¡HARKEN!

¡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.