unitednotions.film

United Notions Film is proud to announce that Las Awichas, a mixed-reality installation by Violeta Ayala, has opened at the Guangdong Museum of Art as part of SURREALITY, a major art and technology exhibition developed by the Center for Metaverse and Computational Creativity (MC²) at HKUST (Guangzhou), led by Professor Pan Hui.

Working at architectural scale, Las Awichas brings together body, space, and ancestral memory through mixed reality. The installation creates a dialogue between AI-generated Andean grandmothers and visitors, exploring how emerging technologies can coexist with Indigenous epistemologies without extraction or translation into dominant frameworks.

The project began in 2020 as a deeply personal work. “AI-collaborative art is giving me a possibility to imagine my culture in a different light,” Ayala wrote at the time. “As a Quechua creator and filmmaker whose civilization was destroyed by colonizers, I really cherished the opportunity to imagine my ancestors.”

What started as digital portraits of female ancestors—rooted in Ayala’s grandmother Herminia Soto Montaño—evolved into something larger: robotic animals inspired by Nazca lines, carrying forward ancestral dialogue into new forms. The work operates through ch’ixi logic (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui): different ways of knowing held in productive tension, not synthesis.

This installation continues UNF’s exploration of Neo Andean Futurism, following Prison X and other projects that challenge extractive approaches to Indigenous knowledge and technology.

Las Awichas is now on view at the Guangdong Museum of Art through 15/2 - 30/3.

NEWS + EXPERIENCE

On New Year’s Eve we launched our own streaming release inside The Bolivian Case website.

theboliviancase.com

A TV series dropped in Norway and suddenly the story we documented was circulating in a new shape, missing key elements. The full story needs to be told properly, with context, from the people who still live it.

We didn’t wait for distribution. We built it.

Everything is made in-house: platform, player, hosting, payments, delivery pipeline. Decentralized, resilient, and coded by us. Built so the film could live on its own terms.

Next: Sala.video

A curated platform releasing 12 films a year, starting with our United Notions Film catalogue. We’re also opening up the infrastructure supporting other filmmakers to host directly on their own sites using our tech, keeping control of audience, pricing, territories, and release strategy.

In two weeks, it proved the model.

And this is only the beginning. Sala.red will expand into XR and spatial computing across AR and VR.

Watch now: theboliviancase.com

Sala.video soon.

Built by award-winning filmmakers and technologists: Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw

At United Notions Film the last two weeks have unfolded across two fronts that keep feeding each other, technology in motion and documentary in real time.

In the lab we expanded motion systems inside Blender, developed hand–command interaction through MediaPipe and TensorFlow, and brought our IoT pixel surfaces closer to a nervous system of their own. The panels respond to movement like organisms made of light. Not fully sentient yet, but no longer passive. They react. They learn. They almost feel.

On the documentary front the atmosphere remains sharp and alive. We filmed abuelas y abuelos holding their vigil for more than 93 days. We recorded the Comteco worker streaming on TikTok and revealing how speech fractures when a city is tense. Protesters continue to update the system from the street and you can sense the collective brain pulsing; human logic, cellular networks, shared footage circulating like neurons.

Social platforms have become part of the film itself. Not only a window but a circulation system. Vi’s TikTok surpassed one million views and her Instagram reels keep carrying testimonies further and faster than traditional distribution ever could. The documentary is no longer waiting for the edit. It is happening with us and through us. Alive, unstable, unfiltered, collaborative.

Maybe this is the evolution of nonfiction. A documentary that acts like cognition in real time. Cameras as nodes. Crowds as processors. Stories breathing mutating responding like systems made of people and pixels.

We return to one question again and again.

What happens when documentary begins to think?

When it responds?

When it becomes sentient before we notice?

For now UNF continues in two rhythms.

One hand in code teaching machines to listen.

The other in the street listening to the people who refuse to disappear.

The work moves. The world moves with it.

Technologies of distribution, Bolivia opening a new political chapter, and the urgent fight for transparency in our telecom cooperative Comteco.

While there’s growing hype around Starlink entering the country, Bolivia still doesn’t have a data protection law, digital rights remain undefined, and our existing infrastructure lacks transparency. Satellite internet isn’t a substitute for governance, accountability, or sovereignty.

For 88 days, senior citizens, the OG (original) shareholders who built this cooperative — have been holding vigil, demanding elections, audits, and answers. Much of the media remains silent, so I’ve been using TikTok as a counterbalance, turning citizen journalism into a living archive of this moment.

Bolivia is shifting.

Technology is shifting.

And we must build systems; political, digital, and narrative, that honour truth, memory, and the communities that carry them.