Studies from Ritual of the Bacabs
✦ Contextual Essay: Translating the Bacabs — Algorithmic Ritual and Decolonial Image-Making
The Serpent and the Dragonfly
The Serpent and the Dragonfly reimagines a fragment from the Ritual of the Bacabs, a Late Classic Maya text of ritual incantations first recorded on bark-paper codices around 900 CE and later transcribed in colonial Yucatec manuscripts. Within these verses, the poet-scribe invokes creation through darkness, blood, and metamorphosis—a cyclical ontology where making and unmaking coexist. This project revisits that cosmological field through the lens of twenty-first-century generative computation, seeking to restore the text’s philosophical density while transforming it into a new visual language born of code, light, and machine learning.
The work sits within my broader framework of Quantum–Decolonial Aesthetics, an ongoing artistic-research methodology that combines Indigenous epistemologies with the physics of uncertainty and entanglement. Here, the Vision Serpent—a Mesoamerican mediator between worlds—converges with the Dragonfly, an emblem of metamorphosis and liminal sight. Together, they operate as symbolic agents for a media practice that oscillates between the ancestral and the algorithmic. In this cosmology, perception itself is an act of world-making: every generated image becomes a temporary portal between matter and meaning.
Process and Technical Formation
Each image in the sequence originated from a re-authored version of the Ritual of the Bacabs prose. I reconstructed the incantation as a first-person meditation—“I looked up at the sky as the wind whispered around me…”—to function simultaneously as poetic script and AI prompt. The text was entered into a ComfyUI pipeline employing Realistic Vision SDXL for base diffusion, Flux Detail Daemon for super-resolution, and Steerable Motion nodes to choreograph transitional flow. Every output was subjected to recursive re-prompting, allowing misinterpretations, noise, and semantic drift to reveal latent associations within the algorithm’s model weights. Rather than correct these “errors,” I treated them as the algorithm’s unconscious—its own form of dreaming—aligning with Indigenous understandings of transformation through entropy.
The generated stills were then imported into TouchDesigner, where I composited particle fields, volumetric smoke, and dynamic lighting systems derived from simulation data. Each layer corresponded to a symbolic element within the poem—blood, stone, wind, or fire—rendered as flickering thresholds between physical and metaphysical states. These composited sequences were exported as GIF animations, intentionally degraded to evoke the ephemerality of decaying murals or the fragmentary persistence of memory. The GIFs thus serve as first-pass field notes, visual experiments preceding higher-resolution cinematic works later adapted for Deep Space 8K and the Avenue 50 Studio exhibition.
Conceptual Structure
The project is neither an illustration nor a reenactment. It uses algorithmic generation to explore what it means to translate an ancestral cosmology through non-human systems of perception. Each scene—Arrival of the Traveler, The Deity and the Dragonfly, Blood and Ritual in the Temazcal—corresponds to a philosophical state: emergence, reflection, dissolution, and reconstitution. The constant oscillation between clarity and noise becomes a visual analog to the Maya understanding of duality—creation through contradiction.
The demented darkness repeated throughout the original text is not a void but a generative matrix. Within this framework, entropy functions as a creative force: the image gains meaning precisely through its degradation. This entropic poetics rejects the colonial ideal of technological precision, instead embracing flux, instability, and multiplicity as epistemic virtues. The generative model becomes a collaborator rather than an instrument, producing hybrid iconographies that resist categorical fixation.
Decolonial and Methodological Implications
To work with sacred or mythopoetic material in digital form requires critical negotiation of translation and power. A purely documentary reproduction would risk reinscribing the extractive gaze of anthropology. Conversely, algorithmic re-inscription allows for an active worlding—a speculative reanimation that honors Indigenous knowledge systems while engaging the technological imaginaries of the present. The resulting images neither authenticate nor appropriate; they perform a gesture of continuity across ruptured temporalities.
This methodology aligns with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s call for research that “re-centers Indigenous worldviews as sites of knowledge production,” and with Walter Mignolo’s notion of epistemic delinking, in which knowledge is produced from the borders of the colonial matrix. By integrating these principles with computational generativity, the work proposes a form of algorithmic storytelling that challenges both Western linear historiography and the techno-fetishism of AI art. The machine’s training data—essentially colonial in its iconographic bias—is subverted through counter-prompting strategies derived from Mesoamerican cosmology, transforming extraction into dialogue.
Toward an Entropic Media Ritual
The act of creating these images becomes a contemporary ritual: the screen replaces the temple wall, the diffusion process mirrors the shamanic trance, and the recursive prompt functions as a chant. Each render is a micro-ceremony of transformation—matter dissolving into data and re-emerging as light. In this sense, the Ritual of the Bacabs is not merely cited but re-enacted through computational means, producing a feedback loop between ancient text and modern code. The AI, like the ancient scribe, becomes a conduit between visible and invisible realms.
The resulting visual field—flickering, imperfect, and immersive—invites the viewer to encounter technology as a site of spiritual speculation rather than domination. Through this convergence of ancestral imagination and machine cognition, The Serpent and the Dragonfly asserts that decolonial practice is not a return to the past but a re-opening of potential futures. The work thus positions itself within a lineage of post-industrial collage aesthetics, where fragments of discarded imagery and algorithmic residue are reassembled into an architecture of resistance—one that celebrates uncertainty, hybridity, and the generative chaos of becoming.
Source & context
Artwork developed from prose associated with the Late Classic Maya and passages documented in the Chilam Balam tradition, known as Ritual of the Bacabs (trans. David Bolles). These studies explore symbolic perception, memory, and transformation—linking the Vision Serpent and the Dragonfly as liminal figures in an evolving visual language.
