SHIFTED #14: On Laura Colmenares Guerra’s 'Aaron in Lo' and Liminal Bodies
On interspecies futures, meditative landscapes, and the emotional textures of Octavia Butler.
This article is part of a new series of short conversations with artists exploring the shifting terrains of digital art, ecology, and imagined futures. The first interview was with Claudia Hart, on her artwork “Short Season.”
The first time I encountered Laura Colmenares Guerra’s Aaron in Lo, I was immediately drawn to its strange, mesmerizing lifeforms. These creatures didn’t resemble anything I had seen before. They were truly alien—beings from another world, suspended in movement. I was curious, captivated. And then, the moment of realization: we were not on another planet at all. We were underwater, inside a speculative ecosystem clearly inspired by Earth-based species. I was subjugated by that shift in perception.
Based on Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, the work draws us into an intimate moment of metamorphosis. Aaron, the protagonist, is unraveling. His human form softens, disperses, and adapts. His future, and the world’s, depends on his capacity to trust, to let go. Laura translates this into a meditative video landscape: corals and ferns sway, underwater and above-ground ecologies blend, and a mercury-like creature moves through it all in slow ritual.
Diane Drubay: Your work is based on Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, specifically a scene from Imago, the third volume. What drew you to this moment and to Aaron's story in particular?
Laura Colmenares Guerra: Aaron isn’t the main character of the book—that’s part of what drew me to him. He is desperate. He needs to find humans to mate with, but they’re afraid of him. He’s a construct, both human and alien, and this moment in the book is where he decides to let go of everything: his human side, his expectations, maybe even his hope.
It’s such a powerful metaphor for where we are now. We’re told to be strong, to strive, to succeed—but at the same time, it all feels empty. Ecological collapse, war, power struggles. Sometimes, I feel that same desire to just vanish into the Earth, to metamorphose into something else.
DD: What we see in the video is hypnotic. It feels submerged, somewhere between sea and soil. Can you describe the environment and how you created it?
LCG: When I created this piece, I was staying in a forest house in Colombia, immersed in nature for 20 days. I was walking every day, and I was looking; there were ferns everywhere. And I was looking at them; I was fascinated by them. But I wanted to do something underwater. So what you see is like a series of plants that resemble corals, but not fully corals. It's like a mix of hybrids between land and aquatic plants that have on top of them their strains; they have, like, some black shapes that I was thinking could be like these sensory organs that are described along the trilogy of Octavia Butler.
Aaron’s body is abstract. It’s made of these connected, floating spheres, like mercury, constantly forming and unforming. My background is in landscape analysis and cartography, and I’ve done a lot of work with GIS and 3D-printed clay landscapes. But with Aaron in Lo, I wanted to explore something more emotional. I created a system that would allow me to manipulate different patterns or different possibilities, like the shape of the leaves of the ferns or the thickness, the colors, and also the behavior. So I used nodal programming for both the creation of the 3D objects and also for the behavior. And I really liked and enjoyed the process. This is the first time that I used AI except for text in my process, but I didn't use it to create the images, but I used it as an assistant to help me find solutions when I was stuck in some math procedures for formulas.
DD: The sound plays such a strong role. It’s organic, synthetic, and meditative at the same time. Can you talk about that aspect of the piece?
LCG: Yes, sound was very important to me. It was one of the first times I created the full soundscape myself. The sound is unsettling because you hear birds, but it also has this underwater quality. I was all the time playing between these two things, like being underwater but having elements from the surface.
Laura Colmenares Guerra, Aaron in Lo, 3D Animation, Length: 51-second animated loop, 2025 (click to collect)
The first time I watched Aaron in Lo, I couldn’t look away. The mercury-like creature undulates slowly through a forest of speculative plants. There’s no clear boundary between flesh and landscape, between subject and environment. Everything is in transformation. Laura Colmenares Guerra invites us to enter that liminal space.
This interview was originally run for the launch of the online exhibition “On the Edge of the Horizon,” co-curated with Tina Sauerlaender (Radiance VR). You can visit the show via this link: https://on-the-edge-of-the-horizon.common.garden/
Stay tuned for our upcoming interview with Anke Schiemann as we continue exploring the emotional terrains of post-natural digital art.