ZEN COHEN

Oracle Machine

Oracle Machine is a totemic response to the acceleration of machine learning, the immense scale of digital images it produces, and the extractive infrastructures that sustain this proliferation. The installation creates space to reflect on the shifting role of the human collaborator within this ritual of hyperproduction—as both conduit and disturbance, poking at the signal.

The installation positions a monitor lying in repose beneath a suspended endoscope, encased in rose quartz—a material historically associated with healing and divination. This configuration references the dowsing pendulum, framing the apparatus as both sensing device and speculative oracle. A live video feedback loop is established between camera and screen, producing recursive fields of color, texture, and light.

Viewers are invited to intervene in this system by moving their hands beneath the camera to trigger swinging movements to subtly alter the feedback signal. These gestures generate shifting visual “currents,” where the body becomes both input and image. The interaction is further mediated through TouchDesigner, which mixes live feedback with prerecorded footage of water bodies and landscapes across the Southeast. These layered streams—personal, environmental, and computational—circulate together, evoking the movement of tides, floods, and flows.

Through its iterative process of echoing images, Oracle Machine operates as a generative system—part divination tool, part image machine—where meaning emerges through recursion, interference, and the unstable boundary between human presence and automated production.

Print interventions with video feedback:

Video footage of water bodies (floods, ponds, swimming pools, waterfalls, Pacific and Atlantic ocean) used to create time displacement in TouchDesigner:

The project's first iteration was installed in the Lee Gallery at Clemson University as part of the Art Department’s faculty exhibit, Artists Teaching: Teaching Artists. Throughout the six-week exhibition, interactions with the installation were recorded to produce media files for extracting still frames to make prints and handmade books.

The next phase of the project is currently in development and will include collaborations with machine and software engineers at Clemson to design a motion-responsive camera that will swing like a pendulum.

Additionally, I worked with Dana Potter, founder of HiLo Arts Labs, a curatorial and collaborative printmaking project that connects print and new media works. Working with Prof. Potter, the collaborative printmaking portion of the project transformed still frames from the media files recorded during the exhibit this fall into an editioned portfolio of fine art prints. Using visuals initially generated through the iterative process of video feedback, a set of variable prints emphasizes the generative qualities of printmaking.