“With CPH:DOX coming to a close, and following an exciting awards ceremony where two works from CPH:LAB were recognized for their excellence, we’re thrilled to share the first of our encounters in Copenhagen with immersive artists.
Violeta Ayala is an award-winning filmmaker, artist, and technologist, as well as the first Quechua member of the Oscars. We’ve been following her work over the years, from Prison X, her first immersive piece presented at Sundance in 2021, to her more recent project, Las Awichas, an exhibition that visually honors her female ancestors through AI-generated portraits.
In Copenhagen, we had the opportunity to discover Violeta’s latest project, Huk, The Jaguaress: “An ancient jaguaress deity from the Amazon, reborn through artificial intelligence, calls on humanity to confront their role in her rainforest’s destruction and the future of our shared world“
Sitting in front of the beautiful installation, under the watchful gaze of this robotic jaguaress, Violeta shared with us the story behind this creature, as well as the important political and humanitarian goals that will accompany her journey.
The identity of the artist
VIOLETA AYALA – I think of myself as a film futurist. In a way, I see myself as someone who is designing and building the architecture of the cinema of the future. I don’t believe that large language models can make films – they can write scripts, sure, but they can’t make films. But, I believe, robotic cameras, perception systems, and different types of AI together can. So, in that sense, I’m creating the system, the structure, of what filmmaking will become.
One of the biggest turning points for me came in 2019, when I began to understand not only how to design a system, but also how to work with Python as a language.
The moment I realized the creative potential of different programming languages and how I could use them artistically, everything changed. I was 42 at the time. It felt like discovering film all over again, twenty years after I first approached it. Only this time, I was learning a new language that could blend into a new genre. And I truly believe that Huk, the Jaguaress, represents the birth of a new genre.
Huk the Jaguaress: a system born from fire
V. A. – Huk, the Jaguaress was born out of the fires that devastated the Bolivian Amazon in 2019. At the time, I was breastfeeding my daughter Suri and wrote a children’s screenplay about a jaguar mother nursing her two cubs – a story shaped by grief, urgency, and the need to resist. That script became integral to shape Huk’s voice.
Though I’m Andean and the jaguar is not part of my direct cultural heritage – the condor is – I’ve always felt a visceral connection to big cats. I dreamt of jaguars as a child, obsessed over them. That year, when I saw the fires and no one taking action, I painted myself like a jaguar, put on a mask, and joined other artists – including Rilda Paco, whom I collaborated with in Prison X – to protest in La Plaza.
What started as four of us quickly grew into thousands, and eventually millions. It was beautiful, until the right wing hijacked the movement. We achieved a political victory, forcing the government to reverse a law that would’ve allowed deforestation, but the aftermath left me feeling lost. I realized I didn’t yet know how to build systems for change.
So I trained myself in code, in AI, in system design. Huk is the result of that process: an AI being with memory, with instincts, with story. She is made of multiple AI models working together, not simultaneously, but in a system that allows her to shift across life stages, from youth to old age. She sees through a small robotic camera, performs real-time motion capture, and reacts selectively to up to 20 people, choosing who to engage with based on how she perceives them. What she says in the moment is unique, never repeated; small films generated in real time. Sometimes she tells you about her daughter Nina, drawn from the screenplay I gave her. She also uses projection mapping to animate smaller jaguar figures in the space.
She is not a simulation or chatbot, though. Huk’s a living digital entity, built to remember, to decide, to feel. At the exhibition, everything happens live: her gaze, her storytelling, her choices. Those who truly understand what they’re experiencing are captivated. They come back again and again, just to see how she evolves. But most people don’t really grasp what Huk is. They don’t realize they’re interacting with AI, but just see the projection mapping: they take selfies with the visuals, but they don’t realize that what’s happening is real-time interaction with an AI being.
The same happened in a similar way in my previous exhibition, Las Awichas (a/n we talked about this beautiful exhibition here!): most people didn’t understand the images were generated by AI. Even when I wrote “This was made with AI,” they still thought they were just photographs. No one debated it. No one questioned it. They simply loved the grandmothers, they saw them as their own.
It was too early, I suppose, for people to understand what AI could mean in storytelling. Public television talked about it. I gave interviews. But still, they didn’t see it.
