↓Skip to main content
  1. Projects/

Visiones inestables, by Mónica Páez

·3 mins
Exhibition view of Visiones inestables: a projected AI-generated image of the museum, a projected quote and a lit photograph in a dark gallery
Exhibition view of Visiones inestables at the Art Museum of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Courtesy of Mónica Páez.
Table of Contents

Visiones inestables (Unstable Visions) is an artwork by the Colombian artist Mónica Páez, made in collaboration with Juan David García Arteaga and Daniel Felipe Montenegro, and exhibited on June 17, 2026 at the Art Museum of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia). It explores our interaction with large language models as a synthesized, amplified and distorted reflection of each person’s digital footprint.

Artwork page | Video | Mónica Páez

1. About the Artwork #

The piece uses artificial intelligence to create speculative versions of the possible futures of a well-known place, starting from concrete material: photographs of the Art Museum of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and texts about the museum as an institution.

The AI reorganizes and mixes discourses that have traditionally tried to stabilize ideas about heritage, conservation, the archive, memory, authenticity and the institution itself. Far from producing a coherent image of the museum, it generates hybrid, ambiguous and contradictory images, where the internal tensions of that material appear as errors, mutations and deviations.

The title refers to Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), where science fiction is not a projection of the future but a tool to read the present. When the AI is asked to imagine possible futures for the museum, the images it returns reveal what usually remains invisible: its mechanisms of conservation, its promises of permanence and its inevitable changes.

The instability is not in the eye that looks, but in the very nature of the institution.

— From the artist’s statement

2. Technique #

  • Video projection
  • Python 3 programming
  • Text-guided image editing with an agent based on the language model gemini-2.5-flash-image
  • Digital print on Moab Lasal Photo matte 230 g paper
  • Variable dimensions

3. Credits #

  • Artist: Mónica Páez
  • In collaboration with: Juan David García Arteaga and Daniel Felipe Montenegro
  • Special thanks to the students: Daniel Ávila López, María Josse Hurtado García and María Camila Larrotta Aldana
  • Video: Tangrama
Read the full artist’s statement (in Spanish) on Mónica Páez’s website.

4. A Note of Gratitude #

Visiones inestables is, first and foremost, Mónica’s work: her vision, her questions and her way of looking at the museum and at the images we are learning to make with AI. Being invited into her process was a privilege, and I am deeply grateful for her generosity, her trust and her friendship.

I am just as grateful to Juan David García Arteaga, who was also the director of my undergraduate thesis, for everything I keep learning from him and for sharing this collaboration with me. Contributing alongside both of them to bring this piece to life is something I will always carry with me. Thank you, profes.