What if all that was left to solve on Earth was judgement?

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This project puts a contemporary ideology and visual style - pre-columbian, baroque, and borderless explorations of a third spaces in the desert - at the heart of a cross cultural narrative.

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We submit this work as part of the Future Vision XPRIZE competition. We will update this post with more information about the project. In the mean time you may find more information about the art of the De La Torre brothers here:

www.delatorrebrothers.art

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LOGLINE

After seeing a vengeful criminal hack a doctor's implants and frame a local drifter, two young friends face a deadly choice: keep quiet to survive, or step into an AI-mediated tribunal to speak the truth.

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SYNOPSIS

Set in a high-tech desert, this story explores how two friends come of age in a world governed by agentic justice. While hiding out past curfew in the third space between the worlds, they witness a bitter outcast murder a doctor by overriding his heart implant. To cover his tracks, the killer frames Xapawiyeme, an incapacitated drifter, setting her up for permanent Civic Severance.

For Huck, survival means staying silent. He knows the killer is a skilled hacker who can use exploits to target them. But Kauyu is consumed by guilt that Xapa’s impending trial would lead to digital exile. In a culture where everyday life and legal systems are mediated by automated agents, the boys face a modern rites-of-passage: learning how to project their own authentic human voice through layers of algorithmic noise. Kauyu realizes that relying on automated feeds without human input allows truth to be manipulated.

The Agentic Tribunal scene unfolds as a cross-cultural musical. Kauyu delivers his testimony in a syncopated cumbia rhythm. Blending pre-Columbian motifs, Mexican folklore, and Midwestern American lore, the song weaves together a plot with ancestral lore that transcends national boundaries and time. In this world, the characters—rendered with the luminous, sculpted presence of blown glass—move through a fusion of heritage and high tech, suggesting that moral truth and accountability to your peers will be core to any future society, even if there are many bodies and minds made of fused silica.

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STATEMENT

De La Torre Brothers. Einar and Jamex De La Torre were born in Guadalajara, México (1963 & 1960). Moving to a California beach town in 1972, the complexities of their bicultural identity and current life on both sides of the border—Baja California and San Diego—deeply inform their practice. Their signature style combines blown glass sculpture, mixed media, and lenticular printing. Their work blends religious iconography, German expressionism, Mexican vernacular arts, and pre-Columbian motifs. They have completed 18 solo museum exhibitions, 8 public art projects, and 4 biennales.

Philip Meier is a printmaker, neuroscientist, and founder of 10zebra: a next-generation video creation platform. His work centers on visual perception and how artists trick the brain into seeing fiction. Holding a PhD in computational neuroscience from UCSD, he is passionate about drawing, painting, and applying art and science to social problems. Philip helps creative teams blend traditional camera work with generative AI, leveraging curation, reference frameworks, and machine-driven visual understanding to build novel human-machine workflows.

Project Collaboration Statement. This project is a collaboration between Philip Meier and the De la Torre brothers. The team is pushing into transmedia storytelling. Characters were physically crafted in intricate blown glass by the De la Torre brothers, and then extended into an animated narrative, to create new character variations, and style combinations for this project.

After being installed at the Laguna Art Museum for an exhibit of the same name (“The Tipping Point”), every visual asset was captured entirely on a Pixel phone and generated through the 10zebra platform. Multi-layered worlds—where cumbia, agentic justice, and ancestral memory converge—can be realized dynamically at the edge of mobile technology and collaborative human creativity. We are fascinated by the labyrinthine complexity our technology promises, and walk forward with curiosity, hoping to help build a better future in this multifaceted world.

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Lighting glass sculptures with De La Torre Brothers

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