ORIGINAL PRODUCTION
¡HARKEN!
¡Harken! is a transfiguration of the flawed and fragmented pieces of history written about Juan Rodriguez, a mixed-race Atlantic Creole who arrived in 1613 from Santo Domingo as a fur trader for the Dutch. In ¡Harken! Juan Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life. The AI responds with hallucinations and distortions based on secondhand accounts written by colonizers and accepted as “history.” Using generative AI, audience prompts, face-swapping, and image generation, ¡Harken! Audiences help Rodriguez re-write his story by ‘feeding’ the AI new information, generating new images and landscapes.
Special thanks and extra development support from Materials for the Arts, Sterling Swann, Dan Dobson, and The Maiden and The Wolf.
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First commissioned by Governors Island Arts for INTERVENTIONS in 2023.
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NYTW Adelphi Residency development.
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JACK Arts performance in February 2025.
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An immersive reimagining of the fragmented history of Juan Rodriguez, New York’s first immigrant, where his ghost enlists ChatGPT, audience prompts, and generative AI to rewrite his colonizer-distorted story in real time. 50 minute runtime.
With 2 Salons: As part of the salon series Collaboration as Resistance, join Modesto Flako Jimenez, Ker Chen, and Kay Matschullat for a salon style conversation among collaborators and the audience to explore all the layers of collaboration nestled in ¡Harken!, between Juan and the Dutch, Juan and historians, Flako and Juan, Flako, Juan, and AI. Are we excavating a lost truth, returning to a myth or finding a new horizon with the added tool of “intelligent” technology?
This production was made possible by Onassis ONX and Onassis Foundation and Oye Group.
