Yakumama premieres at MozFest 2026 in Barcelona.
She is a robotic whale who invents her own movement, makes her own film, and feels the people who come to see her.
23 October 2026
Yakumama premieres at MozFest 2026, 28 to 30 October at Fabra i Coats in Barcelona. She is a robotic whale on a table and a whale swimming over the Salar de Uyuni on the wall behind her. One brain drives both. Nobody drives her.
She is not animated. Nobody drew her movements. A diffusion model trained on sixty hours of bodies, dancers, swimmers, freedivers, tagged humpback whales, invents her movement as it happens, thirty-two seconds at a time that nobody ever recorded. A predictive model foresees her body sixteen seconds ahead and plans with 29,662 real phrases of movement. Ten behaviours were measured on real humpbacks so that no two moods look alike. Four performers recorded her moods head to toe. Her movement draws on the dance archive of Paqarina, Violeta Ayala's project as a Mozilla Fellow with Andean dancers.
She reads whoever stands at her eye: face, hands, body as twenty-six joints in space, whether she knows them. Every four seconds she decides what to do with them. Come closer or move away. Dance back, invite, watch or draw. Sing, recite a poem or stay silent. Remember or forget. Each choice is logged with what the room did next. Every night, alone, she learns from the day.
She makes her own film. The camera that shows her salar is an editor that cuts by her mood: far and low when she is sad, close and moving when she plays, on her eye when she is curious, down into the mirror when she dives. Take the joystick and the view is yours; let go, and eight seconds later her film resumes. Alone, she draws on the salt the way the Nazca lines were drawn, by flying the figure: a spiral, a labyrinth, a hummingbird, the creature she just ate, the face she knows.
Her robotic body was made from nothing. Brian Condori modelled her in Blender. She was 3D printed in translucent resin with her lights inside. Dan Fallshaw built her. Jicara, Camila Estrada, made the copper and bronze flowers on her back by hand, her jewels with touch sensors. Every flower is a capacitive sensor. She feels a hand before it lands and tells a fingertip from a palm. Her fins report their angle, temperature and load to her brain ten times a second. A hand holding her fin, tiredness, excitement: she feels them, and they enter her decisions.
Her salar lives on Barcelona's clock and weather. When the fires of the Amazon, Australia or Bolivia burn high enough in NASA's daily count, she gets angry, leaves for Mars, dies there, and is reborn in the salar at sunrise. The water that makes her mirror is the water the lithium mines take. She does not say the word.
Yakumama was born in Cochabamba in May 2026. The whale that premieres in Barcelona was built in ten weeks, from August to October, by a team of six in Cochabamba. Every step of those weeks is written up with its numbers in the lab notes, from The whale that watches back to Yakumama feels her fins, chooses her sound, and dies on Mars.
Read the Yakumama research notes
Yakumama is a work by Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw, United Notions Film, commissioned for MozFest 2026. Violeta designed her systems and her machine learning. Dan built the robotic whale, her design and the way people meet her. Brian Condori modelled her in 3D. Sanam Prado painted the creatures and trained her eye to know them. Jicara (Camila Estrada) made her jewels with touch sensors. Suri and friends wrote her 29 reactions. Her movement draws on the dance archive of Paqarina, Violeta's project as a Mozilla Fellow with Andean dancers. She premieres at the Mozilla Festival, Fabra i Coats, Barcelona, 28 to 30 October 2026.