Բաժակ Նայող / One Who Looks at the Cup

Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup)
With Dahlia Elsayed, Andrew Demirjian, and Danny Snelson

For All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
REDCAT / Getty PST Art & Science
Curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar and Talia Heiman
September 12, 2024 – February 23, 2025

Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup) is a collaboration that uses community dataset creation to train a model to perform coffee reading and to output predictions in both Armenian and English. Coffee reading divines a querent’s past, present, and future by decoding the visual patterns at the bottom of their cup. This method of divination originates in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa), where it has circulated as a predictive technology since as early as the 16th century. Across SWANA diasporas, coffee reading has been matrilineally transmitted as a ritual of affirming futurity.

The project’s bilingual training corpus features transcripts and images from coffee readings conducted by the artist with SWANA diasporans in Los Angeles; oral histories gathered on the subject of liberatory futures; and text from turn-of-the- century Armenian feminist writer, Shushanik Kurghinian. Its bilingual, community-generated training data and outputs aim to counter algolinguicism: processes that minoritize speakers of non-dominant languages and obstruct their access to the authorship of digital technologies. In these ways, One Who Looks at the Cup turns to intuitive, embodied, and ancestral forms of collective future-making to unsettle the technoscientific logics of algorithmic prediction.

The iteration of One Who Looks at the Cup on view in REDCAT’s exhibition, “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace,” was developed in collaboration with Dahlia Elsayed, Andrew Demirjian, and Danny Snelson. The installation stages a SWANA futurist kitchen, reflecting the kitchen as a site where tasseography is customarily practiced. Visitors receive a cup and are instructed to smudge it with their thumb to reveal the messages it contains, per the rituals of traditional tasseography. The coffee reader subsequently printouts bilingual predictions drawing from the community-generated datasets developed in the project’s training process.

One Who Looks at the Cup was supported by the Music Center Digital Innovation Initiative.

Project Credits:

With: Dahlia Elsayed, Andrew Demirjian, Danny Snelson

Translators: Margo Gevorgyan and Hayk Makhmuryan

Creative Technologists: Danny Snelson and DOTDOT

Dataset Contributors: Atlas Acopian, Erik Adamian, Gilda Davidian, Kareem Estefan, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Margo Gevorgyan, Ani Kalafian, Natalie Kamajian, Hayk Makhmuryan, Carene Rose Mekertichyan, Ara Oshagan, Nadia Sarkissian, Yasaman Sheri, Lia Soorenian, Marina Terteryan, Meldia Yesayan, Ryat Yezbick

Dataset Features Text From: Shushanik Kurghinian, I Want to Live, trans. Shushan Avagyan, ed. Susan Barba and Victoria Rowe. With special thanks to the translator and editors.

With Illustrated Excerpts From: Carina Karapetian Giorgi, “Intuitive Knowledge: The Queer Phenomenology of Armenian Matrilineal Rituals of Tasseography”