Cosmograma en espacio latente Recasts Rock Art Through AI

Estratigrafía algorítmica - Cerro azul is a wall of ceramic plates cast from a painted cliff in the Colombian Amazon. Juan Covelli 3D-scanned a fragment of the rock face at Cerro Azul, in the Serranía de La Lindosa, printed the scan, made a mold from the print and pressed clay plates that keep the rock's actual topography. The plates are then hand-painted in slip and oxides with figures from a neural network Covelli trained on the site's pictographs. In the gallery's documentation post they hang in a dark room like the pieces of a broken map.

The work anchors Cosmograma en espacio latente, Covelli's solo show at Policroma in Medellín, which opened Sept. 17. La Lindosa's red ochre paintings became international news in 2020, when researchers read Ice Age animals in them. The gallery's exhibition text sets the show against that reading: archaeology dates and sorts the images, the megafauna story makes them worth more the older they look, and the Indigenous present drops out. Covelli adds a third reader, a trained model, and fires its guesses into clay. "If the colonial expedition mapped space, the neural network maps data," the text says.

Covelli has spent years pointing 3D scanning, printing and machine learning at colonial archives and repatriation. Atrato, about Colombia's Atrato River, showed at the V&A in London earlier this year.

For more reading, see Juan Covelli rebuilds Colombia's toppled monuments and Covelli's Instagram.