Name: Black Bar Social: One Who Looks At The Cup
Start: 2024-09-17T18:00:00-07:00
End: 2024-09-17T21:00:00-07:00
Location: 135 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA, United States, California 90012

Black Bar Social: One Who Looks At The Cup

Dive into the world of divination at One Who Looks at the Cup, the next installment of The Music Center’s Black Bar Social series.
The practice of divination, which foretells the future by deciphering visual patterns in coffee grounds, will be brought to life through the lens of technology and community. “Bazhak Nayogh,” which is Armenian for “coffee reader” or “one who looks at the cup” will embark on a groundbreaking journey to train an AI model in the ancestral art of Armenian coffee cup reading.
The AI will be trained using coffee cup readings conducted with Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) members of the artist's communities, along with oral history interviews on the topic of liberatory futures. With training datasets in both Armenian and English, the AI’s outputs will be bilingual, honoring the linguistic richness of LA’s diasporic communities.
Experience the convergence of ancestral knowledge and emerging technologies as we chart a path towards the possibility of collectively authored futures.
This experience was created with DotDot Studio, Andrew Demirjian and Dahlia Elsayed.