The Armenian artist combines traditional tasseography with algorithmic technologies to explore the nature of erasure
Can AI see the future? This short film, by Armenian artist and researcher Mashinka Hakopian and her collaborators, follows a project which trains a large language model to perform coffee readings in English and Armenian. ԲԱԺԱԿ ՆԱՅՈՂ / ONE WHO LOOKS AT THE CUP is composed of audio recordings from six different readings led by members of the SWANA diaspora which were used to create a dataset, accompanied by an illustrative video. Each clip opens with a shot of a cup lined with used coffee grounds slowly swivelling around its base, followed by snapshots of querents leading the interpretation. “There are sonic vibrations that are resonating from your past in order to be heard in this moment”, one says. Though they are looking to the future, their words speak about the past and the present. They tell stories about their ancestors, mothers and grandmothers that inform what they see in the cup: a megaphone, a thin ring, the ventricles and aorta of a heart. Tasseography, the art of coffee reading, has been circulating as a form of divination or ‘predictive technology’ across the SWANA region since the sixteenth century. It’s believed that the practice became particularly widespread among Armenian diasporic communities after the Armenian genocide of 1915–23. It acted, the film states, as ‘a method of affirming futurity in the face of a catastrophic present.’
Each sequence is separated from the next by a black and white text card designed in a blotch-test pattern, mirroring the coffee stains, which provides more information on how the AI model works and on the history of tasseography. The film’s alignment of tasseography and algorithmic technologies creates a sobering framework through which to consider artificial intelligence. Both practices are forms of divination, we come to understand, to the extent that they are methods of searching for knowledge based on an interpretation of signs. The idea calls to mind Hito Steyerl’s 2016 essay ‘A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition’. When sorting through large amounts of data, what constitutes ‘signal’, an acceptable pattern, asks Steyerl, and what is just ‘noise’, discardable dirty data? How does this contribute to legitimising the status quo? By turning our attention to the process of data collection, Hakopian refuses the erasure of her subjects and instead foregrounds their voices, experiences and desires through touching vignettes that evoke the feeling of fond memories – affective elements that tend to disappear when inputted into a spreadsheet. Her system, she shows, is proudly built on ‘dirty data’, from the grounds up.
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: ԲԱԺԱԿ ՆԱՅՈՂ / ONE WHO LOOKS AT THE CUP, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, dir. Atlas Acopian, score by Lara Sarkissian, 2024
17 November–17 December 2025
© Courtesy the artist
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a writer, artist and researcher born in Yerevan, Armenia and residing and working on Tongva land in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design, a Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics at the New School, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge Visual Culture. She is the author of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022), an artist book and work of speculative feminist media theory that presents lectures on data justice delivered by “artificial killjoys.” Her research and in-progress monograph explore ancestral intelligences: data feminist interventions in computational media rooted in ancestral, non-Western knowledge systems.
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