About the Author

General profile

Antonio Palacios Rojo (Seville, 1971) uses cinema, literature, digital art, and photography in his work to explore themes such as creation and technology, as well as memory and the Andalusian environment. He is mainly known for the feature-length documentary Los Negros (2022) and for the dialog-based novel El Primer Libro (2013).

His creative work usually focuses on dramatization, primarily through fiction and occasionally through documentary. He is known as a writer, film director, digital artist, and, at times, photographer. Until 2020, his creative process often involved text-generation techniques using the early intelligent tools available at the time. New technological media are also among the main subjects he explores.

For his more experimental or personal works, he signs as Palacio Rojo. In more professional projects or when working for others, he uses his full name, Antonio Palacios Rojo, or the name Antonio Palacios.

From 2005 to 2010, he maintained a website where, among many other literary experiments, he created the project Mimeografías, which can be classified within generative literature, a branch of electronic literature. From the outset, this project marked his interest in digital creative techniques for generating literary texts. For this purpose, he used the first tools available that would much later, especially from 2020 onwards, become popularly known as Artificial Intelligence. For this project only, he signed as “La Bodega”.

The animated short film Emotistory (2009), the first he both wrote and directed, follows this same line of technological inspiration and is already starring textual emoticons.

In 2011, he wrote and directed the short film Salas S.A.L., a tribute to the films of Jean-Luc Godard focused on the power relationships established in the workplace.

El Primer Libro (2013), a dialog-based novel, satirizes the use of Artificial Intelligence in artistic creation long before the popular emergence of these products in the creative field. For the writing of some of the included texts, he designed ways of generating text using the primitive digital tools available at the time.

In El Libro Diario (2014), he blends the structure of a personal diary with the framework and tasks required to write any work of fiction. In the writing of the book, early conversational chatbots were used as a source of inspiration. In other parts, online text manipulation tools were used for the same purpose.

El Libro De Las Carcomas (2015) collects various texts from different genres such as fiction, essay, and experimental literature. Many of them are still the result of his exploration of generative tools.

He wrote and directed Luna Fija (2017), which tells, in the form of a mock documentary, how images originating from the minds of deceased people travel through the air around us.

In Yo Sombra (2018), he brings together fragments from his previous books along with interviews, curious news from Seville, conversations overheard by the author during several walks through the city center, as well as numerous quotations from various classical authors. The result can be considered a cento or hybrid work that gives the text a parodic character.

Los Papeles del Norte (2020) includes some texts previously published in literary magazines along with other unpublished works.

Los Mensajes De WAIF (2021) combines poetry and instant photographs to create a photobook that presents a playful challenge to the reader.

When publishing, he prefers to do so in both national and international literary and creative magazines. Interestingly, his first published short story was written in English and appeared in the London-based magazine Bad Idea , in 2008.

In the following years, his narrative essays—non-fiction pieces that follow dramatic structures and devices—as well as his short stories, appeared in publications dedicated to literature.

His first feature-length film, the documentary Los Negros (2022), deals with the Brotherhood of Slaves of Seville, one of the key institutions in Universal Black History. To do so, it uses both dramatizations with actors and animated sequences in 2D and 3D.

The photographic project La Vida Sentida (2022), features Plácido Rodríguez , one of the last inhabitants of the Doñana Marshes.

Casa Quemada (2024), framed within digital art, explores the conflict between technological exploitation and ecological conservation in areas of Seville and Huelva affected by wildfires, mining, and agricultural shantytown settlements.

He made his film debut in 2005 by co-writing the short film Hombres de Paja, which subverts the main conventions of classic film noir, as it is, among other things, led by a recently new mother who investigates the death of her husband.

In 2019, he wrote the short film Charo 8, shot on eight-millimeter film, which won the First Jury Prize at the Neuchâtel Super8 Film Festival.

In 2025, as part of the PhD Program in Art and Heritage at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Seville , he delivered a seminar on Artificial Intelligence and Creation titled Desaprendiendo Límites. On this website, much of what was discussed at the time can be followed online in a practical way.

In 2025, he took part in Webs of Water, sponsored by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in collaboration with Tactical Tech. Within this framework, he carried out the artistic intervention “Cables to Sand”, which took place in Sines (Portugal). There, he walked the routes through which the submarine cable connecting Europe with the Caribbean passes, recording data from his walk such as acceleration, force, or location. This shared information constituted the artwork itself.

