ANCESTORS

Hanna Haaslahti

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Installations
Electronic Language International Festival

ANCESTORS – Finland

ANCESTORS is an intimate and one-of-a-kind immersive experience, where you become progenitor of a virtually generated genealogy. At the heart of the experience are your descendants, connecting you and other visitors as ancestors of a unique, one-time virtual lineage.

BIO
She is an artist and director working with digital images. Her central tool is computer vision, and she explores how machines shape social relations. Her artworks generate new forms of narrative interaction between people, investigating the possibilities of human-machine-human collaboration. Her practice is inspired by scientific research on perception, vision, and machine learning/artificial intelligence, as well as by everyday observations of life in the contemporary age of technological supremacy.

Cryptic Ruins
It’s the year 21020 and a mysterious archaeological site has been uncovered in what was central London. A large communal structure seemingly dedicated to unproductive expending of energy from human bodies. Whilst we might easily identify it as a gym, our descendants are concerned with why it exists at all. By framing the 21st century compulsion towards physical fitness as a mysterious practice of the past that requires decoding, Deja’s playful film reveals something of the absurdity of contemporary urban life and questions the rationality of our obsessions.

TETRAGRAMMATON
A dialogue between these two artists on themes of myth, ritual and meaning, as much about their exhaustion and propensity to bewilderment as any potential they may inhere, for recuperation for and by language, culture and society. Joey’s work, ‘Religiously observant’, is inspired by alchemical and occult ideas, the world of spirits and hallucinations. The wall print features a gold CGI blazon of the Tetragrammaton It references the Sumerian mythology of the Annunaki a race of ancient chthonic fertility Gods, subsequently inscribed in a series of publications by Zecharia Sitchin (a kind of elder statesman of conspiracy theorists worldwide) as descendants of aliens, who enslaved the human race to extract gold from the earth. John’s work similarly ranges over territories of opposition: between ancient and contemporary; mythic and kitsch; between the viscid and primordial. It takes as its subject the vector of congealment, in the Marxist sense of the way labour power is congealed in commodities and so forth, extending this metaphor into an aesthetics of myth and ritual, emptied out, flattened, compacted like a sedimentary layer of anthropocene garbage, for the post-historical epoch.The sound component provides an aural complement to this structure of refuse, exhaustion and abjection. Mixing pre- or post-linguistic utterances, grunts, groans, screaming: a kind of secular glossolalia chaotically interwoven with whalesong, deep techno and political oratory.