Oracle Index - latency.club

Oracle Index is a generative cinema installation that imagines a future Cuba in which cryptocurrency, prediction markets, artificial intelligence, underground gambling, and divination become intertwined as systems for navigating economic uncertainty.

The work begins from a speculative scenario. In the aftermath of a total embargo known on the island as La Opción Cero, the government turns to cryptocurrency and prediction markets to draw in hard currency and foreign capital. The Communist Party adopts Futarchy, a model of governance in which political institutions set collective goals while market speculators bet on which policies are most likely to reach them, with the blockchain supplying the transparency and resistance to manipulation the system requires. Locked out of the state-backed platform, ordinary Cubans build underground betting economies, trading derivatives of the official markets over illicit satellite links and repurposing government data streams as raw material for La Bolita, the island’s centuries-old numbers lottery. As they always have, players search for its numbers in their dreams and read them through La Charada. Meanwhile, Santería practitioners fold artificial intelligence into divination.

This narrative is presented as a fragmented archive, assembled by an unnamed anthropologist who studies this other Cuba. It includes interviews, fieldnotes, state broadcasts, social-media fragments, and newsreels, as well as dream recordings of clandestine Bolita players, staged using outdated generative AI models. All scenes are performed by real people from the artists’ earlier ethnographic fieldwork on Cuba’s informal digital and economic infrastructures, here playing fictional future versions of themselves.

A large LED screen receives videos from four competing cryptocurrency miners, each holding one segment of the fictional archive. Every miner participates in a cryptographic lottery, the same proof-of-work process that secures Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The winner earns the right to transfer its next video to the screen, creating an evolving narrative determined by algorithmic chance. The machines are secondhand rigs, stranded when Ethereum abandoned proof-of-work mining in 2022 and given a second life here as narrators of the archive.

Oracle Index is part of the exhibition The Mechanics of Truth within the LAB 5 program curated by Bani Brusadin.

Generative cinema installation: LED screen and four cryptocurrency miners.

About the artists

latency.club is an evolving collaborative platform initiated by Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn, operating between Havana, Berlin, and other contexts.

Working across art, cinema, and ethnography, they explore how infrastructures of finance, data, and governance infiltrate everyday life, and how people construct, modify, and reappropriate these systems under conditions of scarcity, exclusion, and control.  

Their works have been presented in museums and institutions worldwide, including Seoul Museum of Art, Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art, the Warsaw Biennial, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, The Photographers’ Gallery London, and the New York Latin American Art Triennial, among others. 

latency.club / nestorsire.com / steffenkoehn.com