As an explanation of this concept of blending lived experience and recorded data to create a work of art, he wrote the manifesto Solo Datos, Solo Vida .

Antonio Palacios Rojo is a member of the Academy of Cinema of Andalusia .

The website hosting the experiments was built on Google Sites, as it offered an easy way to design and maintain content, as well as to allow collaboration with other authors. The original site, like many other examples of Net Art, has since been lost.

A review of the project can be found on the blog of the Hispanic Electronic Literature Portal of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, at the University of Alicante.

In addition to Mimeografías, he developed literary experiments such as Juego De Los Verbos, Juego De Los Infinitos, and Juego De Las Lenguas.

At the time, the author explained his creative method as follows:

"The method of using mimeography is simple. Any given text is taken and turned into a sound file. There are several programs, originally created as machine readers for the blind, capable of performing this secret miracle. Once the sound of the written words has been obtained, they are transcribed again using another program: the one that converts sound into written words. The immense difficulty of deciphering what we say—the sound of language—leads the machine into a continuous error, producing an endless, joyful babble. The only task left to humans is that of proofreader and editor; the machine is the author of the discoveries hidden within the tangle."

When signing these works, he used the pseudonym La Bodega, a deliberately fictional cultural company supposedly run by Antonio Palacios. He drew inspiration from a quote by Andy Warhol, in which Warhol suggested that in the future, companies would sign works of art. In doing so, Antonio Palacios Rojo anticipated the current trend of close identification between creators and their own commercial brands.

The author acknowledges precedents in the automatic writing of the Surrealists and, above all, in Penelope Rosemont, creator of the mimeograms, produced by manipulating the small printing press that is the mimeograph until phrases and words begin to dance. In this way, the experiments on the site, like many others related to automatic text generation, are connected both to avant-garde literary movements (Surrealism, Oulipo) and to conceptual artistic trends (Dada, Fluxus).

The short film was originally conceived for publication on YouTube, a platform that was still very young at the time. Despite this, it was later submitted to several film festivals. Emotistory was selected for Animayo, the first and only Spanish animation festival recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Hollywood as a qualifying festival for the Academy Awards®.

The plot revolves around a professional and seductive relationship between an employee and her boss, both portrayed by the same actress.

Salas S.A.L. has an unusual structure that makes it an experimental narrative. The sequence of shots in the first half is repeated and inverted in the second half. In addition, everything spoken in the dialogue during the first half is repeated almost word for word in the second, but with its order and meaning altered.

Furthermore, the entire short film is shot using a subjective camera, maintaining the perspective of the same character—the boss—throughout its runtime.

As part of its selection at prestigious festivals such as Outfest and NewFest, Salas S.A.L. was screened at the Filmoteca of Catalonia, the Film Forum at Lincoln Center (New York, United States), and the Directors Guild screening room, the Harmony Gold Theater (Los Angeles, United States). It also opened the opening gala of MIX NYC on its 25th anniversary, the festival dedicated to experimental cinema in New York City.

Ten years later, it was selected by the SGAE Foundation as one of the short films included in the retrospective exhibition “SGAE en Corto: Shorts for a New Millennium”, held to mark its anniversary in September 2022.

El Primer Libro satirizes technology companies that exploit artistic human capital to develop their tools. Ten years ago, many of its passages accurately anticipated what would become news from 2020 onwards.

The book was originally signed under the name Palacio Rojo. In the reissue published ten years later, in 2023, the author signed it as Antonio Palacios Rojo.

El Primer Libro was first published on the online self-publishing platform Smashwords. In addition, a non-commercial physical edition was produced and distributed through bookcrossing.

In the 2023 reissue, the author revised the work by limiting himself to removing what was superfluous, without the need to add anything, as the story accurately predicted the present we live in and the future to come.

Within the plot, there is a program that writes texts according to the user’s will, much like many creative chat tools widely discussed today. In the room where the characters gather, the chatbot generates texts based on user instructions—what are now known as “prompts”—and recites them using a synthetic voice.

To obtain these automatically generated texts recited by the fictional AI, the author used methods such as searching for words with specific syllables through online text-editing programs, or reciting texts at high speed to induce errors, a technique already mentioned in Notes on Mimeografías.

In the story, the fictional chat is asked to write a manifesto against technology as an ironic joke. Interestingly, years later, Alexander Reben, an artist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model to generate biting critiques of art created with Artificial Intelligence.

