United Attacks Against Socotra
In 2024, I launched a small digital art protest to highlight the plight of Socotra. This island is entangled in Yemen’s civil war, a country now divided into three zones, each controlled by different alliances of global powers. Socotra itself falls under the influence of the United Arab Emirates and its allies. Due to its relative stability, there is a push to transform it into a tourist destination.
What struck me was the stark contradiction of promoting traveling to a land ravaged by one of the most devastating armed conflicts of recent years. The unique flora and fauna make it a magnet for visitors eager to populate their social media with striking photos and videos. Tourists don’t just focus on nature—they also photograph the local population, often posing in ways that have become clichés of travel content. The travelers themselves are framed in familiar poses: gazing at the horizon, dressed in traditional attire, smiling at the camera, fishing, or boating on crystal-clear waters. They capture images of animals that seem exotic to outsiders.
By sharing these photographs on their profiles, these strangers aim to boost their online traffic and popularity, turning Socotra into a curated fantasy. If successful, they inspire others to follow suit, chasing the same illusory reputation through a ripple effect. This place has thus become another silent battleground—one of popular exploitation—where the virtual realm offers no solutions. Taking action in the real world is costly and can have deadly consequences for those who dare to intervene.
One of the biggest flaws in my protest project was relying on generative programs. I repurposed the imagery shared by the people who had visited the paradise, creating what I thought was a new form of artistic expression. Instead, I only added to the electronic noise. My initial impulse was to visit Socotra myself through one of the agencies operating in the area. For a hefty fee, they offer access to places far removed from the usual trails. But in reality, doing so would have meant embracing the very ethical contradictions I sought to critique: engaging in tourism in a war zone.
Webs of Water Activation Series
The crucial aspect of this experience has been observing the tangible guiding thread of an entire technological universe, which aims to be ethereal and impartial, liberating the content of all human wisdom, and, above all, a source of progress. We envision this virtual world as an all-encompassing organization: despite the presence of significant centers of power, there is always space for activism and for minorities to have a voice and fight for their cause. The network tends to naturally integrate numerous independent or isolated systems, more or less connected to each other, akin to parallel universes.
However, within it, we all follow a master line: the material infrastructure. This includes not only telecommunications but also energy. It is clear that we need electricity and wires to sustain our way of life. Currently, cabling is the predominant communication system. Metals too are required to build various essential devices. Therefore, every time we enter this supposed evanescent realm, we are subject to those who possess the physical structure, those who manage, organize, and protect it. That is, large corporations and governments, especially very powerful ones with a colonial past.
My idea has been to try to provide a more holistic or broader view of all this. That is, outside, there is a world that we try to capture with limited tools, whatever the trend may be. But far from that infrastructure and electronica, corporal beings will continue to be immersed in reality. That's why I consider an enlightening symbol in those turtles carrying electronic beacons to trace their trajectories on maps, while a certain audience follows those navigations through their digital devices. In other words, another living organism being monitored, watched, summarizing its presence in a simple series of data displayed on a screen. When creating and maintaining a technological mega-structure, not only life but also the surrounding vegetation must be taken into account.
I also had a revelation while working on this project, compiling, web scraping, doing what is called "dorking." The extractive methods makes you feel like a node within a circuit where there is only transaction, very cold. All one does is recycle the available information according to one's own vision. Contribute, find, edit, follow your own criteria... All integrated into an arrangement of nodes always controlled and identified, in parallel or contrary systems that prevent us from seeing the subject in its totality, leading us to alienation. So, I presented all my documentation and research work on a page that simulated a data center that, when processing, gave the sensation of overflow, providing new lines of meaning. Therefore, it becomes vital to see who the owners of the cables are, where they pass, the great connection there is between, for example, the United States and Europe, compared to the relatively little there is with the poorest areas of the globe. When passing near a cable landing station, you discover all the people who are working inside. There is also a human element that we do not think about.
We always forget that: who has paid to build and use an infrastructure and how they intend to recover their investment, who are the ones who work in them and maintain them. Because this entire technological system will require an increasing energy expenditure and resources. Metals, minerals, water... But they are still selling that all this is in the form of clouds or cyberspace... The reality is simpler: cables, stations, ships, drones, devices, data centers... A metallic world that can be touched.
Cables to Sand
In my project Cables to Sand, I explored the submarine structure that carry nearly all global internet traffic, spanning continents beneath vast bodies of water. One such cable runs from Brazil to the coastal town of Sines in Portugal. While experimenting with information generated by everyday movement, I recorded the force, location, and acceleration of my own journey—from the landing site to the beach where it was supposed to surface. I later used this data to animate satellite images of the place, making the overhead views shift unpredictably: distorting, spinning, drifting closer or farther away, as if tracing the instability of the connection itself.
