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Morphological Operatives
2026
Video
Series of 3, Editions of 3 + AP
Morphological Operatives is a series of three videos, each taking a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of soil from Kawah Ijen, shared by a scientist from Yan’s earlier collaboration, as a seed that AI grows in two directions: a microbial form in the lower panel, a landscape in the upper. Between the two, an image segmentation model performs a cross-image pseudo analysis, tracing resemblances within a speculative interface of scientific image reading. Drawing its forms from Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s seminal drawings of the nervous system at the turn of the 20th century, the work meditates on pattern recognition as a gesture and on the elastic space of imagination between refreshed frames.
The images originate in Proxima Kosmos, a research collaboration with scientists at MIT, initiated by the Berggruen Institute, for which Yan directed two films. Here she returns to the SEM images and the fictional capacity already latent in how they are read: the interpretive tension that arises when we imagine, and attempt to study, life that might exist out there, beyond the chemistry we know. Treating that tension as generative ground for speculating on methodologies and knowledge production, the work continues a strategy recurring in her practice: using the instruments of science to propose alternative epistemologies.