Karen Palacio is an Argentinian digital artist. In her live performances, she uses her own program code and artificial intelligence to explore new worlds of sound and visuals.
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00:00The MUTEC Festival in Buenos Aires.
00:04Here, Karen Palacio performs side-by-side with DJ Valentina Espirito.
00:09But this is no ordinary DJ set.
00:12The Electronic Music and Digital Arts Festival tries to push the boundaries and blur the lines between the two fields.
00:19Here, Palacio uses AI to program live visuals to complement the DJ set.
00:25When we deal with artificial intelligence, in art too, we experience things that are historically new for the human species.
00:38The computer scientist uses different AI models for her audiovisual work.
00:45She generates her music with the help of machine learning algorithms.
00:50When I make art, I like to think of it as a tree that connects everything I do.
00:58At the roots of that tree is a feminist vision of technology that revisits the history of women in technology, and in computer science in particular.
01:09Then there is the interest in national technological sovereignty.
01:16For her work, Palacio needs access to cutting-edge computer technology,
01:20which wouldn't be possible here if it weren't for Argentina's public universities and their high-performance IT network.
01:32Because of the volume of data that I process, and the technologies I use,
01:38my projects require scientific computing power from abroad, the kind I just don't have access to,
01:45be it because services are billed in dollars, or because the necessary hardware doesn't get shipped out here or anywhere locally.
01:57The digital divide between the global North and South is particularly noticeable in artificial intelligence applications.
02:04Artists like Karen Palacio want to bridge this divide, but that's not the only barrier in tech that she has to overcome.
02:15There is the digital divide and the gender divide.
02:19I had to live through several bad situations of exclusion and discrimination in a male-dominated environment.
02:28And yet, I persevered. I kept going. I fought for this, trusting and believing that I could show people that it really is possible.