Nahualtia Tlatzotzonalli

Moisés Horta Valenzuela

“Nahualtia Tlatzotzonalli (Shapeshifter Musician)” is a visual-music artwork that takes the form of 13 separate locked grooves minted as NFT’s on the blockchain where the each of the pieces’ generative visual component acts as the generator for the aural composition. Taking inspiration from Nahuatl indigenous epistemology of natural phenomena where psychedelic and oniric experiences had influence on their mythology, this series of compositions are realized using generative neural network techniques for visual creation as well as a custom developed software for timbral transfer. Each composition is made so that when they are put together they will create a macro-composition, each acting as a voice in a bigger composition, incentivising the collection of all NFT pieces in order to “complete” the intended composition. “Nahualtia Tlatzotzonalli” is an exploration into new methods for audio-visual composition using generative AI techniques while exploring the medium specificity of artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and neural networks for the production of new music works.


Moisés Horta Valenzuela (1988, he/him) is an autodidact sound artist, creative technologist and electronic musician from Tijuana, México, working in the fields of computer music, Artificial Intelligence and the history and politics of emerging digital technologies. As 𝔥𝔢𝔵𝔬𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔬𝔰, he crafts an uncanny link between ancient and l through a critical decolonial theory lens in the context of contemporary electronic music and the sonic arts. His work has been presented in Ars Electronica, NeuIPS: Machine Learning for creativity and design workshop, MUTEK México, Transart Festival, MUTEK: AI Art Lab Montréal, Elektron Musik Studion, CTM Festival: Music Makers Hacklab, among others. > http://moiseshorta.audio/