Robotic Journeys through the Andes

In this episode, Hannah talks to Golden Nica winner Paula Gaetano Adi about Guanaquerx, the first robot in history to cross the Andes Mountains. More than a technical object, Guanaquerx is a poetic, political, and collective operation that was two years in the making, involved a transdisciplinary team and fused ancestral knowledge with contemporary robotic technologies. Its symbolic crossing of the Andes hints at a new kind of revolution, one that brings about alternative technological futures.

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Hannah Balber, Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Paula Gaetano Adi
https://www.paulagaetanoadi.com/ 

Transcript

Paula Gaetano Adi: We could have told this story in an essay; we could have told this story in a book. And it would be a beautiful story. But for me, the act of actually doing the crossing was always, from the beginning, a very important thing as an action. And as a way of demonstrating two things: First, that we could make that kind of robot, and then that we could actually put it in the mountains.  

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to Art Is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building. My name is Ana Carabelea, and together with my colleague Hannah Balber, we discuss with artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. This episode takes us to lofty heights. More precisely, to 4,500 meters above sea level. We talk about Guanaquerx, the first robot to cross the Andes mountains. Behind this adventurous and symbolic art performance is Argentine artist and researcher Paula Gaetano Adi. Together with a team of artists, engineers, local guides, and almost 60 mules and horses, she has reinterpreted a historic crossing of the Andes from 1817. The robot Guanaquerx looks like a guanaco, a llama-like Andean animal, and is much more than a technical object. The project can be seen as a poetic act of resistance: against technological imperialism, exploitation, and for a different vision of what robots can be. For this work, Paula Gaetano Adi has been awarded the Golden Nica in the Artificial Life & Intelligence category.  

Hannah Balber: Crossing a mountain range at 4500m altitude with the robot sounds like science fiction, but you actually did it. You created Guanaquerx, which you've called the first robots to cross the Andes Mountains. What drew you to this idea? What was the original spark that set this project in motion? 

Paula: Well, thank you for having me, Hannah. And thank you for allowing me to speak a little bit more about the project. Guanaquerx is a very long-term project in its own way, from its conception to the actual crossing in itself. That was a long journey that took seven days across the mountains. Obviously, before that there were two years of intense development. It was, as you said, science fiction becoming reality. But not science fiction in the Western sense, you know, in the way that we envision robots in traditional mainstream science fiction. That was one of the early seeds of the project, really trying to think about how we could bring ideas that are maybe coming from science fiction or the origins of robotics to reality, into a landscape, into a place that maybe is not associated with that kind of science fiction, the Andes, for example.  

Hannah: How would you describe what Guanaquerx is? 

Paula: So Guanaquerx is... There are many ways that we can describe it. In a more technical way, it's a guanaco, a robotic guanaco. A guanaco is a camelid native to South America. It's from the family of the llamas, the vicuñas. But this is a specific camelid that lives in Argentina, in the Argentina-Chile Cordillera. So, in that sense, it’s a quadruped, it’s a four-wheel, four-legged robot. But I like to think of it as something else. It's a robot in search of emancipation. A robot that is trying to inaugurate a different imagination or a technical imagination, as I would like to say. A robot that is trying to show that there might be many ways in which we can conceive robots. And so, starting from the idea of the guanaco, because it is our native animal, but really going beyond that, because it is a hybrid. It's certainly a hybrid that was made with local materials from the region that the robot actually crossed, but also with very sophisticated technology that was imported from Silicon Valley. 

Hannah: You connected this robotic journey to a historic event. In January 1817, the Revolutionary Army of the Andes, led by José de San Martín, crossed the Andes mountains with several thousand men, mules and horses. Why is that event so significant in South American history? 

Paula: Well, that's definitely the origin of this project, the crossing of the Andes of 1817 by José de San Martín and his army. It was certainly a seed as I was trying to find ideas of emancipation, revolution, and liberation, that are very much attached to the narrative of robots. From the early beginnings of thinking about robots, they're these enslaved creatures trying to liberate themselves from their masters who are oppressing them. So, I'm departing from that narrative and trying to find other emancipatory struggles, other stories of emancipation – and I went just back home. I'm originally from Argentina. I'm from San Juan, a town that saw the origins of this crossing of the Andes. Argentina was liberated from Spanish rule in 1816, but at that time, Chile and Peru were not liberated from Spain. And so, it was very important for San Martín, who is this kind of national hero, to help liberate Chile and Peru from the Spanish. He didn't have the support of the national government of Argentina at that time, and he did it with the people from the region, from the Cuyo provinces, which is where I'm from originally. So, there is a great sense of pride in my town that this happened with the support of the community. We did it, and we crossed the Andes in this very unexpected way in order to first liberate Chile and then Peru.  

