Neópolis is the section of the Festival de Málaga where science, technology, and artistic language converge. Through it, we seek to understand the coordinates of the present in order to grasp what is happening to humanity. We are living through a truly unique moment, immersed in a technological revolution that is changing human behaviour and creating a technological agenda that undermines the fundamental values ​​upon which we have built our model of coexistence, our democracies, and our decisions about the common good, making our ways of being in the world more fragile. A large part of our relationships and behaviours are based on cruelty and hostility, rendering the weak and the fragile irrelevant to current models that impose identities and subjectivities arising from algorithmic biases.
 
This section seeks to stimulate reflection through immersive interventions and experiences that transport viewers to a territory constructed according to the variables of the real and the unreal, a territory based on the blending of two worlds in tension: the world as we know it, understood through the variables of the solid, and a fluid world defined by characteristics stemming from the Fourth Industrial Revolution and characterised by a series of imperatives that seek not coexistence but imposition.
 
Through dialogues between creators, scientists, philosophers, and technology experts, we will approach a series of areas of knowledge, which we will address, artistically, as ephemeral works that move us and enable us to generate new spaces focused on collective reflection. Above all, we strive to be vehicles for dissemination in order to, precisely, avoid the imperatives of an agenda that is imposed without explanation.
 
 Audiovisual language serves as a thermometer to measure social changes which, in our time, are particularly accelerated, with not even time to be assimilated or thought about. Neópolis places the sustainability of the human being at the centre of its discourse and reflects on what it means to be human in this technologised present. From this open dialogue from the scientific and technological to the philosophical and the world of ideas, we want to challenge the inhabitants of our Neópolis to learn about the influence of science and technology in our lives. A reflection that allows us to decide what our attitude is towards this new contemporary environment that has arisen from the digital transformation.
 

To understand the intervention of the set of technologies that produce artificial content, the so-called Artificial Intelligences, it is important to understand the scope of data mining and the use of deep learning, whose contribution depends on the amount of data available to each technology corporation. The more data, the greater the commercial advantage, that is, the greater the intervention over human beings, over our capacity for decision-making and will.
 
Regarding this use and deep learning, Karen Hao, in her essay ‘Empire of AI’, writes:
 
“Tech giants already had proof of the commercial potential of neural networks before the DNN-research auction. In 2009, Hinton graduate students demonstrated that this software was acceptable for speech recognition. IBM, Microsoft, and Google jumped on the bandwagon, but Google was the first technology company to achieve its commercialisation. In 2012, Google began producing neural networks and greatly improved Android's recognition capabilities.”
 
As Google's AI operations continued to expand, neural networks created decisive improvements for the company's gold mine: searches. The software could better match user queries with the most relevant web pages, providing users with better search results and, more importantly, offering them more personalised ads. The more Google profited and the more billions it invested in deep learning, the more the rest of the industry followed suit. Companies established themselves as the leading investors in AI research, and before long, they were setting the research agenda based on breakthroughs that could generate short-term returns.
 
And the key to understanding the current context:
 
"The deep learning overload in Silicon Valley, in its attempt to expand and consolidate large-scale monopolies, also encoded a culture among AI developers to consider everything as data that should be captured and consumed by their technologies in an attempt to make them reflect the world as much as possible. (...). The detailed digital traces of people's thoughts and ideas on social networks were simply text. People and vehicles in photos were simply objects. Surveillance was detection”.
 
As far as the general public is concerned, generative AI has been among us since the end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI. But that’s not true, and once again, information is being hidden from us so that we continue to be consumed and reduced to mere data. From 2012 to 2022, we witnessed what we consider the first era of AI commercialisation, laying the groundwork for the current uncontrolled revolution of generative AI. This led us to the agentic web, a model that allows generative artificial intelligence to become an extension of human beings, mimicking their reasoning processes and, therefore, modifying human behaviour, making us more dependent, more fragile, less free, and with a static global perspective heavily influenced by ideological biases.
 
The agentic web consists of AI systems that can perform tasks independently, make decisions, and act on behalf of users with limited human intervention, leveraging multiple models and tools to achieve their objectives.
 
