Oracle Index lets crypto miners program the cinema

Four secondhand mining rigs, stranded when Ethereum walked away from proof-of-work in 2022, have been given a second career as projectionists. In Oracle Index, the generative cinema installation by latency.club at Medialab Matadero in Madrid through Dec. 13, each rig holds one segment of a fictional archive and competes in the same cryptographic lottery that secures Bitcoin; the winner earns the right to put its video on the gallery's LED screen. The film you watch is cut by algorithmic chance, which is exactly the point.

latency.club is the collaborative platform of Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn, who work between Havana and Berlin across art, cinema and ethnography. The scenario: after a total embargo Cubans call La Opción Cero, the state turns to cryptocurrency and prediction markets for hard currency, adopting Futarchy, the governance model in which speculators bet on which policies will meet collective goals. Locked out of the official platform, ordinary Cubans run underground betting economies over illicit satellite links, feeding repurposed government data streams into La Bolita, the island's centuries-old numbers lottery, while Santería practitioners fold AI into divination. The whole thing is framed as the archive of an unnamed anthropologist, and its scenes are performed by real people the artists met researching Cuba's informal digital infrastructures, playing fictional future versions of themselves; the dream recordings of clandestine Bolita players are staged in deliberately outdated generative AI, per the venue.

The piece sits in The Mechanics of Truth, the exhibition of the Medialab's LAB 5 program curated by Bani Brusadin, alongside work by Lucia Rebolino, Martyna Marciniak, and Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich. The announcement came through the Rijksakademie, where Siré is a resident.

Killscreen covered the pair's dice-roll gamebook about Cuba's Axie Infinity collapse this month.