Opening a space for a different kind of possibility was also what I was thinking. You know, if you think of a robot in the Andes, maybe it is not a crazy idea, if you think that we have huge international corporations, from China, from Canada, extracting gold, extracting all kinds of minerals in that particular area. You would think, okay, maybe a robot is possible there, working in some of these mines. But this robot was doing something different. And I think that's what I wanted it to challenge, the imagination in that sense. I think art obviously allows us to do that kind of action. We could have told this story in an essay; we could have told this story in a book. And it would be a beautiful story. But for me, the act of actually doing the crossing was always, from the beginning, a very important thing as an action. And as a way of demonstrating two things. First, that we could make that kind of robot, and then that we could actually put it in the mountains. 

Hannah: What did it mean to you to build this project in that region? So, what was your personal connection to this landscape, to this legacy? 

Paula: It has been a very moving project for me. I'm from the region originally. I grew up in San Juan. And you know this story is there. You wake up, and the Andes are there. And people every year have been going and doing this crossing as a way of commemoration. So, in January or February, which are the only months you can do it, because otherwise there is snow and it’s crazy cold, people will do it. And they do it like a pilgrimage. And so, I always hear about the crossing; it was not something foreign for me at all. I moved to the US where I teach and I work, but I spend the other half of the time in San Juan. I’m really going back and forth. But I was never able to make a project in my hometown.   

Hannah: What exactly does Guanaquerx look like, and why did you design it that way? 

Paula: The robot is taller than a human. It's pretty big. It's a real-size Guanaco. For me, it was also very important that we were talking about real scale, that we were able to get in front of this robot and really have the feeling that there was a being there that was an animal that could actually live in this landscape. We started with knowing that it would have four legs. And then I started working with this laboratory in the Silicon Valley who were developing this four-wheel-legged mobile device. And so, they came into the project very early on. I started doing a lot of studies with materials, and it became very evident to me that the other materials, along with the wires, the aluminium, and the plastic and all that, there was part of the robot. I wanted to have some local materials. And so, we worked with caña coligüe, it's a kind of cane, but it’s local. It's very sophisticated. It can hold a lot of weight. And that was also the material that the indigenous people in the region will use for creating their weapons, for example. The other parts of the Guanaco, which you would think are more ornamental, but were crucial to me, are the textiles, you know, and all the ornaments. So, not so much the Guanaco because they are much more like wild animals, but llamas get dressed, and they're from the same family. And so, they use saddle bags, you know. In the tradition, they put them in collars and little pompoms and things like that. I kind of wanted to bring that aspect as well. And for that, I worked with the textile women from the town where we worked all that year, and they created the textile from scratch. The same way that we worked with the robot. It was very important that everything was kind of created from scratch and that everyone can work from their own areas of expertise. So, there were many experts. I wasn't really actually making anything in that sense. I was kind of coordinating all these people and allowing them to talk to each other because it was kind of like the spirit of the project. There was this kind of hybrid, mestizo or cheque animal that brought together all these knowledges. And that’s what constituted Guanaquerx. And that is the most emancipatory thing, it’s what makes it an emancipatory technology, if you want to think about it. 

Ana: Paula Gaetano Adi is a Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design in the US and works as an interdisciplinary artist and scholar at the intersection of robotics, crafts, video, and performance. In her practice, she explores technology, artificial life, and the question of how colonial mindsets and power structures continue to persist today—and how they can be countered. In her work, machines become sites of poetic resistance against colonial and capitalist patterns. The animal-like robot Guanaquerx also carries symbolic elements: for example, it can beat a traditional drum from the Andes region with its tail and wave its own revolutionary flag. On the chest of the mechanical guanaco is a QR code that leads to an Emancipation Declaration. It states that a robot may not injure the Earth and all earth-beings and must also prevent humans from doing so. 

Hannah: We see in reality a lot of instances where robots or machines are in fact used to exploit or to harm earth-beings. And you see Guanaquerx as a robot of liberation, in contrast to the usual associations of AI with control and exploitation. What does it mean for you in practice to build technology for emancipation? And why is it so important for you? 