 
Neópolis #4.1 
Audiovisual and sound installation by LCA.
Project SOS-LCAmálaga | Promálaga Casa de Socorro (Plaza de la Trinidad, 12)
Mon 09 March, Tue 10 March, Wed 11 March, 7.30-9.00 p.m.
Free entry until full capacity is reached
 
Diálogo Neópolis #4.1 | Colloquium with César Rendueles
‘Redes vacías.
Tecnología catastrófica y el fin de la democracia’ (Anagrama, 2026) (Empty networks. Catastrophic Technology and the End of Democracy)
Monday 9 March, 6.30 p.m.
Promálaga Casa de Socorro (Plaza de la Trinidad, 12)
Free entry until full capacity is reached

 

In this digital age, the search for identity, recognition, and belonging is part of a technological strategy and a form of group pressure. Algorithmic biases act as echo chambers, a relentless echo that bombards our gaze and leads us to specific bodies, uniform ideas, and, perhaps most seriously, to putting up for sale an intimacy that should be a refuge for oneself.
 
On social media, we display illnesses, discomforts. Affections, desires, bodies. Ideas, fears, insecurities. This collection of data is then analysed by neural networks, servers that use our data and information to mould these docile individuals. The temptation is obvious. Why be myself if I can be anything else on social media? What is the purpose of truth? To create a new self on social media, one that shows what one is not, that, seemingly, controls a narrative that, in reality, is an imperative of where technology wants to lead us: people who waste their time making reels, empty subjects with no time to think, for the sake of truth. People who preserve their privacy, who protect it. Who know that life revolves around the revolution of presence. In the age of mimetic identity, of simulated identity, everything is possible: except people, except the truth of being oneself.


Neópolis #4.2 
Intervention by Kansas Anymore
MIMMA - Palacio Conde de las Navas (C/ Beatas, 15)
Mon 09 March (10 am-1.30 pm.), Tue 10 March, Wed 11 March (10 am -7 pm.)
Free entry until full capacity is reached
 

We are subjected to such manipulation that we don't know for sure if our freedom of thought is truly that, freedom of thought, or if, in reality, the ideas and thoughts we have are mediated by algorithms. The mind of each human being is the last refuge of the intimate, that which we must preserve and defend to achieve individual and, therefore, collective well-being. All critical reflection rests on a framework of ideas that relate not only to who we are, but also to how we are with others. In this regard, it is worth recalling Hannah Arendt's essential definition: "Human beings are only truly human when they are with others". The imperative of technocapitalism is well aware of the importance of producing isolated individuals, precisely by generating production models that guarantee this social isolation and promoting the development of social media platforms that amplify polarisation and suppress all critical content.
 
Social media platforms have a business model based on the mass promotion of negative content—up to five times more than positive content—a model focused on ensuring user interaction and increasing the amount of time each user spends on the platforms. The elimination of fact-checkers and moderators, the veiled censorship of critical content, coupled with a data economy based on neural networks that feed on the personal information of millions of users stored on opaque servers, have generated a digital ecosystem that places violence at the centre of its logic.
 
One of the categories of humanity that has suffered most from this approach is language. On a daily basis, we use blunt, forceful words with such frequency and banality that they have become devoid of their own sense and meaning. The requirement of certain networks to shorten messages, the lack of attention, the confusion of opinion with knowledge, among other factors, means that language is losing its essence when considered in relation to humanity: the construction of reality and its leading role in building imaginary worlds.
 
Every day, we use and read words like fascism, violence, abuse, harassment on social media. We use them with such arbitrariness that the words lose their meaning—words that, until very recently, helped us create cognitive categories and navigate the world by distinguishing what contributed to collective well-being and contemporary democracies. What happens when language ceases to have any weight in our collective consciousness? When each word no longer names a reality because that reality floods everything and suffocates language itself.
 
 
Neópolis #4.3 
Sound installation by Eugenio Rivas
San Miguel Cemetery Chapel (Plaza del Patrocinio)
Tuesday 10 March, Wednesday 11 March, Thursday 12 March 8:30 am to 12:00 noon/6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
Free entry until full capacity is reached

Diálogo Neópolis #4.3 | Cognitive biases | Colloquium with Marta González-Moro and Juan Aguilar
Thusday 12 March, 18.00 pm
Chapel of San Miguel Cemetery (Plaza del Patrocinio)
Free entry until full capacity is reached