The book tells how Bernardo, Berta, and Edmundo—three young writers—take part in the A.M.O.K. project, which claims to mark a turning point in the history of human creation. This money-making scheme is the work of Basilio, a cultural entrepreneur who claims to have created the first character born of Artificial Intelligence. To make it work, he has gathered thousands of award-winning writers in Seville. They are tasked with supplying exciting situations so that the A.M.O.K. program can improvise its reactions, as if it were a seasoned actor.

The three writers attempt to construct a story in which a scientist revives his deceased wife through a hologram animated by a novel program of his own invention.

The narrative adopts a highly unusual format, as it is entirely written in dialogue, in the tradition of the dramatic novel La Celestina.

The book presents a possible inhuman future in which technology brings about the end of intimate human expression.

It also predicts the exploitation of human artistic capital by managers of technology companies, who take advantage of artists’ production to train their AIs to imitate perfectly without paying for it.

Furthermore, it points toward a step not yet taken: the creation by Artificial Intelligence of perfect replicas of deceased loved ones—something that could become possible according to current technological advances.

Following its reissue, the science fiction journal Sci-Fdi, published by the Complutense University of Madrid, published an excerpt from the work.

Readers were invited to fill in headings arranged like diary entries. At the beginning, a user guide was included to clarify the rules of the game proposed by its reading.

The aim was to help readers become a character with a story. When fictionalizing, we must answer many questions about each participant in the plot—their personality, thoughts, and defining traits, as well as the events that take place and how they speak. In this case, the reader had to complete all this information in order to construct the story of their own life.

In this exercise notebook, a fictional version of the author was presented as an example, providing a model answer for each heading. In this way, the work continued to explore the boundary of the open work—one that turns creation into a hybrid of artist’s book and literary artifact.

To create the fictional life of Palacio Rojo, the author used primitive chatbots such as Cleverbot—language programs that generated absurd responses or involuntary literary discoveries—unlike newer text-generation tools, which are more efficient but also less surprising. He thus included, in edited form, some of his interactions with these early artificial simulations.

El Libro Diario was first published electronically on the Smashwords platform. Later, a limited paper edition was produced and distributed through bookcrossing.

In the printed version, the entire book cover was smooth, in a reddish-brown tone, with no words, illustrations, or photographs. It was another attempt to defy expectations and appeal to mystery.

El Libro De Las Carcomas was first published electronically on the Smashwords platform. Later, a limited paper edition was produced and distributed through bookcrossing.

Among its contents, Tu Lugar en el Cuerpo Mental, o Cómo nos Convertiremos en Células de una Corporación stands out—an essay that anticipated the arrival of an Artificial Intelligence operating within the networked environment and its consequences, while also linking it to a mythology already established by past writers and thinkers. Thus, science fiction authors, scientists involved in the construction of AI, and philosophers are brought together. Figures cited include Julian May, Olaf Stapledon, Minsky, Theodore Sturgeon, Kurzweil, Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky, F. Paul Wilson, Arthur C. Clarke, Nick Harkaway, McLuhan, among others.

In the short story Conoce a tu LLais, he imagines a program that improvises stories based on the user’s surroundings. To generate the mechanical and delirious plot, the author drew inspiration from Pyprose, a software tool that generated texts from a suggested list of terms. The result was incongruent yet grammatically correct, which helped him create the plot and characters of the story. This piece was published in the science fiction journal Sci-Fdi of the Complutense University of Madrid.

A similar system was used for two stories: El Canto Central del Mundo and Las Unciones del Otoño. As a starting point, the author used various randomly generated texts similar to Lorem Ipsum—those filler texts used by web designers to lay out pages. According to the author:

“The first computer programs capable of generating texts were already appearing. One of them was Pyprose, also known as Prose, written in Python code and developed by Charles O. Hartman starting in 1996. The tool allowed you to suggest a list of terms to include in a small dictionary, which was actually a document containing a list of words. The result remained quite incongruent, since what appeared on screen was entirely guided by chance, although the sentences were grammatically correct. This produced some very original concepts.”

“From the resulting nonsense, I managed to draw inspiration to write, for example, El Canto Central del Mundo, in which I imagined an experiment through which the senses could be modified. As inspiration, I gathered all the verbs and nouns related to human senses—such as ‘to smell’, ‘smell’—and shuffled them randomly using this text-editing program. The resulting text helped me imagine how our habitual way of sensing could be altered.”

