Arca, Untitled

The future has always belonged to those capable of imagining it differently. Long before technological innovation arrives, before political systems shift or social values transform, artists, writers and musicians begin the work of world-building, creating new languages through which reality itself can be reconsidered. From the speculative fictions of Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler to the radical acts of self-invention that define contemporary culture, imagination has remained one of humanity’s most powerful tools for resisting inevitability and expanding the horizon of what might be possible.

Few artists embody this spirit more completely than Arca. Across music, performance, image-making and self-fashioning, she has spent more than a decade constructing a practice devoted to transformation. Her work inhabits a space where identities remain fluid, where bodies exceed the limits imposed upon them, and where beauty emerges not through stability or perfection but through mutation, contradiction and continual becoming. Refusing fixed definitions, Arca approaches artistic practice as an open-ended process through which new forms of existence can be imagined into being.

Presented as the inaugural commission of CIRCA 2022 and its year-long programme AND NOW WE BUILD WORLDS, Untitled extends this expansive vision into the public realm. Derived from thirty-one mixed-media paintings created by the artist and reinterpreted through a machine-learning process, the work generates a continuous sequence of evolving images that drift between states of recognition and abstraction. Rather than reproducing the original paintings, the algorithm enters into dialogue with them, allowing colours, textures and gestures to unfold into forms that neither artist nor machine could fully predict.

At a moment when digital technologies increasingly organise the conditions of contemporary life, Untitled offers an alternative understanding of what these systems might make possible. Instead of reinforcing certainty, classification and control, Arca employs technology as a mechanism for ambiguity, emergence and discovery. The resulting images feel less like representations than living entities, constantly dissolving and reassembling themselves in a process that mirrors the fluidity of identity itself. What emerges is not a vision of the future but a demonstration that the future remains unwritten.

Broadcast across some of the world’s most visible advertising screens, the commission occupies spaces ordinarily devoted to the circulation of desire, consumption and spectacle. Against this backdrop, Arca introduces a different proposition. Her images resist immediate interpretation and refuse to settle into singular meanings. They ask viewers to remain within uncertainty, to surrender to transformation, and to recognise that the most radical act of imagination may not be to predict what comes next, but to accept that neither we nor the worlds we inhabit are ever truly complete.

Describing the work as an invitation to experience “visual ASMR”, Arca speaks of pleasure, solace and warped beauty. Yet beneath this sensorial encounter lies a deeper meditation on freedom itself. In a culture increasingly driven by categorisation and visibility, Untitled celebrates what remains fluid, unstable and unresolved. It reminds us that new worlds do not arrive fully formed. They emerge gradually, through acts of experimentation, invention and desire, from those willing to imagine otherwise.

Arca is one of the most visionary and genre-defying artists of her generation. Working across music, performance, visual art and technology, she has built a practice that challenges conventional ideas of identity, authorship and transformation. Through works that blur the boundaries between the physical and digital, the human and machine, the intimate and the monumental, Arca has become a defining voice in contemporary culture.

Born Alejandra Ghersi in Caracas, Venezuela, Arca first emerged as a groundbreaking producer and musician whose radical approach to sound reshaped the landscape of experimental and popular music alike. Her collaborations with artists including Björk, Rosalía, FKA twigs and Kanye West established her as one of the most influential creative figures working today, while her own albums expanded the possibilities of electronic music through a deeply personal exploration of gender, embodiment and self-invention.

Arca’s relationship with CIRCA began in 2022 when she launched the platform’s annual programme, AND NOW WE BUILD WORLDS, with Untitled, a landmark New Year commission broadcast across public screens in London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Seoul and Tokyo. Blurring the boundaries between painting and artificial intelligence, the project transformed thirty-one of Arca’s original mixed-media paintings into an evolving digital artwork through machine learning technology. Created in collaboration with CIRCA x Dazed Class of 2021 finalist Christina Anagnostou, the commission marked Arca’s emergence as a visual artist on the global stage and demonstrated her ability to move fluidly between disciplines, technologies and forms of expression. Alongside the public commission, CIRCA published a series of editions including Yōkai Destrudo, extending the project’s exploration of mutation, hybridity and world-building into physical form.

Whether working with sound, performance, image-making or emerging technologies, Arca approaches art as a space of continual transformation. Her work proposes new ways of understanding identity not as something fixed, but as something constantly evolving and becoming. Through an uncompromising commitment to experimentation and self-determination, she continues to expand the boundaries of contemporary culture and inspire new generations of artists, musicians and thinkers around the world.