Vanishing Acts: AI, Performative Knowledge & Sustainable Memory

Vanishing Acts is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, sustainability, and cultural memory. In collaboration with the University of Malta’s Department of AI and the Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS), the conference explores how AI transforms the creative process while raising urgent questions about authorship, the "vanishing" human element, and the preservation of embodied knowledge in a digital age.

Our Presentation

Ancestral Algorithms: AI, Cultural Memory, and the Submerged Body

Presenters: Brigette Dunn-Korpela & Nak Yong Choi

Format: Panel R: Coding, Archiving, Ancestral & Diasporic Futurities

In this presentation, we introduce ECHO Immersion, a transdisciplinary collaboration that reclaims AI as a tool for ancestral recovery. Moving away from the narrative of technology as a tool of erasure, we present a "speculative archive" for Black diasporic lives lost during the Middle Passage.

Brigette Dunn-Korpela & Nak Yong Choi (virtual): ‘Ancestral Algorithms: AI, Cultural

Memory, and the Submerged Body’

This presentation examines ECHO Immersion—a transdisciplinary collaboration between

choreographer Brigette Dunn-Korpela and XR/AI artist-director Nak Yong Choi—as a live

inquiry into how AI can become a vessel for ancestral memory and performative knowledge.

Rooted in Dunn-Korpela’s concept of geotemporalecholocation—a methodology that integrates

sound, geography, and nonlinear time through the sensing body—the project stages AI not as an

instrument of erasure, but as a speculative archive for Black diasporic presence, particularly

those lives marked by disappearance in the wake of the Middle Passage.

Set within immersive sonic and visual environments (including Into the Unknown,

CalArts 2025, and the forthcoming ECHO Immersion × Reef, Los Angeles 2026), the work

imagines a submerged/digital realm where memory, data, and embodiment coalesce. Using

generative AI tools (Runway ML, Google Veo 3, Hugging Face), spatial sound, field recordings,

and choreographic gestures, the collaboration translates movement into “ancestral

algorithms”—performative scripts that render the body both archive and transmitter. In doing

so, it responds to current debates on AI bias, vanishing archives, and sustainability in

performative media: Black and Brown bodies in motion can reprogram machine vision and data

ethics by re-inscribing somatic, ecological, and spiritual intelligence into digital systems.

Through this lens, AI becomes a site of listening and reckoning—an underwater chorus where

histories thought to have vanished reverberate once more.