The real revelation came when I visited the coast in person. There, I found a sign declaring the dune-filled landscape a protected area, safeguarded for its unique flora. Access to that zone was tightly controlled—whether by design or coincidence. These infrastructures are classified as critical, essential to national and international security. Any act of sabotage, like an attempt to sever a wire, could even provoke a military response. This underscored the physical, material reality of a system we often perceive as purely digital. The experience also drove home a crucial lesson: some truths only reveal themselves through direct, on-the-ground engagement—discoveries that, in some cases, no amount of web research can uncover.
Burnt Houses, Feeling Life
In my previous project, Casa Quemada, I discovered satellite photos that resembled abstract paintings. After locating these places—thanks to an app now clearly repurposed for technological warfare—I decided to travel to them, inhabit them. This tension between the digital and the physical has become a recurring theme in my recent work.
For example, in La Vida Sentida, I took self-portraits using a small, almost toy-like camera—a Fujifilm Instax Mini 9. Later, I manipulated these snapshots by inserting flower petals, shrub leaves, or feathers behind them. Over time, the organic material bled onto the images, staining them with its vital fluids. These marks seemed to breathe life into the lifeless visual representation, especially when depicting a body or a face.
At its core, it was all about animating what is fixed—and therefore barren. Photography is built on a process of freezing the living. The same applies to its evolutions: from systems that capture image and sound to preserve a fleeting moment, to generative audiovisual tools that consume entire archives of human testimony only to regurgitate them as monstrous patchworks of dead data.
Only Data, Only Life
In June 2025, Jesús Castillo, a biology professor at the University of Seville, began a hunger strike after learning of starvation deaths in Gaza. His act struck me as an unconscious longing to make the virtual real—to embody what he had only experienced intellectually. For those with a certain disposition—whether spiritual or emotional—there is a need to suffer what we witness, while most settle for sharing videos or becoming another link in the chain of information distributed on behalf of war victims. These are conflicts often fueled by the very corporations that own the platforms hosting such protests.
In my manifesto, Solo Datos, Solo Vida (Only Data, Only Life), I wrote that “Our role—whether as artists or everyday creators—is to feed patterns into generative systems, which then remix and repurpose them in ways we can’t always predict”. What I didn’t anticipate was the recent alliance between major tech companies and arms manufacturers. As we know, for decades, user data and behavioral feedback have been used to refine models. Even indirectly, we, makers, have contributed to the development of tools later repurposed for military use.
The declaration also sought to reduce creative work to pure numerical generation. Every interaction with a device leaves a digital footprint. The artwork, then, would be that raw trace—unprocessed, unadorned by images or sound, stripped of the illusion of traditional artistic representation. This would be the final frontier of 21st-century creation: life reduced to numbers, to mere symbols, presented as it is.
But the next step might be a new Basal Art. We must break free from the vast network we inhabit—a system where we constantly emit to be tracked by unseen controls. We must carve their own path out.
Fractal Impact
At the beginning of the boom of LLMs, especially OpenAI’s models, I took the opportunity to investigate what the most common user demands were regarding this supposed artificial “intelligence”—and which less frequent questions the advanced program itself considered important. For example, the users frequently asked how they could use this product and what it consisted of. It was, therefore, a completely utilitarian vision.
On the other hand, the LLM regarded as crucial an issue that almost no one cared about: the energy consumption and ecological impact of AI. This surprised me, because I hadn’t realized that the power required, along with the constant maintenance of the vast infrastructure necessary for massive computing, had such a brutal devastation—not to mention the consequent waste this new demand would generate.
During that initial period, when chatbots were still being trained in a particular way, it was possible to uncover an honest critique—a key situation that the developers themselves knew was vital and that would inevitably worsen with the growing popularity of these products. From there, I decided that a combination of generative tools would help me create an artistic visualization of this problem.
The resulting image presented two representations: “Rock formations in coastlines,” linked to “Greenhouse gas emissions,” and “Ice formations,” associated with “Electronic waste generation.” These visual metaphors—fractal designs—were abstract attempts to translate the consequences of digital expansion into organic, geological patterns.
The creative process behind this art piece was both unique and collaborative. A large language model (LLM) provided precise guidelines to an agent in Replit, which then executed Python code to generate the illustrations. This method underscored the machine's ability to comprehend and materialize complex concepts, demonstrating the potential of digital creation to convey significant messages.
My own participation was intentionally minimized. By facilitating interaction between two innovative systems, I aimed to infuse the project with a sense of autonomy and to question authorship itself. The generative programs ultimately selected a theme often overlooked during the initial surge of artificial “intelligence” in art: the impact of technology. In this way, the work closed a conceptual loop—returning to that early, neglected problem that the machines themselves had once identified as essential.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder whether denouncing the ecological cost through the very technologies that cause it isn’t another form of contradiction—one that I knowingly chose to escape from in subsequent projects.