Film Futurism

Violeta Ayala is a Mozilla Fellow

Our co-founder joins the 2026-2027 cohort of Mozilla Foundation Fellows. Mozilla describes the cohort as builders creating alternatives to dominant technology systems.

Violeta was the first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her work keeps expanding what Indigenous storytelling can be: film, VR, robotics, and now AI infrastructure built from her city, Cochabamba.

Las Awichas at the Guangdong Museum of Art

Las Awichas, a mixed-reality installation by Violeta Ayala, opens at the Guangdong Museum of Art as part of SURREALITY, an art and technology exhibition developed by the Center for Metaverse and Computational Creativity (MC²) at HKUST (Guangzhou), led by Professor Pan Hui.

The installation works at architectural scale. It brings together body, space and ancestral memory, and creates a dialogue between AI-generated Andean grandmothers and visitors.

What started as digital portraits of female ancestors, rooted in Ayala's grandmother Herminia Soto Montaño, grew into robotic animals inspired by the Nazca lines. The work operates through ch'ixi logic (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui): different ways of knowing held in productive tension.

On view from 15 February to 30 March.

“AI-collaborative art is giving me a possibility to imagine my culture in a different light. As a Quechua creator and filmmaker whose civilization was destroyed by colonizers, I really cherished the opportunity to imagine my ancestors.”

Violeta Ayala, 2020

Our own streaming release

On New Year's Eve we launched our own streaming release inside The Bolivian Case website. A TV series dropped in Norway and the story we documented was circulating in a new shape, missing key elements. The full story needs to be told with context, from the people who still live it.

We built it ourselves: platform, player, hosting, payments and delivery pipeline. Everything is made in-house, so the film lives on its own terms.

sala.video followed. It is a curated platform releasing 12 films a year, starting with the United Notions Film catalogue. Other filmmakers can host films on their own sites with our tech and keep control of audience, pricing, territories and release strategy.

Watch The Bolivian Casesala.video

Todo Nace Desde Lo Pequeño

Everything Starts Small. The performance was fleeting and amazing.

It began as a way of VJ-ing for the afterparty, only I was doing it live, in real time, ch'ixi all the way. Dan was on the camera, sending me streams through IoT, and I was transforming everything, fully concentrated.

By the time the performance began, the space was overflowing. From past to future, we shaped a vision of Neo-Andean Futurism. The interfaces were ours, the AI model was local, and our community centre, El mARTadero, became our nest, re-imagined as the future. Music composed by Yasmeen Hitti with Dan's remix. Breakdancers, impossibly talented.

From the south of the world, we are shaping our own cinema, our own experiences, our own narratives. Those who control the systems of distribution control the future, but we have community, and we hold it in our hands.

Our instrument

• Visual generation: StreamDiffusion, dynamic prompts, ControlNet
• Temporal stability: seed noise, V2V cache, feature injection
• Embodied input: body, breakdance, camera and sensor data
• Performative output: TouchDesigner, projection, sound sync

Violeta Ayala