The presented artworks invert power structures to allow collective and self-empowering technologies to thrive.

For Atractor Studio + Semantica technology is an ally in addressing the problems caused by industrial agriculture, which uses advanced machinery, chemicals and genetically modified plants to mass-produce food. The soundscape A Tale of Two Seeds (2023) and the two video works On Vegetal Politics (2022) and Botánica Transgénica (2022) focus on how companies use these methods to colonise land in Colombia, leading to the exploitation of native plants and local knowledge. 

A Tale of Two Seeds is based on field recordings that reveal differences in soil health between soy monocultures and soy-amaranth polycultures. Polycultures emit a rich variety of sounds that reflect the interactions in and above the ground, while monocultures are nearly silent, showing a lack of biodiversity. Plants extract vital, electrically charged nutrients like calcium and magnesium from the soil, an exchange that can be made audible through microphones and ultrasonic detectors. Above ground, plants communicate with pollinators such as bees via electrical fields, with each side differently charged to attract the other. Since monocultures are heavily treated with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, which unbalance the nutrients in the soil, no variety in sound can be detected. Despite these life-threatening conditions, amaranth, an ancient grain and native seed, is growing in these soy monocultures. Amaranth’s resistance became a symbol and a protagonist of the people's ongoing fight against industrial farming and land robbery. 

The two videos On Vegetal Politics and Botánica Transgénica demonstrate how digital technology impacts agriculture. On Vegetal Politics shows how a computer algorithm is used in industrial agriculture to compare the stock prices of amaranth and soy, highlighting how companies economically value soy more even though amaranth is far more nutritious. Plants are traded on the stock market as any other commodity, which allows agrochemical industries to patent each genetic modification. In Botánica Transgénica, Atractor Studio’s web-scraping algorithm tracks genetic modifications of cacao, coffee and soy in patent databases and registers them as NFTs (a unique digital asset) to symbolically reclaim these plants for Colombia.