Danny Snelson designs custom (and eco-friendly!) AI for new installation at MASS MoCA
Kaelan Burkett
“Բաժակ նայող/One Who Looks at the Cup: Querent,” adds a high-tech wrinkle to the ancient practice of telling fortunes by reading coffee grounds or tea leaves at the bottom of a drinking cup.
| March 4, 2026
Danny Snelson, a UCLA professor of English and design media arts, is one of four contributors to an interactive work on display in a new exhibition at MASS MoCA, the prestigious contemporary art museum in North Adams, Mass.
The installation, titled “Բաժակ նայող/One Who Looks at the Cup: Querent,” adds a high-tech (but relatively low-fi) wrinkle to the ancient practice of telling fortunes by reading coffee grounds or tea leaves at the bottom of a drinking cup. Բաժակ նայող is the Armenian term for the person who performs such readings.
Danny Snelson
The piece is a part of “Technologies of Relation,” which explores the role of machines and algorithms in people’s everyday lives. The exhibition opened in late February and will be on display through spring 2027.
Each person who visits Բաժակ նայող receives a cup with coffee grounds inside and is directed to press their thumb into before having the grounds scanned and then “read” by a custom AI model that Snelson fine-tuned for local computation. The AI was trained on real-world coffee ground readings conducted in Los Angeles.
Snelson also built the hardware that runs the AI. In response to concerns about the growing environmental impact of AI’s heavy use of energy and water, he designed the entire system to operate using very little power — about 10% of the power it takes to heat a cup of coffee. It also uses only 2 gigabytes of memory, runs locally instead of on a cloud platform and operates on just a single CPU.
Snelson’s collaborators are Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, an Armenian artist, writer and faculty member at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Demirjian.
“Technologies of Relation” has another UCLA connection, too. It includes a work by Lauren Lee McCarthy, a professor of design media arts at the School of the Arts and Architecture. “LAUREN: Anyone Home” uses a custom-built Alexa-like smart device that can converse with museumgoers and offer suggestions to make them more comfortable — by adjusting lighting or music, for example.
Related: Danny Snelson on little databases and the poetics of the web revival