In Conversation: Samar Younes on Quantum Craft and Future Ancestors
- Amy Jiang
- Oct 15
- 7 min read
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
Samar Younes is a Beirut-born Quantum Culture Artist-Theorist and creator of Quantum Craft™: a “superposition epistemology” where artisanal wisdom, ancestral patterns, ecological thinking, and AI operate in productive tension. Through her practice SAMARITUAL, she moves across three territories—Creator, Catalyst, Cultivator—crafting Future Ancestors, staging installations like Breaking Bread, and transforming organizations from extraction to regeneration. Trained at Central Saint Martins with two decades in cultural direction, her work has infiltrated institutions from Dubai Future Foundation to New Museum, and brands like Coach and Loro Piana. As an educator and mentor, she transmits post-disciplinary protocols for navigating AI-accelerated, transcultural futures.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background, and how your work connects to the theme “Ghosts in the Feedback Loop”?
Born during the height of the civil war in Beirut to Lebanese parents, my cultural DNA was shaped by fragments of elsewhere that lived within our household: my maternal grandmother's 11+ years in Venezuela (where my mother was born), my parents' LA chapter during my father's neurology training in the '70s, and the French colonial education system that makes most Lebanese inherently multilingual. This isn't displacement but cultural accumulation: American pop culture, Venezuelan rhythms, French intellectual frameworks, and Lebanese material intelligence coexisting in superposition.
After London's art schools, I began my practice in Miami's Caribbean-Latin convergence, then synthesized everything in Brooklyn. This isn’t my bio per se, so much as method: I work through Silk Road logic: accumulation over assimilation, where subcultures and broad cultural spectra coexist. What the curatorial statement calls "ghosts in the feedback loop" perfectly describes how these cultural fragments—excluded from institutional categories yet ever-present—haunt and rewire systems designed to contain them.
My Quantum Craft framework emerged from recognizing that AI systems exhibit the same categorical violence I've navigated culturally: flattening complex inheritances into digestible labels. My four-intelligence framework (artificial, artisanal, ancestral, ecological) operates in blind spots machine training doesn't see or understand, teaching computational systems to recognize forms of intelligence they weren't trained to understand.
The Future Ancestors series performs reverse archaeology: instead of excavating past artifacts, I generate future relics that reveal how diaspora consciousness might evolve when freed from all binary categorization. The “ghosts” in the loop re-emerge here not as wounds but as insurgent intelligences, rewiring systems that never learned to read us.
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 call AI a digital djinn: neither tool nor subject, but a cultural entity conjured from collective memory. Djinns aren't inherently good or evil; they amplify the intent of whoever calls them. That's how I perceive AI.
I don't prompt it for answers; I conduct it like material...a craftsman. I study its glitches, its hallucinations, its encoded biases, because that's where the ghosts leak through. My process treats data as cultural compost: not erasing the individual fragments that compose the dataset, but allowing them to decompose and cross-pollinate into enriching soil from which entirely new aesthetic possibilities can grow.
My work emerges where fashion becomes architecture becomes craft becomes speculation: not through disciplinary fusion but through what I call disciplinary apophasis. When I generate Future Ancestors portraits, coral neural networks simultaneously function as jewelry, architectural elements, biological speculation, and ceremonial technology. The AI doesn't choose between these categories; it performs their entanglement.
My process begins with cultural archaeology across multiple dimensions: physical samples of hand-crafted materials, documenting gestural languages, and mapping ceremonial objects. These become prompt DNA, feeding machine learning not just aesthetic information but embodied cultural intelligence. Through iterative refinement, I deploy what I call articulatory intelligence: an ethno-aesthetic acumen that reads cultural patterns like a master weaver reads thread tension, considering how influences can cross-pollinate, mutate into hybrid forms, or generate entirely unprecedented aesthetic territories. This means working with AI as a collaborator that is always haunted, always partial, always entangled with human, ancestral, and ecological systems.
The results refuse categorical thinking while demonstrating sophisticated material intelligence, exactly the kind of aesthetic insurgency that makes systems designed for extraction suddenly productive for cultural generation.
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?
My work gestures toward futures where cultural preservation happens through active mutation rather than static archiving. Instead of warning against AI's homogenizing tendencies, I demonstrate how computational systems can become sophisticated cultural translators when approached through transcultural intelligence, rather than perpetuating and exacerbating monoculture.
