Arca

Alejandra Ghersi (born 1989 in Caracas), known as Arca, is among the most influential experimental producers of her era — a shaping force on Kanye West’s “Yeezus,” Björk’s “Vulnicura,” and FKA twigs’ early records, and author of the mutant “KiCk” album cycle. Her work treats identity and sound as endlessly transformable, which made machine collaboration a natural next step.

One hundred remixes by an “intelligent sentience”

In December 2020 Arca released “Riquiquí;Bronze-Instances(1-100)” — one hundred AI-generated permutations of her “KiCk i” track “Riquiquí,” created with Bronze, a generative audio engine that reworks stems into never-repeating variations. No human had ever been granted an official Arca remix; the first hundred went to a machine, stretching a 2:40 song into nearly six hours.

She described listening as genuinely uncanny — recognizing “the textures and melodies, but never the song” — and framed the mystery as the point. The Bronze partnership extended physical roots she had already planted: in 2019 she and artist Philippe Parreno used the engine for an ever-morphing soundtrack installed in the lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where the music never plays the same way twice.

Arca’s embrace of generative tools predates the ChatGPT-era debate and comes from the art world’s conceptual end: not AI as a cost-saving substitute for musicians, but as a collaborator that dissolves the idea of a fixed, finished song — a fitting instrument for an artist whose entire catalog is about permanent mutation.