"Cryptic Lineages" at Museum of the Moving Image

“Cryptic Lineages” explores emerging AI technologies through an expansive body of work that includes performance, installation, video, sound, sculpture, and prints. The project premiered at the Museum of the Moving Image as a theatrical performance screening featuring projection, live vocalizations, and choreographed movements. A sensuous AI-generated video underlies a haunting narration read using an AI clone of Splan’s voice. The narration is accompanied by a data-driven ambient soundscape created with machine learning technology and simulated muscle movement data. Together, these elements interweave science and fiction through speculations on a future generated by the detritus of the past.

Using “physical reservoir computing” as a conceptual scaffold, “Cryptic Lineages” delves into the use of liquid, microbes, plants, and human bodies to perform computational processing and machine learning tasks. Drawing upon real scientific experiments using water, bacteria, strawberries, and living tissue to process information, the work interrogates the increasingly porous boundaries between the computational and the biological. A fantastical narrative unfolds where even the metabolic activity of wastewater becomes a reservoir for modeling and predicting disaster in a posthuman landscape shaped by late-stage capitalism. The work confronts the sociopolitical complexities of harnessing the intrinsic processes of dynamical systems to predict changes, forecast events, or detect anomalous behavior. Themes of energy, labor, and the instrumentalization of bodies offer poetic reflections on how our cultural constructions of "nature" and the "individual" might shape—and be reshaped by—the future of computing and artificial intelligence.