Isaías Herrera

In SymbioShell (2025), a bio-hybrid prosthesis stages a deliberate mistranslation. It converts the biochemical urges of Physarum polycephalum, hunger, avoidance, exploration, into the culturally loaded grammar of a human hand. Using computer vision and unsupervised AI, the organism’s slow spatial intelligence is mapped into a latent space and articulated in real time by a prosthetic limb. The work foregrounds the tension of anthropocentric semantics. The mold does not “mean” a gesture and does not greet or refuse. It searches, persists, reroutes. This is also the genesis of a language for a nonhuman entity, one that emerges only at the moment of interpretation. The gestures carry no intrinsic semantic weight. They are motor execution, timing, repetition, variation. Meaning appears within the subjectivity of the observer, who projects intention onto the mechanized otherness and, through prolonged attention, begins to read a speculative lexicon where none was originally present. Translation becomes a productive failure that exposes radical otherness while showing how legibility is manufactured by human perception.

In Desierto Recordado (2025), virtual reality reconstructs the Chihuahuan Desert as a living, walkable archive across four historical strata: the Mesozoic Era and the 16th, 19th, and 21st centuries. Built from archival material and historical records, the work translates research into embodied time travel, situating contemporary visitors inside past worlds. Its central conflict is ethical and experiential, and it is also a conflict of translation. VR can stage historical proximity, but it cannot suspend contemporary perception. The visitor enters each era carrying present-day sensibilities, and that gap becomes the work’s critical space. In every stratum, participants face ethical dilemmas shaped by forms of violence once treated as ordinary, while retaining agency in how they act and what they refuse. Across this temporal arc, the desert appears as a terrain shaped by multiple forms of violence: ecological, theological, colonial, industrial, and those linked to contemporary organized crime. The work attends to the resilience of those who live through these forces, tracing how endurance, adaptation, and collective memory persist across centuries and become a source of identity in northeastern Mexico.

Artificial Sonorous Ecosystem (2021/2023) turns real-time atmospheric variables into the life cycles and sonic behavior of digital organisms. Its central tension sits in the gap between measurement and experience. The system uses weather data as a changing set of conditions that modulate birth, growth, and extinction, and lets those shifts ripple through an evolving sonic ecology. What arrives in sound is not a portrait of the atmosphere, but a living model that responds to it, with behaviors that can drift, misalign, and mutate as conditions change. It invites sustained listening to recognize emergent patterns, species, and transformations that exceed the artist’s control.

In parallel, the Zoonoros laboratory (2020–present) is a transdisciplinary collective working across live performance, spoken word, reading practices, and sound art. Its improvisational works combine low-tech wearables and sensory prosthetics with hand-built instruments made from everyday objects, alongside digital devices coded with free software and interactive virtual environments. The collective works across sensory differences and shared cultural protocols. It moves between divergent perceptual worlds and the habits that shape “normal” attention, waiting, and compliance, including theatrical conventions that audiences rarely notice until they are pushed. Translation across sensory worlds remains incomplete by design, and that incompleteness becomes a method. The work acknowledges the gap between phenomenologies such as blindness and deafness and the perceptual habits of normative audiences, then composes with that distance through negotiated friction: sound into vibration, voice into texture, rhythm into shared cues. The excess created by imperfect equivalence becomes the artwork, foregrounding fragility, humor, and precariousness as aesthetic material.