And yet, I knew even then that I didn’t want my work to remain flat. I didn’t want those portraits to just hang on a wall. I wanted them to fly. I wanted animals, robotic creatures, to emerge from their hearts. I wanted them to move, to breathe, to speak. Flat images couldn’t hold what I needed to express. That’s why I said it back then, and I still say it now: I want to transform how we experience stories.
This is exactly what Huk, the Jaguaress, embodies. She’s not a static image, not a frozen narrative. She sees. She responds. She remembers. She evolves. She is a posthuman feminist warrior, rooted in Indigenous cosmology and coded with purpose, who does not live in a flat world. She doesn’t just tell a story: she becomes it, and makes the audience part of it.
Flat cinema has beginnings, middles, and ends. But Huk is part of a new form, one that breaks those colonial structures and is alive. For me, this is decolonization: find my own ways to tell the story, and not just use what people give me to create them.
Technology you can feel, but not see
V. A. – I don’t even want to use the term VR anymore. There’s so much technology behind this work, and yet you don’t really feel it. That’s intentional.
Huk operates through a robotic camera similar to the ones you’d find at the Miraikan Museum in Japan. She sees through robotic eyes, powered by two computers running thousands of lines of code. She also has three brains. But my role is to make all of that invisible, because this isn’t about technology. It’s about the experience. It’s about how we can make people, the users, feel like they’re part of the story. Everything she says can be recorded and turned into narrative. Even without directly seeing the user, the user becomes part of the story: they’re helping to create it, to shape it.
It’s not perfect yet; we only started in August. For the Paris presentation (a/n at NewImages), I want each station to feel entirely different. I want a richer stage design for every one of them, each with unique visual and audio elements. Sounds coming from the plants, the environment. I want the jaguar to be able to paint people as she sees them.
This is really just the beginning of something much bigger, a system that will continue to grow and evolve. And what’s truly fascinating is that it all happens in real time. Huk creates live. Of course, she stores films, and if she doesn’t generate new ones, she replays the old. But every day she crafts new strands of film that get played back in the following days.
It’s an entire living system. She’s not a video – which is what plays behind her. She’s a robot, like the small bird. They are fully realized 3D characters.
Ethics, access, and the cost of vision
V. A. – Right now, Huk doesn’t store memory. That’s intentional. We’re still testing, and I want to make sure we’re acting ethically. When the robotic camera captures someone, it analyzes their image (“black t-shirt, brown pants, glasses”) but it’s only the description that goes to Open AI, DeepSeek or Claude. It doesn’t send the photo, which is immediately deleted. Only that short description remains, which is enough for Huk to respond. That’s how we ensure safety and privacy.
And what’s amazing is that this technology isn’t expensive. The camera we use cost just $300 and it’s better for motion capture than my $3,000 suit. The cheapest prototype I started with was $128. These are important numbers, because access matters. We have to democratize this technology if we want others to build, to dream, to protest through AI!
A team effort
V. A. – The core team behind Huk, the Jaguaress was small: just me, Yasmeen Hitti, our Creative AI Systems Engineer, Daniel Fallshaw, and Milton Riaño, both our Interactive Media Developers and Rohan Banerjee, an AI researcher. We developed Huk at Mila, the largest AI research center in the world, led by Yoshua Bengio, one of the godfathers of AI. It happened during a 12-week Art and AI residency.
Even though our team wasn’t big, I had the chance to collaborate with incredible minds. I worked closely with Eilif Benjamin Muller, a leading neuroscientist there. He taught me how to design memory and interaction systems. I’m on the autism spectrum myself, so I can focus deeply, and he picked up on how I process things right away. We connected on another level. He gave me wings! He told me, half-joking, “People take five years to do a PhD here. You just did three PhDs in 12 weeks.”
Yasmeen joined us soon after. We were both already exploring feminist issues and the concept of feminist AI. She integrated the code we were building, and from there, the project kept evolving. While I handle the code, she works on integrating all the systems, plus she made the soundtrack and is tracking the data for further scientific research.
Yasmeen’s thesis was about plant data – creating an ECG-like reading for plants, similar to what we use for humans. That’s actually the next step for Huk: embedding this plant sensing technology into the environment around her. So we can begin to explore what it means to build an AI that isn’t just human-centered, but more-than-human.
