Protopica: Using Immersive Technology to Preserve Cultural Heritage
Protopica: Sin Agua No Hay Tiempo unfolds as an immersive underwater chamber shaped by Caribbean cosmology, where the ocean emerges as both archive and oracle. Ancient petroglyphs and symbolic carvings ripple across the walls, as majestic flora and fauna reveal themselves, carrying participants through a continuum where ancestral memory dissolves into speculative futures.
This installation is an ongoing exploration of cultural memory, speculative futures, and ancestral technologies. Emerging from a short film created using OpenAls Sora (during its alpha phase), it has since evolved into a multidisciplinary platform blending generative Al, brain-computer interfaces, and immersive design, with a focus on heritage preservation and community.
Protopica is a cultural vessel for safeguarding endangered various narratives, particularly those rooted in diasporic, Indigenous, and underrepresented cultures.
With each of its iterations, including its latest chapter “Sin Agua No Hay Tiempo”, it asks: How might our identities shift if we remembered differently?
Rather than using Al and emerging tools to overwrite, Protopica employs them to listen: to languages, to stories, and to the knowledge carried in blood and water.
About the Artists
Will Selviz — Immersive designer & Afro-Caribbean technologist, co-founder of Protopica, with XR & AI works for Nike, Meta, Microsoft, and BCI shows at Sónar.
Manuel Sainsily — Guadeloupe-born Creative Director & TED speaker, co-founder of Protopica, lecturer at Harvard/MIT/Stanford/Oxford, co-created MasterClass’s first GenAI course, collaborations with Adobe, NVIDIA, Lightspeed, OpenAI.
