sequence and inverse temporal logic.

This essay explores the evolving landscape where branding operates as developments in technology blur distinctions between private and public entities. It analyzes how information platforms enable complex shifts in governance as state and non-state powers embrace surveillance, digital propaganda, and globally distributed networks of data, in their own brand strategies.

(human) learning was a study group on technology and aesthetics with shifting participants, locations and collaborators. Organized around discussions of theory and fiction, the program addressed our collective anxieties around the distance between human cognition and the increasing complexity of computational systems. Each session was broadcast live on a website using a custom-made software that transcribed conversations as it learned to decode speech into text and images.

This series of workshops and lectures focused on art and design practices that make use of computation as means and motifs for research and critical experimentation. The program investigated how the reproducibility of information, across a wide range of media, destabilizes the power of the singular art object and, in the process, reveals how institutional systems and market forces regulate the flows of knowledge.