Andrés Arizmendy Benavides - Liminal Alterity

Colombia

Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?

I would say that my artistic practice falls within this system of work, which I explore with curiosity, maintaining a deliberate critical distance from the immediate and ephemeral. My approach is not to see Artificial Intelligence as a collaborator, but as the tool that it is. I seek to incorporate its technical potential without allowing it to overshadow my artistic vision or sensibility. In this way, my work is developed with clear intentionality, criteria, sensitivity, and a well-defined ethical and conceptual stance. My project “Liminal Alterity” pursues this. In it, I use AI as an environment with which I interact, sometimes as a medium and sometimes as an adversary, to expose certain biases, flaws, and the way it shapes the legibility of identity. In this research process, the presence of my body, of my face, is fundamental, as it is the starting point for expanding and finding the very limits of the tool. Additionally, I recognize this tool as more than just an interface; I question its data sets, consent mechanisms, energy and data infrastructures, human labor, legal frameworks, and cultural patterns of the models I use. The very concept of “artificial intelligence” is, for me, an effect of all this positioning.

Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?

My approach focuses on a highly critical practice that operates within the technical limits of what the tool offers, but refuses to accept those limits as inescapable or infallible. What drives me is the urgency of current representation, the speed with which images, even synthetic ones, are transformed into evidence, merchandise, or a means of control. In a way, my project Liminal Alterity acts against the tide. Through distancing, play, and allegory, my goal is to expose the mimetic impulses of the system and the pressure it exerts toward homogenization. At the same time, I am drawn to the need to establish specific ethical requirements around Artificial Intelligence. This is why I have sought to make my personal photographic archive and my image one of the key elements in my practice for the generation of images.

How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?

My artistic practice falls within what has been termed “hyperspace.” I conceive of Artificial Intelligence not only as a tool, but as an environment that shapes the context of the work, its temporality, as well as its scope and value. In this field, the real risk lies not in the technology itself, but in the loss of legibility: opaque AI models, automations that operate invisibly, and systems so immersive that they are perceived as natural rather than cultural constructs. Therefore, a central axis of my practice is to resist the production dynamics proposed by certain models, to question them and to devise new approaches to this technology, which lead me to a poetics of the contemporary representation of the individual. My work develops in constant tension with the current technological moment, while seeking to create a critical distance within it. This “liminal otherness” manifests itself at the intersection of the body and infrastructure, the intimate and the political, image creation and responsibility, driven by the fundamental question: with what level of awareness, how, and why are we using these systems?

Artist Statement

Through self-portraits generated with AI models and digital manipulation—where I allow myself to play with the concepts of liminality and alterity—I explore, traverse, and blur the boundaries surrounding ideas of identity, authorship, artifice, the body, and reality. This invites a sense of estrangement and opens a conversation about the possibility of being another. This practice of generating self-portraits has evolved into my personal project Liminal Alterity, through which I question the self and the potential for its displacement, imagining a fluid identity in constant transformation. It also raises a broader inquiry into the human experience itself, proposing the freedom to become other. In creating these images, I pursue the notion of estrangement, as it allows for a space of connection with the viewer—one that can evoke an emotion or provoke a question. Additionally, I deliberately incorporate my own presence—my face—into the generation of these images as an act of appropriation, claiming authorship and ownership within the context of generative AI. I am also interested in exploring an artistic practice that is socially responsible, while developing a poetic and critical language.

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Andrés Arizmendy Benavides - Liminal Alterity

Colombia