Digital F(r)ictions: Reimagining Colombian Art and its Territory
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Digital F(r)ictions is an interactive web-based artwork that re-imagines the territory of Colombia as a hybrid double of the country’s artistic and environmental landscape. It creates a fiction of a new territory that goes beyond the satellite map, an intentional friction between different ways of seeing and representing Colombian territory. Juxtaposing to the "data colonialism" of mainstream artificial intelligence (AI) gaze, it fine-tunes Stable Diffusion on the Modern Art Museum of Bogotá (MAMBO) collection, alongside works from three additional Colombian artistic traditions. For each MAMBO artwork, the anchor of our work, it generates four distinct visual interpretations using CLIP embeddings, each embodying an alternative, situated way of seeing that embraces four Colombian artistic traditions: colonial, modern, pre-Hispanic, and street art. This paper details our technical approach: (1) semantic alignment between artworks and ecological layers, (2) LoRA fine-tuning for Stable Diffusion models, and (3) interface design enabling interactive exploration. Inspired by Latin American theorists and concepts of "digital pluriversality," our work seeks to disrupt monolithic narratives of cultural memory. By integrating AI models of CLIP, BLIP, and Stable Diffusion, the project generates an alternative cartography of Colombia where artwork semantics align with ecological layers, and multiple re-imagined interpretations of the MAMBO collection, challenging the homologation of mainstream AI while exploring decolonial approaches to technology. The interactive Web-based artwork can be viewed here.
DOI: 10.1145/3736785
Institutions: Max Planck Society, University of Zurich
Language: English
Topic: Art, Technology, and Culture
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4412474743