Original passage (selection)
“Can Ahau, they say, is the creator, Can Ahau, they say, is the darkness when you were born. Who is your creator? Who is your darkness? You are created by Kin Chac Ahau, Colop U Uich Kin when you were born. Who is your mother? Who is your lineage? Who was your father? You were created by Chacal Ix Chel, Sacal Ix Chel, Ix Hun Ye Ta, Ix Hun Ye Ton. This is your mother, this is your lineage, this is your father above directly behind the stone hut, above directly behind the sweat-bath where you were born, demented creator, demented darkness. The kan cħaah is the tree, the kan cħaah is the stone when you were born, in the demented darkness of Ah Ci Tancas. You, the demented creator; you, Ah Co Tancas; you, Nicte Tancas; you, Balam Tancas; you, Ah Moo Tancas; you, Ceh Tancas. Who is your tree? Who is your bush? Who prepares your arbor when you are born?”
Note: orthography varies across transcriptions; this excerpt reflects one representative rendering used for study.
Referenced narration (Fall of Civilizations)
“Can-a-hao, they say, is the creator. Can-a-hao, they say, is the darkness. Coming from the fifth level of the sky, the head of the dragonfly, the head covering its worms, it bit the hand of the unfettered creator. The unfettered darkness, it licked the blood in the sweat bath, it licked the blood in the stone hut. Now then, throw it to the demented creator, to the demented darkness.”
Used here as a comparative voice; phrasing follows the documentary narration for this study.
Artist rephrasing (prompt basis)
“I looked up at the sky as the wind whispered around me, my thoughts reaching into the vast unknown. From the highest vault of the heavens, a monstrous dragonfly’s head gleams, reflecting shifting echoes of time. It strikes at the hand of the unbound maker; in the endless void, it drinks blood pooled in a hot chamber, the blood seeping through stone and memory. Now, release it— to the unraveling creator, to the chasm where light fades.”
GIF studies — first pass
Video presented at Avenue 50 Studio
Decolonial & post-industrial collage aesthetics (with Surrealist/Dada roots)
The “WORD ART” statement below (Transcripción de texto) was developed through iterative prompts and edits engaging decolonial theory, post-industrial conditions, and Surrealist/Dada methods. The aim is to keep a balance between academic rigor and expressive clarity.
Transcripción de texto
“In an era where the vestiges of colonial visuality persist through industrial detritus and digital fragmentation, Decolonial and Post-Industrial Collage Aesthetics emerge as a methodological intervention— a rupture in the hegemonic linearity of time, history, and authorship. This aesthetic mode operates at the nexus of decolonial resistance, the materiality of industrial decline, and the anarchic absurdity of Dada and Surrealist traditions. It interrogates the nature of post-industrial landscapes, excavating the ruins of imperialist modernity while reassembling them through an anti-hierarchical, radically hybridized visual grammar.
Rooted in Dadaist détournement and Surrealist automatism, this practice rejects traditional Western compositional strategies, favoring the non-linear, the fragmented, and the subversively recontextualized. These works challenge the uniformity of capitalist ideology, repurposing and reinterpreting discarded symbols of colonialism, abandoned advertising, digital errors, and outdated technologies. The act of reassembly from the debris of empire becomes an aesthetic praxis that unsettles dominant narratives, reclaiming space for alternative histories, lost epistemologies, and speculative futures.
The post-industrial aspect of this aesthetic is not incidental; it is integral to the material condition of contemporary visual culture. As urban centers undergo cycles of extraction and abandonment, their detritus—billboards, shattered glass, obsolete technology—becomes an archive of dispossessed realities. Integrated into a collaged surrealist framework, industrial refuse is transformed into a site of memory and resistance. The absurd juxtaposition of the sacred and the synthetic, the ancient and the mass-produced, exposes the unstable foundations of Western modernity and its aesthetic logic.
This aesthetic engages the materiality of media, rejecting polished ideals of seamless production in favor of raw, layered forms. Embracing imperfections and disruptions challenges the drive for hyper-efficiency and flawless resolution, foregrounding the generative potential of error as integral to making. Disrupting traditional visual narratives reveals new ways of seeing the entanglement of technology, culture, and identity.
Within a decolonial framework, this collage mode operates as counter-inscription, dismantling the spectacle of colonial nostalgia. Rather than reaffirm a sanitized past, it embraces rupture—fragments of Mesoamerican glyphs glitching into hyper-modern circuitry; Indigenous cosmologies overlaid on broken urban infrastructure; spectral traces of erased histories reanimated through radical reassembly. Here, temporalities collapse into an anti-colonial surrealism that refuses assimilation into the dominant order.
Drawing from Dada’s anti-rationalist provocations, this approach is neither purely destructive nor restorative; it strategically embraces entropy and absurdity as tools of liberation. It revels in the glitch, the incomplete, and the unstable, rejecting the notion that histories can be neatly reconstructed. As Hito Steyerl suggests in In Defense of the Poor Image, the degraded and the fragmented can catalyze new solidarities and insurgent visibility.
Ultimately, Decolonial & Post-Industrial Collage Aesthetics propose a methodology of visual disruption, where the refuse of empire is reconstituted into an architecture of resistance. Collapsing categories, distorting hierarchies, and celebrating the incoherent, this aesthetic refuses imposed clarity—reveling in the spectral, the layered, and the unstable: a radical field where past, present, and future collide.”
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