Salazar

Argentina

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

I place myself inside the systems I work with, but never in a comfortable way. I’m there to look at them critically. In my work, I don’t treat artificial intelligence, electronic devices, or algorithmic systems as neutral tools or as transparent extensions of human intention. I’m interested in inhabiting them as tense territories, shaped by material, ecological, and political conflicts. I work with systems that have historically been built through extractive, instrumental, and anthropocentric logics: data collection, neural networks, technical infrastructures, and I try to push them off-center. I don’t stand in front of them as a user, but as part of unstable assemblages where non-human agencies are also at work: minerals, energy flows, plants, bacteria, damaged territories. I’m not interested in technophobia, nor in techno-utopian fascination. What I want is to undo the idea that technology “represents” or “simulates” the world. Instead, I think of it as something that actively produces reality, fiction, and forms of sensitivity together with other bodies and materials. My works are not closed stories; they are systems designed to let other kinds of non-human, non-intentional, and non-linguistic expressions emerge.

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

I’m moving toward a practice that’s less about the image as an end result and more about how systems behave, their own timings, their material frictions. I’m interested in open processes, where things can fail, where latency, error, and instability are not problems but part of the work. What keeps pulling me forward is a persistent question: how to create conditions for more-than-human entities to express themselves without immediately forcing them into human meanings. That question pushes me to work with fragile interfaces, sensing systems, AI models trained with situated data, and materials that react, degrade, or store memory. There’s also a political pull here. I’m thinking technology from Latin America, from territories marked by extractivism, mining, deforestation, and data coloniality. I’m not interested in abstract critiques of AI. I care about concrete practices that operate inside the material conditions of the current ecological crisis. Within that movement, fiction becomes a tool, a way to imagine other relations, other cosmologies, where the artificial and the ancestral, the technical and the living, are not opposites but strange, uncomfortable hybrids.

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

My practice unfolds in a hybrid space that is part laboratory, part speculative ecosystem. It’s not just the exhibition space, but also the workshop, the code, the territory, the research, and the work with living or sensitive materials. I experience this space as something that constantly deforms, depending on the relations that get activated: between satellite data and ancestral memory, between predictive models and divination practices, between technological infrastructures and damaged landscapes. The works don’t sit comfortably in that space; they stretch it, contaminate it. I work in a zone where art functions as a tool for ecological thinking, not to illustrate issues, but to create situations where categories like nature and technology, life and matter, control and autonomy start to break down. It’s a space crossed by multiple scales (microbial, territorial, planetary) and by temporalities that don’t match human time or the accelerated time of commercial technology. In that sense, my practice doesn’t try to close meanings. It opens up zones of uncertainty. Spaces where something without a voice, a face, or a clear intention can still affect things, insist, leave traces. That’s where I feel my work is right now.

Published in >

The AI Art Magazine, Number 3

Crystallizing the Void, AI generation, 2025.

Salazar, Crystallizing the Void, AI generation, 2025

Description

Crystallizing the Void is a bio-generative installation that explores the extractive crisis of high Andean salt flats and saline lagoons in the region known as the Lithium Triangle (Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile). The work looks at the relationship between mineral agency, contemporary technology, and the energy transition. The project is based on more than one thousand satellite images showing how these high Andean wetlands have changed over recent decades, including saline lagoons that have disappeared and areas turned into artificial salt flats. From the hydro–geo–morphological patterns found in these images, a generative adversarial network is trained to create speculative images of landscapes shaped by disappearance and transformation. In the installation, the images are visualized and turned into sound using the rhythms of a very low, slow, and unstable energy produced by three custom sodium-based cells. This low-energy flow controls how the AI model works, while evaporation slowly creates salt crystals. The artwork is built around a central paradox: a very small, local form of energy affects a technology linked to speed and high energy use, such as artificial intelligence. Through this tension, the work reflects on the contradictions of an energy transition based on mineral extraction and invites viewers to see salt not as a resource, but as an active material with its own rhythms and forms of expression.

Process

This artwork grew out of my interest in the extractive processes affecting high Andean salt flats and saline lagoons in the Lithium Triangle, and from questions that emerged while studying satellite images of these territories. Seeing lagoons disappear and landscapes radically transformed by lithium extraction led me to think of these bodies of water as living entities operating across other temporal and material scales, rather than as inert resources. I wanted to highlight their vitality, their capacity to change, resist, and affect their surroundings. At the same time, the work is driven by a central contradiction: using a technology that carries its own material and energetic footprint to reflect on an ecological crisis that this same technological infrastructure helps to produce. Exploring how this tension can be made visible and sensible became a key motivation for the piece.

Tools

The project combines satellite imagery, machine learning, electronic sensing, sound synthesis, and material processes. I collected more than one thousand satellite images of high Andean salt flats and saline lagoons and used their hydro–geo–morphological patterns to train a StyleGAN-based generative network. During the installation, images are generated in real time by navigating the latent space of the network, with their behavior driven by the sensing of energy produced by three custom sodium-based cells. Sound is also generated in real time through a granular synthesis patch developed in Pure Data, using audio samples recorded from the machinery involved in lithium extraction processes. Both the visual and sonic outputs are controlled by this very low, slow, and unstable form of energy. At the same time, the evaporation of the sodium-based cells gradually produces salt crystals, making the material transformation visible. By linking low-energy mineral processes with a high-energy technology such as artificial intelligence, the work intentionally creates a tension that is central to its meaning.

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Published in:
The AI Art Magazine, Number 3,
April 2026

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Salazar

Argentina