"Cryptic Lineages" at Museum of the Moving Image

“Cryptic Lineages” presents a provocative exploration of emerging AI technologies through an expansive body of work that encompasses video, animation, sound, and artist books. The project premiered at the Museum of the Moving Image as a performance screening that included projection accompanied by Splan’s live vocalizations and the choreographed movements of a dancer. The work is materially grounded in AI-generated video with a narration read using an AI clone of Splan’s voice. The narration is accompanied by an ambient soundscape created with a machine learning technology known as “reservoir computing” using simulated muscle movement data. Together, these elements weave a poetic narrative that merge 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 machine learning tasks. Rather than relying solely on conventional silicon-based hardware like processors and circuit boards, reservoir computing uses the dynamics of natural systems. Shifting properties, such as the metabolic activity of bacteria or changes in the behavior of water under pressure, are treated as computational inputs. Natural responses to external stimuli are used as data streams for modeling, prediction, or classification. The work confronts the sociopolitical complexities of harnessing the intrinsic processes of dynamical systems to predict changes, forecast events, or detect anomalous behavior. Drawing upon scientific experiments using water, bacteria, strawberry plants, and living tissue to process information, the work 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.