Joel Ong

Memory Machines #3: an oceanic pas de deux (2026-28)

is an ongoing archival project exploring the entanglement of historical narratives and the physical storage devices within which these exist, age and percolate. The 3rd iteration in this series, Memory Machines #3: an oceanic pas de deux (2026-28) focuses on the creative and poetic ways coastal environments become portals for memory and the way earthbodies (humans and more-than-human bodies) become implicated as inscription devices within them.

The project will feature a duet between two robotic arms programmed to mimic a series of behaviours learned from recorded videos of deep sea robots behind a video wall of found footage of deep sea robots from the Oceans Networks Canada run Oceans 3.0 data portal.  

Building on current YOLO based programs that are optimized for human post estimation and reconstruction, we use a gradient of generative AI programs to parse movement instructions from videos into coordinates for directing our robotic arms. The project will also convert live movement data from the robotic arms to generative graphics in Augmented Reality that is viewable from a mobile device. For the CVPR art gallery, this single channel video is one part documentation of the project, part presentation of the visuals generated through the development of a series of pose estimations and movement vectors are recontextualized as ‘Tiktok’ dance moves for a 6 axis robotic arm to execute. 

While providing an interesting expansion of the notion of computer vision technologies, the project aligns with the emerging thematic of Integrative Cognitive Frameworks (Hayles,2025) that prioritize non-hierarchical, diverse and collaborative imagining with machines and other more-than-human intelligences.. With this ongoing project, we seek outliers in datasets around the deep sea - statistical outliers and in particular unseen labour through robot choreography, we also question exclusions that are culturally and politically motivated, such as omissions of context, metadata or communities. The title pas de deux also refers to pioneering Canadian animations artist Norman McLaren’s work whose work set the stage for our progress in depicting virtual traces and memory in digital art. 

This work has been supported by funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through a SSHRC Insight Grant.  

Link:

https://www.arkfrequencies.com/memory-machines-3-an-oceanic-pas-de-deux/