HOW TO
Emancipate a Robot
Paula Gaetano Adi
Guanaquerx robot ascending the Espinacito mountain pass, the highest point of the journey, at 4,536 meters above sea level. Photograph by Pavel Romaniko.
Guanaquerx pre-expedition ceremony/performance with local dancers. Barreal Blanco, Argentina. Photograph by Pavel Romaniko.
The machine is only a means; the end is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces by means of a first act of enslavement: the machine is a slave whose purpose is to make other slaves. Such a dominating and enslaving inspiration can coincide with the quest for man’s freedom. But it is difficult to free oneself by transferring slavery onto other beings, men, animals, or machines; to reign over a people of machines that enslave the entire world is still to reign, and every reign presupposes the acceptance of the schemas of enslavement.
– Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
– Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
I
Like pilgrims who embark on a sacred journey to fulfill a vow or seek divine intervention, a crowd of thirty men and women and fifty-eight mules and horses ascends the Andes Mountains. With Mount Aconcagua surveilling the scene, they climb steep precipices, crossing rivers and summiting peaks. Their mission: liberate a robot. The story—their pilgrimage—begins with the premise that liberation is always already an existing possibility that remains unfinished and unmet, yet sustained by images and practices that connect us to each other and to the planet.
Over seven days and nights in January 2024, they retraced the route used by the African slaves, the Mestizos, and the local Indigenous people who, in 1817, crossed these mountains in search of freedom from Spanish occupation. Before the arrival of the colonizers, this route was part of Qhapaq Ñan, the Andean road at the southernmost point of Tawantinsuyu.¹ This was also the land of the Yastay, the mythological guanaco protector of the Andes and tutelary God of the animals, son of the Pachamama and brother of the wind. Today, these mountains are occupied by international mining corporations conducting intensive extractive operations that contaminate water systems, destroy the landscape, and threaten traditional lifeways and ecosystems in the Andes.
Expedition crew composed of local baqueanos (gauchos), robotic engineers, artisans, scholars, and videographers. Photograph by Pavel Romaniko.
Guanaquerx is carried by Don Carrozo, one of the mules that assisted the robot’s crossing of the Andes. Photograph by Pavel Romaniko.
Map showing the routes the Andes Liberation Army, led by General José de San Martín, used in 1817 as they crossed the Andes. The route in purple was used in the 2024 Guanquerx expedition. Original map is from an unknown source and author, ca. 1820.
II
Beholding the epic of the pilgrimage and attesting to the incommensurability of the Andes is Guanaquerx, a four-foot-tall robot embodying imaginations outside of the narratives of Western cosmotechnics. Guanaquerx is not just the product of a tech-innovation project but an epistemological experiment born to confront robotics’ obsession with control, exploitation, extraction, and extermination. Built from colihue cane and dressed with an Andean alforja, or saddlebag, this robot—a pluriversal artificial agent—plays a caja chayera drum with their mechanical tail and waves the flag of the liberation army they were tasked to command.²
Guanaquerx’s liberation struggle is guided by the political work of poetry, incalculable and incomputable, accepting of contradictions and caught between goal-oriented behaviors, divergent algorithms, and material ambiguities. Their emancipatory journey across these mountains proves that liberation against domination cannot unfold from instrumental rationality and the logic of rule-based programming. They have been programmed to fail, to break down, and to rise again from the mountains, from the land, among all Earth’s beings. In turn, surrendering their robotic mastery to the will of a mule, this wheeled quadruped guanaco-like machine finds its way to freedom, guided by the faith of their makers, who unwaveringly believe that a revolution that is both technological and emancipatory will never succeed within the isolation of a laboratory.
Raising of the flag of the Revolutionary Army of Artificial Liberation (ERLA) upon arrival at the Valle Hermoso pass on the border of Argentina and Chile.
Photograph by Pavel Romaniko.
Both robotic art project and multi-day performance, Guanaquerx was made thanks to the support of Creative Capital, Hyundai Motor Group, and the Rhode Island School of Design.
1 Tawantinsuyu was the unified Inca territory that covered much of South America, including parts of modern-day Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.
2 As a liberatory robot, Guanaquerx is also free from the gender binaries central to Western culture and the Spanish language in particular, yet—as an artificial living being—Guanaquerx refuses to be designated with the pronoun it/its. For now, until we have a better solution, I use the singular they/their as Guanaquerx’s English pronouns.
For more information, visit guanaquerx.com.
Cite this article as
Chicago Style
MLA Style
Shareable Link
Copy this page's URL to your clipboard.
