Speculative Encounter

Source: Klasies River Cave in Tidal Dialogue by Aaniyah Martin, Amy Rusch, Sarah Wurz, Meghan Judge This creative-critical work stages a speculative encounter between a large language model and the ocean at Klasies River Caves on South Africa’s southern coast. Klasies is one node within a dense constellation of coastal archaeological sites through which narratives of early Homo sapiens have been assembled and circulated globally (Parkington 2006; Wurz 2013; Larbey et al. 2019). Excavated as scientific proof of human intelligence, the cave is also a coastal waterscape shaped by ancestral presence, colonial extraction, sedimentary processes and contemporary regimes of access and enclosure (Parkington 2006). Grounded in strandlooping (Martin 2024a)—walking with the tide as a method of thinking with water and deep time—the work brings artificial intelligence (AI) into dialogue with oceanic, geological, archaeological and embodied forms of knowing. Rather than positioning AI as a neutral or inevitable tool, the encounter exposes the epistemic limits of algorithmic systems trained on extractive, settler-scientific knowledge infrastructures. Through poetic dialogues, failed translations, code fragments and sonic interruptions, the ocean reveals what the machine cannot hold: salt, silence, grief, wisdom, ancestral memory and the relational ethics of environmental care.