Bello is a multimedia research-creation project that speculates on the life and symbolic persistence of Alejandro Bello Silva, reframing his historical disappearance as an active field of affective and cultural production. Drawing on the Chilean expression “más perdido que el Teniente Bello”—often articulated through irony—the project explores how meaning emerges from the divergence between semantic content and prosodic tone.

AVE

01.12.22

Poema Espiral

02.12.22

AlgarveXR

03.12.22

Bitácora

04.12.22

At its core, Bello develops Affective Virtual Environments (AVE): immersive 360º spaces generated from voice through a lightweight multimodal system optimized for Hugging Face. This system integrates speech emotion recognition using an LSTM architecture trained on 40 MFCC features, automatic transcription, and sentiment analysis to produce synchronized audiovisual outputs, including AI-generated panoramic imagery and emotion-conditioned soundscapes.

Extending this framework, the project develops a speculative visual archive generated through sentiment analysis of poetic corpora from Project Gutenberg, reimagined as latent works Bello might have produced during his time in France. Within this perspective, Bello is no longer framed as a lost figure, but as a distributed presence—emerging across voice, computation, and affect—disrupting conventional notions of disappearance, authorship, and historical closure.

We also develop a symbolic representation of Teniente Bello’s life through the presence of a coral-colored paper airplane that traverses the visual and narrative space of the project. This fragile aircraft—at once a childlike object and a poetic device—stands in contrast to the militarized machine, transforming flight into an act of imagination rather than control. As it moves through clouds, it evokes uncertainty, opacity, and the threshold between visibility and disappearance; the sky becomes not a navigable field, but an indeterminate space where orientation dissolves. Crossing the Andes mountain range (cordillera), the airplane engages with a powerful national and geological symbol—one that traditionally signifies permanence, and identity—yet here it is gently traversed, suggesting transcendence over imposed boundaries. Finally, its passage over the sea recalls both origin and loss: an open, fluid expanse historically tied to migration, memory, and vanishing. Together, these elements—airplane, clouds, cordillera, and sea—compose a symbolic system through which Bello’s trajectory is reimagined not as a failed flight, but as a continuous movement across material and metaphysical landscapes, where disappearance becomes a form of transformation rather than absence.