“The machine is only a means; the end is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces by means of a first act of enslavement: the machine is a slave whose purpose is to make other slaves. Such a dominating and enslaving inspiration can coincide with the quest for man’s freedom. But it is difficult to free oneself by transferring slavery onto other beings, men, animals, or machines; to reign over a people of machines that enslave the entire world is still to reign, and every reign presupposes the acceptance of the schemas of enslavement.”   

 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects

On January 1817, the Andes Revolutionary Army, led by General José de San Martín, executed a monumental operation: 5,200 men and women and more than 10,000 mules and horses crossed the Andes Mountains from Argentina to Chile. About fifty percent of the army were African slaves, and the other half were mestizos and local indigenous people. Their mission and goal: freedom. Reaching peaks of over 4,500 meters high and traversing precipices and harsh weather conditions, the crossing of the Andes was one of the most dramatic chapters in the 19th-century struggle for Latin American independence, paving the way to liberate the continent from Spanish colonial rule. 

Two centuries after the original Crossing of the Andes, a different kind of insurgent retraced the same high mountain trail. This time it wasn’t a human but a machine—a quadruped terrestrial robot named Guanaquerx, accompanied by an army of artists, engineers, local muleteers, and 58 mules and horses. With Mount Aconcagua watching over them, along ancient Incan trails and through lands currently occupied by international mining corporations, they moved with a single purpose: to reclaim the Andes as a site of resistance and reimagine robotics as a tool for planetary liberation.  

Guanaquerx is the first robot in history to cross the Andes Mountains. Yet, it is more than an engineering achievement; it is a poetic, political, and collective operation. Developed over two years by a transdisciplinary team—engenieers from Hyundai’s New Horizons Studio, local artisans, bamboo specialists, teenage coders, weavers, muleteers, and historians—the robot embodies an alternative cosmotechnics: a technological practice rooted in collaboration and locality, designed to reset our technical imagination and programmed to seek freedom. 

A full-scale exploration rover Guanaquerx was modeled after the guanaco—the native mammal of the Andes—and inspired by the myth of the Yastay, the guanaco guardian of the mountains, son of Pachamama and brother of the wind. Constructed from caña colihue and dressed in Andean textiles, the robot fuses ancestral knowledge with contemporary robotic technologies. It is equipped with multiple payloads, including a multi-vision and sound sytem that records the soundings and images of the Andes and emits a synthetic relincho (whinny). Its mechatronic tail beats a traditional Andean drum, waves the flag of the Revolutionary Army of Artificial Liberation (ERLA), and on its chest, a metal plaque bears the Pluriversal Laws of Robotics—a radical rewrite of Asimov’s laws, pledging allegiance not just to humans, but to the earth and all its beings.

Crossing the Andes was no small feat. The journey lasted seven days and nights on horseback. When not riding, the crew repaired and calibrated the robot by hand—coding, tuning, soldering amid the rocky trails of the Andes. Guanaquerx is a project about designing and implementing technologies otherwise. At a time when AI and robotics continue to serve exploitation, enable environmental plundering, and fuel the drive to colonize worlds, Guanaquerx invites us to imagine an emancipatory technological revolution and to reclaim the unfinished project of decolonization—urging us to make robots our comrades in the struggle to repair our planet, reshaping the future of human–machine–Earth relations. 

Concept & Lead Artist: Paula Gaetano Adi

Robotic Development
Hyundai New Horizons Studio (NHS) Head: John Suh
Guanaquerx Lead Robotics Engineer: Miguel Grassi
Guanaquerx Software Engineer: Tomas Grassi
NHS Lead Mechanical Design Engineer: John Strong
NHS Lead Robotics Control Systems Software Engineer: Zach Nobles
NHS Product Design Engineer: ordan Rozenda
NHS Mechanical and Electrical Design Engineer: Michael Webber
NHS Manufacturing and Test Engineer: Pierre Maurer
NHS Robotics Control Systems Software Engineer: Qotayba Alrayes
NHS Robotics & Mechatronics Engineer: Varit Vichathorn
NHS Electrical and Electronics Design Engineer: Henry Cole
NHS Power Electronics R&D Engineer:  Noah Hedding