In Conversation: Laura Elidedt Rodriguez on Rituals, Commodities, and Algorithmic Memory
- Amy Jiang
- Oct 17
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 3
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control. But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see. Ghosts in the Feedback Loop is a virtual exhibition that invites artists to work inside those cracks—to treat algorithmic systems not as endpoints of automation but as haunted infrastructures alive with memory, loss, and rebellion. This interview is part of TechnoMirage, UAAD’s latest curatorial & publishing project exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, speculative design, and collective imagination. Emerging from a multi-format event series—including a virtual exhibition, an online panel co-hosted with Parsons, and an IRL gathering of workshops, talks, and performances—the publication extends these dialogues into an archival form.
About the Artists
A multidisciplinary artist intertwining art, science, and speculative design practices, blending biotechnology, living systems, and digital space. Rooted in Mexican heritage, her projects explore rituals, monsters, illness, and bodies, reimagining coexistence across species and cultures. Based in the Netherlands, her work reflects on what it means to be human in the current techno-world.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background, and how your work connects to the theme “Ghosts in the Feedback Loop”?
I grew up in Michoacán, Mexico, and in my country, food is not just an item but a moment of celebration, connection, and history. For example, we are major exporters of avocado, but in recent years, the industry has been intervened by narcotrafficking, extortion, and land appropriation. In my city, the rise in avocado prices is directly related to the rise in violence. Therefore, the avocado, often seen as a delicacy associated with health and a wellness lifestyle, also carries cartel violence.
On the other hand, mushrooms carry ritual knowledge but have been commodified in Europe and the USA as items for productivity, with trends of microdosing in Silicon Valley. Tomatoes carry colonial suspicion, as the acidic fruit leached lead from the pewter plates used by wealthy families in Europe, causing lead poisoning.
My practice comes from there: seeing food as a medium haunted by history. In Edible Notions, I train AI on these ingredients to show how biases don’t just disappear—they echo like ghosts. The curatorial statement speaks of ways of knowing that are erased but still present in the machine. That’s exactly how I understand my work: the ghosts are Indigenous rituals, violent economies, and silenced memories. By forcing them into AI’s blind spots, I’m not exorcising them; I’m letting them glitch the loop, reappear, and demand recognition.
Q: How do you perceive AI—as a tool, a collaborator, a medium, a subject, or something else? And how does that shape your artistic process?
I don’t see AI as a neutral tool. For me, it’s closer to what you describe in your statement: a haunted system. It remembers selectively; it forgets strategically. I treat it as a collaborator—more like a partner who can also lie, distort, or insist on its own logic, depending on the datasets, and our current datasets are heavily influenced by Western culture and capitalism. That tension shapes my process: I fine-tune models with partial, situated datasets so they get confused. They misbehave. They reveal their ghosts. Haraway calls the cyborg a site of struggle, not resolution. That’s how I hold AI in my work.
Q: What futures does your featured work gesture toward or warn against? Who do you imagine as your audience, and how do you hope they are impacted?
If AI keeps flattening difference into smooth universals, we’ll live in a future where cultural memories are reduced to consumables and local knowledge is forgotten—reduced to items of consumerism, like mushrooms as pharmaceutical pills or avocados as Instagram décor. That’s the future I’m warning against. But Edible Notions also gestures to another possibility: that AI can rewire itself through ghosts in the feedback loop, carrying overlooked knowledges back into view. My audience is anyone who eats, but especially those who trust AI outputs without thinking, digesting anything the algorithm gives them. I don’t want them to feel comfortable. I want them to feel the glitch. By tasting speculative dishes or watching mosaics of food entangled with violence and ritual, I want visitors to feel unsettled. Ideally, they leave not with answers but with new questions about the narratives we are unconsciously ingesting every day.
Q: Are there particular communities, histories, or environments your work remains in conversation with? How do those relationships evolve over time?
Yes, always. Michoacán’s avocado industry, where environmental destruction and cartel power intertwine. Oaxaca’s mushroom rituals, which are sacred but constantly commodified by outsiders. Colonial Europe’s fear of tomatoes, which now feels absurd but shaped entire cuisines. These stories don’t stay still—they evolve as markets, laws, and technologies shift. All of these biomaterials have been heavily technologized, along with their discourses. My work tracks those changes while insisting that these narratives belong to living communities, not just datasets. Over time, I see my role less as “representing” them and more as creating space where their ghosts can trouble dominant technological narratives.
Q: What do you see as the most urgent threats or uncertainties we may face in the coming decade with the rise of AI?
The danger isn’t just AI itself but the belief that it is objective. I use and recognize the value of AI; however, the real risk lies in believing its neutrality—that it is merely a feedback loop. That’s when erasures become permanent. Another urgent threat is the extraction of cultural and biological knowledge without consent: rituals turned into patents, foodways into commodities, data into corporate property. The uncertainty is whether these practices will remain invisible or whether we will learn to notice them glitching through and take ownership of them, whether we will allow AI to keep mirroring systemic inequalities or whether we can rewire it to reflect plural, situated ways of knowing.
Q: Are there any theories, books, or artists you’d like to recommend in your current areas of interest?
Yes, Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges and Cyborg Manifesto remain foundational, along with Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics, which questions technological universality. Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think expands how we imagine nonhuman knowledge, while Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology exposes how bias seeps into code. In speculative design, Beyond Speculative Design by Mitrović et al. has been key to my methodology. Artistically, I draw inspiration from practices that merge food, culture, and technology for this artwork.
Credits
The project was co-produced by Metamedia and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media as part of the Summer Sessions art and technology residencies
Lead Editor: Amy Xiaofan Jiang
Assistant Editor: Paridhi Garg