Archaeologies of AI is a research-creation project that blends theatrical performances, academic research, and writings. I build a series of lecture performances that invite the audience to reflect on technologies in various ways, by incorporating the use of generative AI such as chatbots, DALL-E images, and video art as part of the artistic language.

How might we imagine alternative futures of AI technology
by excavating its deep histories and archaeologies?

Using the media-archaeological method, the project digs into various historical stories, and weaves alternative genealogies between contemporary developments of technology and their historical counterparts. I conduct (archival) research and share the research output through embodied storytelling and live performance.

How might we resist and challenge the deeply
capitalist, extractivist, and colonialist nature of technology?

Each instalment of the series focuses on a specific historical or contemporary technological artefact, and in retelling its stories, I foreground marginalised voices of women, people of colour, and non-humans in the creation and use of technology. The key artistic form is lecture performances which are expanded through embodied storytelling, theatrical acting, dance, and visuals.

Through these stories, I hope to empower audiences to reimagine possibilities of our technological futures by looking at its (forgotten) pasts and presents, as well as to decentre white-capitalist tech by turning to AI’s multicultural contexts.

Works developed and in progress include:

Dance-based performance When the world is at war, we just keep dancing (2018) focuses on the extraction of coltan, produced by volcanic activity of the Nyiragongo in Congo. Coltan hosts technology minerals tantalum and niobium, and is essential for smartphones. 80% of the world’s coltan comes from Congo, and 80% of coltan from Congo comes from the Nyiragongo region. Anchored through a traditional Congolese dance, I dig into the deep earths of coltan mining, and narrate the story of its violence to human labour, and its ecological devastation.

Storytelling performance Colonising Time: A tale of timekeeping technology, rotational movements, and murder (2022) proposes the subversive potential of anti-clockwise movement in challenging capitalist progression of time. Under the backdrop of timekeeping technology of GMT time and its relationship to colonial imperialist expansion, I set the scene by referring to the triangular trade and how this is mapped by colonial telegraph systems. Inspired by the counter-clockwise dances of European witches, the story then zooms into the technical failure of the 1858 undersea trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, whose blunder can be attributed in part to the anti-clockwise twist of cable fibres, and imagines anti-clockwise movement as resistance to tech infrastructures.

Séance-based performance The Medium is a Medium (2023) focuses on excavating the relationship between AI and death, by studying surrealist artist Salvador Dali’s resurrection through AI and the Generative AI engine Dall-E named after him, and by interviewing Alan Turing from beyond the grave.

Séance-based performance Teredo Cablistrius (2024) zooms into the anti-colonial revenge, sabotage and multi-species resistance against technological capture. Featuring Florence Cook, a Victorian female medium, and the Teredo Cablistrius cable worm, I use historical data from the maritime archives of England and the Netherlands, as well as the archives of Society of Psychical Research to reconstruct a Victorian séance that channels mediumship through my computer and my body to tell stories against technological extractivism and patriarchy.

All of these works include live performance, visual traces, scripts, and research papers. I am currently in the research phase of a divination-based performance reflecting on the non-binary cosmologies of I-CHING as the inspiration of binary computation.

In Spring 2025, I worked on griefbots and AI death tech, as part of my artistic fellowship in the “Living with AI” Residency Programme at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. A lecture performance When AI dreams of death is in development for Spring/ Autumn 2026.

I am currently writing a book together with media scholar Anthony Enns on smart home horror films, and tracing the genealogy of the networked homes to Spiritualist experiments in the late 19th – early 20th century in US/ UK.

I have also been invited to design and teach a Core Curriculum course for the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis based on this research project, Archaeologies of AI: From Bots to Spectres, currently in its 3rd edition.