Ancestral Computation

Image: Nouf Aljowaysir, Where Am I From? (still), 2022.

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, October 21 at 7pm for the screening program Ancestral Computation, followed by a discussion between artist Nouf Aljowaysir and curator Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. The program is co-presented with ArteEast.

Ancestral Computation assembles works that counter the epistemes of Western technoscience, from across the SWANA region and its diasporic time-spaces. These works call forth ancestral intelligences, inheriting forms of worldmaking surfaced from the lacunae of omissive datasets and archives of dispossession. They traverse algorithmic dream divination; develop tools for upending classificatory protocols; evade technologies of capture; and conjure precolonial deities through radio transmissions. They invoke alternate temporalities, rejecting the consignment of non-Western technologies to the dustbins of media history.

This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. The full Ancestral Intelligences program will be available online on artearchive.org from October 21–31, 2025. This program expands on the screening Ancestral Intelligences, hosted at Cambridge University by Cambridge Film & Screen and Cambridge Visual Culture. Ancestral Intelligences was curated by Mashinka Hakopian in conversation with Kareem Estefan.

Films

Kamee Abrahamian, Transmission (Canada and United States, 2018, 13 minutes)
K and L are cultural conservationists working in a not-so-distant future to preserve the artifacts and histories that are being systematically destroyed by a totalitarian government. When they are in a deadly car accident, time splinters into parallel realities, separating them. Each enters a reality where one dies while the other lives, and they embark on a search between worlds to find each other again.

Nouf Aljowaysir, Where Am I From? (United States, 2022, 12 minutes)
Where Am I From? (Ana Min Wein?) is a short film and visual diary that explores the director’s identity using two different perspectives, hers and that of an AI “narrator.” After immigrating to the United States from Saudi Arabia at a young age, Nouf examines her identity by tracing the memories of her childhood and family. As the AI character sustains her journey, he reveals stereotypes and biases derived from his training and algorithmic composition. Contrasting oral storytelling with artificial intelligence, Where Am I From? exposes the reduction of Nouf’s identity and the eradication of the collective memory of her ancestors.

Morehshin Allahyari, Speculations on Capture (United Kingdom, 2024, 40 minutes)
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London has over 19,000 objects from the Islamic world, ranging from the 7th century to the early 20th century. Allahyari’s poetic film explores the stories of astronomical instruments made in Iran and Pakistan, and now held at the V&A. Dating from the 1200s to the 1700s, each object was modeled in 3D specifically for this project and features in the film alongside archival documents and related photographs. The museum’s archives, used in the film as a case study, capture only fragments of these objects’ histories. Documents record their arrival between about 1865 and 1930, but there is little sense of how their displacement impacted their places of origin and the people living there. Speculations on Capture expands on these partially told tales.

Yazan Khalili, Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind (Palestine, 2016, 7 minutes)In Hiding our Faces like the Dancing Wind, Khalili presents a video that is a screen seen through a number of other screens. This interplay exposes structures, operations, and algorithms that become the image itself. The video questions the use of technology and its tendency to typecast. Khalili features a woman's face captured by a camera screen, which appears to confuse the facial recognition system so that a sequence of ethnographic masks interrupts the frame.

Sadia Quddus, Istikhara Dream Cycle (2024, 21 minutes)
Istikhara Dream Cycle carries visitors through a cycle of sacred runes and dreamscapes, conjured through the Dreamer's questions seeking guidance through polycrisis. Through an algorithmic loop of inquiry and response, the dream alternates between seeker and guide, past and future. The Interpreter of Dreams divines answers through Istikhara, or Islamic dream divination. The Dreamer enters Alam al-Mithal, an imaginary realm that allows contact between human souls and the divine through symbols and images. This project trains a generative text upon the scholarship and Dream Dictionary of Ibn Sirin, from 7th century Iraq.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.