Isaías Herrera

Working with robotics, generative systems, algorithmic composition, and extended reality, Herrera builds devices that do not aim to represent a phenomenon transparently, but to make it experientially accessible through situated translations. In this framework, technology operates as an instrument of listening and as an infrastructure for relation: it opens a channel between systems that do not share a common language and renders perceptible the shifts that occur when something changes medium—from data to sound, from biological state to gesture, from archive to a walkable territory.

In SymbioShell (2025), a robotic prosthetic mediates a relationship with Physarum polycephalum through a vision system and artificial intelligence that registers the organism’s activity and articulates it as a gestural vocabulary. The work displaces authorship toward an assemblage in which organism, model, and prosthesis co-determine form, and in which legibility emerges through prolonged observation, recurrence, and variation. In Desierto Recordado (2025), virtual reality functions as a historical transducer: it converts temporalities and normalized forms of violence into situated experience, allowing visitors to traverse a living archive and make decisions that trigger consequences—revealing what is gained and lost within each cultural regime.

Artificial Sonorous Ecosystem (2021/2023) operates as an ecology of artificial life in which digital organisms are born, mature, and die. Their sonic behaviors respond to real-time atmospheric variables—temperature, humidity, wind, air quality, and celestial cycles—so the system mutates beyond the artist’s control and demands attentive listening to distinguish patterns, species, and transformations. In parallel, the Zoonoros laboratory (2020–) investigates conflicts of translation between divergent perception and normative performance formats through interfaces and collaborative practices in which accessibility is not an add-on, but a formal component that reorganizes how experience is heard, read, and shared.

Across these projects, Herrera designs conditions for distributed agency—among organisms, algorithms, visitors, and collectives. Meaning is not delivered as a message; it is generated over the course of the encounter, as translation reveals its limits and, at the same time, produces new forms of relation between the living, the technical, and the social.