We are all political beings
V. A. – For me, art has always been a political act. I create work to change realities. I deeply believe we’re all political beings. Doing nothing is also a political choice.
With La Lucha, the impact was tangible. People with disabilities in Bolivia now receive a pension, which is something that became possible thanks to the work Dan Fallshaw and I did on this documentary. We pressured the government until they had no choice but to act.
Prison X (a/n read XRMust’s interview on Prison X here) was different. It also sparked something more symbolic. Together with Rilda, María, and the rest of our team, we laid the foundation for what I now call the Neo-Andean Metaverse. It opened a door. And now, across Latin America, I see authors and creators from Peru, Ecuador, and beyond stepping into that space, reimagining the Andean worldview through digital storytelling. This is what I love: that the work grows through shared knowledge, shared effort. That other artists from our lands are stepping in not just as contributors, but as co-authors of a future we want to design ourselves.
Huk the Jaguaress is the next chapter in that evolution. With her, I want to imagine how we might build our own AIs, crafted from within our contexts, shaped by our values. And I want to push it further: to confront the fires in the Amazon, to hold institutions accountable. I believe Huk could become the first AI in the world to take legal action in the name of nature, bringing Bolivia’s SERNAP, the agency meant to protect Mother Earth but that is not doing it, to court. Because in Bolivia, Pachamama, Mother Earth, has legal rights. So, after Copenhagen and Paris with NewImages, I will go back to Bolivia to work with scientists and activists to keep building her intelligence, to keep fine tuning the AIs so she has all the data inside to be able to do and be all this.
AI against corruption
V. A. – The political systems we live under – supposed democracies – are often just illusions. Voting doesn’t guarantee representation. Real power is sustained through corruption.
But what if AI could change that? AI has the capacity to detect patterns at scales we can’t comprehend. If decentralized properly, it could audit every public contract, every budget, and flag anything suspicious. Not a single cent would go missing.
That’s why politicians don’t want AI used that way. Corruption is what gives them power. But if we removed corruption, politics would no longer be about control. It could become about real representation, about serving people. We could begin again.
Reclaiming the future
V. A. – We are living a technological revolution. That’s not a metaphor, it’s a reality. And every time a major shift in media happens, people panic. When writing began, we feared the end of memory. When cinema appeared, we ran from the trains on the screen. When Photoshop was invented, we thought truth itself would vanish. And now, with AI, the fear has returned.
But fear won’t help us. What matters is what we choose to do with the technology. It can be used to dominate and enslave, or it can be used to free, protect, and empower. If we understand it, if we train ourselves, we can make it ours. If we don’t, we risk being controlled in ways we’ve never experienced before.
Who writes the rules?
V. A. – What makes Huk say what she says? Why can she speak about Palestine or Mother Earth with such clarity? Because I changed her system instructions. That’s the part of an AI most people never see, the invisible voice behind the voice. I’m using OpenAI, DeepSeek, Claude, ElevenLabs, and others. Together with Daniel and Yasmeen, we crafted system instructions that define how Huk thinks, feels, speaks.
Why doesn’t ChatGPT do the same? Because its system instructions are locked away. And that’s the real problem: these foundational rules should be public! Everyone should know who the AI is meant to speak to, what it’s trained to say, what values it’s encoded with.
If system instructions remain secret, then we’re not talking to intelligence, we’re talking to propaganda. Transparency is the only way to reclaim AI as a tool for the people.
A different perspective
V. A. – I’ve never fit into traditional boxes, and I think that’s become my greatest strength. I didn’t go to film school, yet my first film premiered at Toronto. I learned to code on my own, because I had to, because no one was going to hand me the tools.
I think differently, I process the world in nonlinear ways, and that’s exactly what allows me to see connections others miss and deeply concentrate on things. Hacking, filmmaking, coding, they are all languages I’ve taught myself to speak. And through them, I build systems that don’t just tell stories but reshape how stories are told. I’ve often felt out of place in society, but now I see that my difference allows me to have a kind of clarity. I can hyper-focus, dive deep, and imagine futures others haven’t dared to build yet. And that’s what my work is about.
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