Isaías Herrera

Biography

Isaías de Jesús Herrera Ibarra (Monterrey, Nuevo León, 1989) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher. His practice centers on the construction of architectures of mediation. Situated at the intersection of systems engineering and artistic research, he develops devices that articulate digital and electronic systems to translate intangible realities into sensory experiences. His work investigates phenomena that, due to their biological scale, psychic nature, or historical erasure, remain hidden from standard human perception.

In his work, technology functions not as a tool for optimization, but for listening and translation. In speculative robotics projects like SymbioShell, Herrera challenges anthropocentrism by giving body and gesture to the agency of a unicellular organism, exposing the communicative frictions between biological and artificial logic. Similarly, in Desierto Recordado, he employs extended reality to counteract narratives of emptiness in northeastern Mexico, transforming the history of the desert into a living, habitable archive where extractivist violence and the resistance of the landscape confront one another.

Informed by research into cognitive neuroscience, bio-hybrid systems, and the semiotics of interaction, his methodology bridges the technical and the poetic, approaching circuits and code as connective tissue between distinct realities. Whether generating parallel digital worlds that operate alongside our own or constantly probing the limits of precarity and disability within the Zoonoros laboratory, Herrera configures scenarios where the hierarchy of the senses is reorganized. Through robotics, extended reality, and generative systems, his work seeks to materialize the invisible forces that surround us, allowing for the emergence of new politics of sensibility and interspecies coexistence.