One Who Looks at the Cup / Բաժակ Նայող

collaborative project created with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Dahlia Elsayed, & Danny Snellson

Tasseography, or coffee reading, has been practiced across the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) region since as early as the 16th century. Tasseography is a data feminist practice that privileges intuitive, embodied, and ancestrally learned divination over the Western scientific knowledge of algorithmic prediction. In Armenian diasporas, coffee reading has been matrilineally transmitted as a ritual of affirming futures.

One Who Looks at the Cup Բաժակ Նայող places the histories of tasseography in conversation with contemporary landscapes of artificial intelligence. These landscapes script techno-futures that structurally exclude speakers of non-dominant languages as authors and participants. Through a process of community dataset creation, this project trains an AI model to perform tasseography by detecting the visual patterns in coffee grounds. Its bilingual datasets are compiled through coffee readings conducted by the artist with SWANA members of her communities, as well as oral history interviews on the subject of liberatory futures. The project launched in September 2024 at REDCAT in Los Angeles, one year after a genocidal assault on the Armenians of Artsakh that led to the state’s dissolution and the mass deportation of its Indigenous population. One Who Looks at the Cup explores the possibility of “ancestral intelligence,” modeling AI that affirms collectively authored futures rooted in ancestral pasts.