The Future Ancestors I generate don't represent identities or artifacts but perform identity as ongoing cultural technology and insurgents operating within the cracks of possibilities. My primary audience consists of what I call cultural conspirators: people navigating similar transcultural territories who recognize their lived experience in these speculative embodiments and understand that culture is both inheritance and responsibility. I hope viewers don’t just consume the work but feel implicated in their own role as pattern-shapers, reminded that what we leave behind is as critical as what we create. I am equally interested in challenging institutional frameworks that organize culture around binary colonial categories, which are forced to develop new vocabularies for cultural analysis toward quantum, mutated, kaleidoscopic ways of being and doing.
Q: Are there particular communities, histories, or environments your work remains in conversation with? How do those relationships evolve over time?
My practice operates through disciplinary apophasis: the productive spaces between established categories where new cultural forms emerge. The communities I'm in conversation with aren't defined by demographics but by shared recognition that culture functions as a living ecosystem rather than a museum collection.
These relationships evolve through material-digital entanglement across every possible expression: a playlist becomes architectural intervention, a dance translates into wearable technology, an accessory performs as a healing device, a building functions as ceremonial space. Working with collaborators who understand that post-disciplinary art isn't just aesthetic rebellion but active culture-shaping technology, we are developing what I call insurgent aesthetics that operate simultaneously as theory, speculation, and lived practice.
Recent collaborations demonstrate this ecosystem approach: textile work with Olivier Borde that functions as both sculptural installation and potential fashion prototype; theoretical dialogues with Geraldine Wharry that generate actual speculative objects; workshops that become community ritual while producing cultural methodology. Each relationship multiplies possibilities for how creative intelligence might manifest.
The most significant evolution involves communities recognizing that disciplinary categories themselves are colonial technologies designed to fragment holistic cultural practices. We are developing protocols for creative work that refuse institutional containers while maintaining rigorous intellectual and material sophistication. This means jewelry that's also a neural interface, architecture that's also ceremony, music that's also political strategy.
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 biggest threat isn't AI itself, but our domestication into thinking like machines: flattening multiplicity into efficiency, collapsing imagination into metrics. When computational logic becomes our default cognitive mode, as many social networks already enforce, we start organizing culture around algorithmic priorities: scalability over specificity, pattern recognition over pattern generation, optimization over improvisation.
More insidiously, if we continue crowning one intelligence system as supreme—rational, technical, linguistic—we risk monocultural collapse: ecological, cultural, psychological. AI trained on stolen cultural data only accelerates this trajectory when left unchallenged, creating feedback loops where computational colonialism masquerades as creative democratization.
The most dangerous scenario involves losing what I called articulatory intelligence earlier: the sophisticated forms of cultural translation that communities have developed through generations of navigating complex inheritances. When algorithms can produce "diverse" imagery without understanding the embodied knowledge behind different cultural practices, they create simulacra that satisfy institutional requirements while gutting actual cultural transmission. We end up with computational systems that can mimic cultural patterns while remaining fundamentally illiterate about cultural intelligence.
The uncertainty that drives my practice is whether we cultivate kaleidoscopic knowledge—where AI augments our capacity for multiplicity—or whether we surrender to algorithmic monoculture. This requires developing frameworks for engaging computational systems as cultural collaborators rather than creative replacements, which in turn demands forms of technological education that most institutions aren't equipped to provide.
We're at a critical juncture where the next decade will determine whether AI becomes a tool for cultural flattening or cultural flourishing. The outcome depends entirely on who gets to shape these systems and which forms of intelligence we choose to amplify.
Q: Are there any theories, books, or artists you’d like to recommend in your current areas of interest?
Sylvia Wynter, Being Human as Praxis – Essential framework for understanding how cultural categories shape consciousness and computational bias.
Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross, Your Brain on Art – Rigorous science behind neuroaesthetics, informing my approach to beauty as cognitive technology.
Nassim Taleb, Antifragile – Systems thinking for cultural practices that gain strength from volatility, exactly how my quantum craft methodology operates.
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World – Multispecies collaboration in contaminated landscapes, a perfect metaphor for AI collaboration within extractive systems.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation – Opacity as a tool for cultural sovereignty, crucial for maintaining insurgent aesthetics within transparent algorithmic systems.
Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism – Demonstrates how technological failures become sites of identity liberation, aligning with my approach to AI glitches as cultural opportunity.
Lead Editor: Amy Xiaofan Jiang
Assistant Editor: Paridhi Garg
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