Cryptic Lineages
Friday, June 13 at 7pm
solo performance screening for Reframe
supported by the National Endowment for the Arts
Curated by Regina Harsanyi
Museum of the Moving Image
Astoria, NY
“Cryptic Lineages” explores computational futures through a provocative exploration of emerging AI technologies. Using physical reservoir computing as a conceptual scaffold, interdisciplinary artist Laura Splan explores the use of liquid, bacteria, plants, and living tissue to perform machine learning tasks. The work examines the sociopolitical complexities of harnessing the intrinsic processes of dynamical systems to predict changes, forecast events, or detect anomalous behavior. Splan’s live performance screening combines video, animation, and sound accompanied by live vocalizations. Drawing upon scientific experiments using water, bacteria, and human tissue as computational media, “Cryptic Lineages” interrogates the increasingly blurred boundaries between the computational and the corporeal. Themes of energy, waste, labor, and the instrumentalization of bodies offer poetic reflections on how our cultural constructions of nature and bodies can inform and reshape the future of computation.
“Cryptic Lineages” explores computational futures through a provocative exploration of emerging AI technologies. Using physical reservoir computing as a conceptual scaffold, interdisciplinary artist Laura Splan explores the use of liquid, bacteria, plants, and living tissue to perform machine learning tasks. The work examines the sociopolitical complexities of harnessing the intrinsic processes of dynamical systems to predict changes, forecast events, or detect anomalous behavior. Splan’s live performance screening combines video, animation, and sound accompanied by live vocalizations. Drawing upon scientific experiments using water, bacteria, and human tissue as computational media, “Cryptic Lineages” interrogates the increasingly blurred boundaries between the computational and the corporeal. Themes of energy, waste, labor, and the instrumentalization of bodies offer poetic reflections on how our cultural constructions of nature and bodies can inform and reshape the future of computation.