“After the story, I included the conclusions drawn from my fictional experience of modifying my senses. I did not limit this to the page alone. I also engraved all the conclusions with the tip of a blade onto an old vinyl record. The letters, as announced, become more visible when the record is moved before your eyes—thus continuing to play with the blending of the senses. I also combined text with sound in a strange way by writing on the black surface. Finally, I sought to move beyond the conventional book format and add an element closer to conceptual art.”

The author also allowed Pyprose to generate meaningless sentences without suggesting specific terms. These discoveries became the basis for chapters composed of epigrams: Aforismos and Céname, Río. Some of them were published in the literary magazine Fábula under the title Epigramas Inocentes.

For the poem Vos, Inocencia, an anagram of Invocations, he used textual tools to extract keywords from hymns to gods across various literary traditions, later combining them with technological concepts in a collage of images and thoughts.

To give the piece a purpose closer to conceptual art, he included instructions at the beginning of Vos, Inocencia, inviting the reader to copy the verses onto an envelope in which they were to place their mobile phone. Thus, whenever tempted to pick up the phone, they could read the verses and, with their help, resist the urge to escape. If they succeeded for a period of time, they could open the envelope and take the phone—but this time as its master, not as a slave to technology.

The poem Vos, Inocencia was published by the journal Estación Poesía of the University of Seville.

The short film uses only photographs by Jorge González Ruiz, processed with various digital effects, to tell a science fiction story.

Specifically, it imagines how, since 2010, very low frequency waves surrounding us have been recorded at the CNRS in Lyon. One day, the researchers receive blurred images, similar to those produced by advanced brain scanners. They come from deceased individuals. It is unknown how these images were transmitted from the brain into the air.

The style approaches non-fiction, which is why it premiered at the On Vous Ment Festival in Lyon, dedicated to the mockumentary genre and presented as “a space for reflection on the impact of images and their manipulation”.

According to the author:

“Yo Sombra was born when, after an interview with Francisco García Tortosa, he half-jokingly commissioned me to write a book about Seville in which its inhabitants would recognize their hidden essence, just as Joyce’s Ulysses does with Dublin and its people.”

To achieve this, the author draws on numerous sources. The volume includes conversations about literature and myth with García Tortosa himself, Rafael de Cózar, and Emilio González Ferrín. It also features one-question interviews with Ramón Andrés, Fernando Iwasaki, Ana María Shua, Antonio Molina Flores, Jacobo Cortines, Luis Bagué Quílez, Álvaro Colomer, José Carlos Cataño, and Juan Carlos Abril.

The curious news items about Seville found in the book reveal the paradoxical nature of the city’s image and reality.

In a later revised version of Yo Sombra , the author removed many texts from earlier works that had been included and already possessed their own independent identity (fragments from El Primer Libro, El Libro de las Carcomas, or El Libro Diario), as well as unpublished manuscripts.

The original idea was to publish an unreadable book through a self-publishing imprint that accepts works in exchange for payment, regardless of content quality. The title was an anagram of Soy Broma. According to the author:

“I think it was only funny to me to deliberately sneak something dense and unreadable through, instead of doing so accidentally, as is often the case with most of these self-publishing imprints and even with others that are not.”

Among the magazine texts included in the volume are narrative essays on Fernando Pessoa, Egon Erwin Kisch, Vernon Lee, Forugh Farrokhzad, Ugo Pirro, Christina of Markyate, Zhuangzi, and Kṣemendra.

Among the unpublished works is El Libro del Cuerpo , a dramatic piece containing more than one hundred instructions to be followed by the reader together with a partner, thus constituting an unusual theatrical experiment.

The photographs use the small format provided by the Fujifilm Instax camera.

In some cases, the author used the Pyprose program for inspiration, generating nonsensical sentences that served as notes for future photographs when they suggested unusual or unexpected images.

According to the author:

“I believe my approach was more interactive and creative than the content-generation engines that later became popular. I enjoyed the challenge of finding innovative ways to create something new.”

The synopsis of the photobook explains the game proposed to the reader:

“Our undercover agent Conrado has intercepted several small instant photographs taken by the suspect Cecilia with her Fujifilm Instax Mini 9 camera. We do not know what they might mean. As clues, we have short texts copied by the dissident onto small papers, Post-its, and cards. You must decide which of them corresponds to each image.”

