Spectres/Hoy

Spectres / Hoy is a world building exercise co-created with Generative ai. Using learnings from Chicano Alien Desert Rave and 21 Paz, I wanted to address the issue of immigration more directly, embodying migrants in extraterrestrial bodies. While Spectres explores themes of alienation, identity, and the search for belonging in a series of 16 painterly compositions, Hoy, a video component, features an extraterrestrial wandering the California desert in inverted night vision, amplifying the feeling of dislocation and longing. For audio I manipulated the last verse and chorus of Neil Diamond’s America with a vintage spanish-language version produced in Suno V4. AI-generated English lyrics provide a mysterious and poignant misinterpretation of the spanish-language version of the song. Visuals created in MidJourney 6.1, redrawn and recomposed in Adobe CS and animated in Runway 3.0.