Juan Cortés is a Colombian audiovisual artist currently represented by HyphenHub whose current work explores plant politics, food sovereignty, and the impact of agro-industrial technologies in Latin America. He is interested in the connections between art, science, technology and education and as a self-trained programmer, he uses artificial intelligence and datasets to create interactive installations.
In 2023 his studio was awarded the Prix Ars Golden Nica in the category of Digital Music and Sound Art with a subversive sound installation interrogating the problematic expansion of agro-industrial technologies in Latin America. Previous awards and nominations also include the Luma prize 2023, the prestigious PRAC Prize by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia and in 2016 he received an Honorary Mention in the CERNCollide International Prize, which is awarded as part of CERN’s art and science programme, Art at CERN. Cortes’s works have been exhibited across the world in spaces including MoMA, the Bilbao Exhibition Centre, and Creative Tech Week in New York, his work Supralinar, produced by HyphenHub is currently on tour in the US.
A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains is a sound installation that explores the expansion of the current technical agro-industrial colonization in Latin America, in general, and in Colombia, in particular. The work is composed of three parts: A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains uses subterranean and surface recordings of the soil and recordings of electrical conductivity in the soy and amaranth plants to present a sonic testimony of the changing sounds of the Andean landscape after the arrival of GM monoculture soy expansion in the last decade. For some time now, soy monocultures have been threatened by the amaranth plant. Such is the hypnotic force that soy has on amaranth that industrialists are devoting a large part of their capital to developing technology to uncouple and neutralize the spell between the two species.
