"Cryptic Lineages" at Museum of the Moving Image

“Cryptic Lineages” navigates computational futures through a provocative examination of emerging AI technologies. Using physical reservoir computing as a conceptual scaffold, interdisciplinary artist Laura Splan delves into the use of liquid, microbes, plants, and human bodies to perform machine learning tasks. The work confronts the sociopolitical complexities of harnessing the intrinsic processes of dynamical systems to predict changes, forecast events, or detect anomalous behavior. Splan’s performance screening combines video, animation, and sound accompanied by live vocalizations and movement. Drawing upon scientific experiments using water, bacteria, strawberry plants, and living tissue to process information, “Cryptic Lineages” interrogates the increasingly porous boundaries between the computational and the organic. Themes of energy, waste, 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. As an expansive body of work, “Cryptic Lineages” encompasses artworks, events, publications, and workshops that cultivate sublime encounters with our shared humanity amid an evolving technoscientific landscape.

MOVEMENT
Choreography by Mary John Frank performed by Sayer Mansfield

MoMI PRODUCTION TEAM
Fred Baez, Chief Projectionist & Audio Visual Technician
Stuart Andrew Dodson, Second Projectionist, Audiovisual Technician
Matthaeus Choo Tung, Graphic Designer

ADDITIONAL PRODUCTION SUPPORT
Dance Tech Collective
Maud Acheampong
Reuben Lorch-Miller