Paula: It's not my intention to just dismiss what is really happening at all. It's actually a way of saying: it could be done other ways. I'm extremely worried by how robots as a tool are being utilised, and they're definitely killing humans, and they're definitely doing harm. But I think the role of art becomes really important in using the same tools to demonstrate that another way is maybe possible. That we could use those tools, but not in the way that they're intended. And I'm not dismissing or disregarding the histories from which these technologies were born. Especially now, it’s incredibly important that we're talking about this and how these tools are being utilised. There's something very basic in this project that it really talks about the way that we make and use technology in the ways that technologies are things that we create as humans, and technologies design us back, right? There is a sense of relationality that happens: if we create weapons, they are going to design us as killers. And so, it's trying to think in which way we can create technologies that could design us differently, how we could subvert the origins or draw from those origins and think differently. And I don't think this is going to solve necessarily anything. This is not a project that asks to solve a problem. And in that sense, maybe it's probably useless. But I think it does that work of presenting us with a different scenario and allowing people to see something with a little bit more hope. But not because I don't think there's any hope in this world right now. Specifically now, we are talking in very troubled times of war, of genocide. How do we see a future in all this? How do we see a future? It is almost impossible. And I start from that moment of saying, okay, I don’t see a future. And if there is a future, it’s technological. You know, the future is always technological. So, how can we think of a future that involves technology but in a different way? We're fabulating here in the most traditional sense of science fiction. But we're putting it into action. 

Hannah: The journey itself sounds incredible. Seven days and nights across the Andes with artists, engineers, locals and nearly 60 animals. What was that like day by day? 

Paula: Exhausting, very exhausting. So, it was seven days on the horses, pretty intense. We had very long journeys on the mules. From dawn to dusk, we were on the move: testing the robot, putting it to work, having it fail, running it again, putting it on a mule when we were crossing rivers. So, it was like, as I say, seven days of intense labour in which if we were not riding the horses, we were carrying the robot, tuning the robot. That was pretty much every day. Thirty people did the actual crossing. Fifteen were these baqueanos, they are muleteers, but much more expert than that, they know the territory and everything and they're local and then the other 15 were the engineers, the artisans, myself, photographer, videographer, a doctor that came with us. Luckily, we had no major issues at all. That was, I think, for me, the most stressful part, having to be responsible for all these people. 

Hannah: What did you encounter along the way? What did the landscape look and feel like? 

Paula: It was magical in the sense that it never rained or snowed. We couldn't believe that we didn't have a drop of water in all seven days. So, the Andes, at that moment when you are there, they're very sublime, it's indescribable. There are really no words, and everyone that has done one of these journeys you realize how words or images - I always feel like not even the videos, and we brought a drone to film and all of that - nothing makes you feel what it is like. The landscape changed radically every few hours, you know, from rocks to small rocks to wide landscape to all kinds of landscape, happened there. So, about half of the way is when you go up. So, you go on a very, very steep precipice. There are two very high points. And those we did it on the second day and on the fifth day. Those were the most scary ones. You know, someone had a panic attack. Some people couldn't do it on the mules because there are actually very, very steep precipices, and they're sure, but they're quite tense. And those are the ones that, of course, the robot did it on the mule. One of the leading engineers looked at me, and he was like, there's no way a robot can do this. And I laughed at him, and I was like, I was not asking you to have a robot that would do this. That's why we have the mules. I don't think there is a single robot in the world that can do that. But the whole point is that we can do it, if we do it collectively, that our robot could do it because he has a mule that was there to assist him. And it was an entire collective of all interspecies kind of collective collaboration. And that to me was the magic part.  And I think that's the moment of a realisation for the engineers in that sense. I'm talking about the engineers because they never thought that was real what I was saying. When I presented the idea, they're like: Paula, I don't think there's the technology. I was like: What are you talking about? We can do it with mules. …  And so that was very interesting. At night, we will be charging batteries. We brought some equipment to charge batteries and all that. At night, it was mostly fixing what we broke during the day and then resume everything the following morning… and those were kind of the magical moments I would say, that it really became our mission to help this robot do this journey. 

Hannah: There's something also deeply poetic about the image of a robotic guanaco crossing the Andes. Through this project, Guanaquerx invites us to rethink our technological futures. What kind of future does a dream of? 

Paula: Well, a future of collective collaboration, a collective future, and definitely a future of freedom. And I think that's the most basic thing that the project is saying: freedom for all kinds of beings. A future that is not negating technology, a future that really embraces technology…  but a future in which we are more responsible in the way that we make and we operate those technologies. Because those go hand in hand, it's not just how we operate technologies, but it is in the ways that we make technology and with which goals.  

Hannah: And finally, if there's one thing you hope people take away from one. Okay, what would that be? 

Paula: That we are sometimes too caught up with our imagination, that our imagination is broken at some point. The discourse, the ways in which we are thinking about robots and machines are profoundly unimaginative. You know, there is a huge failure of imagination in the ways we think about robots. And maybe with this project, if that opens up a window from which we can start seeing machines differently. If someone can come to the show or see the video, and think that we were able to do a project like this one, and then maybe there might be other ways of doing other things that are even more important than this one. 

Hannah: Thank you very much for the conversation. 

Paula: Thank you. Thank you very much. 

Ana: That’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and hope you enjoyed it! Today’s episode was brought to you by Radio Ö1 and Ars Electronica. Join us next month for a new episode, and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.