Some of the photographs included in the book were exhibited in galleries in Madrid (Tres por Cuatro) and Seville (Qclub), and also appeared in international media such as Float Photo Magazine (New York).

Winner of the First Jury Prize at the Neuchâtel Super8 Film Festival. In this competition, all films must be shot in chronological order, each shot captured in a single take, and using only one roll of Super8 film. These reels are sent to the festival, where they are developed and screened. The filmmakers see the final result for the very first time during the official projection.

The short film was also part of the official selection of the Nuevo Cine Andaluz Festival in Casares.

The film earned recognitions such as the International Journalism Award from the International Press Club (2022), as well as nominations for the Carmen Awards (2022) for Best New Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

In addition to its theatrical release in Spain, it was also screened internationally in special events, such as at Albright College (USA) as part of the International Day of Remembrance.

The film was not submitted to national or international festivals, with the sole exception of the Nador International Film Festival.

Unlike most historical documentaries, the film avoids the use of interviews. According to critic Miguel Ángel Pizarro:

“Palacios chooses to focus on a specific narrative, a wise decision that limits the film’s ambition so it can fully succeed. He opts to tell the story of the brotherhood, the oldest in Seville. His approach is particularly interesting, as he employs a variety of techniques and avoids the conventional talking-head interviews with experts, reminding us that in Spain religious documentary filmmaking is currently among the most innovative in terms of technique and narrative.”

Ángeles Lucas, writing in El País, recounts the origin of the project:

“Learning about the massive presence of African slaves in Seville between the 14th and 18th centuries, and how they founded—extraordinarily—one of the earliest confraternities in what was then a European megalopolis, Los Negritos, was the ‘revelation’ filmmaker Antonio Palacios had been waiting for in his search for a ‘very powerful’ story to tell.”

La Vida Sentida narrates the author Antonio Palacios’s vital journey from an inner, mental space toward nature.

To do so, the work employs multiple formats: digital, analog, and instant photography. It also embraces a wide range of styles, from experimental and symbolic to documentary, from black and white to color. There is no single editing approach, as this variety reflects the transition from a more mental and conceptual plane to a more referential one rooted in the surrounding environment.

Some of the photographs were published on Vogue’s digital platform.

The journey culminates in the encounter with Plácido Rodríguez, one of the former inhabitants of Doñana, a feral child who grew up only to witness the disappearance of the paradise where he was raised. From him, the author learns that uniting with the environment is a lifelong struggle.

The itineraries covered the Guadiamar, Tinto, and Olivargas rivers and their surroundings, a region once inhabited by Tartessos. During September and October 2024, Antonio Palacios Rojo walked through locations selected for their distinctive visual appearance in Google Earth satellite imagery.

The walks were recorded using an application that collects GPS data. The resulting paths were later embedded into satellite images. However, the artwork itself consists of several downloadable .kml files containing all the coordinates recorded by the satellite.

As additional material, a document is provided describing each journey and including reflections by the following experts: Félix Talego Vázquez, Jesús M. Castillo, Sebastián Celestino, Manuel Olías, Àngels Escrivà Chordà, and Emma González.

Casa Quemada broadly belongs to Data Art and Locative Media, integrating post-digital practices such as life-logging art, walking art, and critical ecologies within the contemporary framework of Anthropocene art.

The project transforms lived experience into downloadable data, positioning the artist’s life as a continuous source of information and critique. In doing so, it continues the author’s interest in dramatization as a creative method, this time approaching artistic performance.

The first magazine in which he was published was Bad Idea, founded in 2006. According to The Observer, it had become “a kind of Granta for the MySpace generation.”

Other magazines that have featured his work include Clarín, Letralia, El Coloquio de los Perros, Quimera, Inundación Castálida, Ariadna, Revista de Letras, Colofón, and Pliego Suelto.

The essayistic narratives feature figures such as Victoria Cirlot, Stefan Zweig, André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Cristina Campo, Zinaída Hippius, Anna Akhmatova, Sappho, Chuang Tse, Valentine Penrose, Margarita Xirgu, Ksemendra, Ugo Pirro, Sławomir Mrożek, Fernando Pessoa, Vernon Lee, Forugh Farrojzad, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Gérard de Nerval, among others.

Recently, many of these pieces were collected in Libros de Pasión y Lucha Sin Sentido. Colección de Ensayos Narrados.