Modesto Flako Jimenez: ¡Harken!

¡Harken! is a transfiguration of the flawed and fragmented pieces of his­to­ry written about Juan Rodriguez – a mixed-race Atlantic Creole who arrived in 1613 from Santo Domingo as a fur trader for the Dutch. In ¡Harken!, Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life. The AI responds with hallucinations; and distortions based on secondhand accounts written by colonizers and accepted as “history.” Using generative AI, audience prompts, face-swapping, and image generation, ¡Harken! Audiences help Rodriguez re-write his story by ‘feeding’ the AI new information generating new images and landscapes. Join creators and theater makers Flako Jimenez and Victor Morales for showings and conversation as they navigate the storytelling of Rodriquez amidst the layers of versions of the story while applying the new tools of technology. Does that lead to the excavation of a lost truth or a return to a myth?