OPERASI CASSAVA 6.0: WHEN UB(A)I DREAMS

<p dir="ltr">Operasi Cassava 6.0 extends my decade-long participatory archive project exploring ubi kayu (cassava) as a migratory, culturally symbolic root reframed through digital and ecological imaginaries. Situated within media art, speculative ethnobotany, and posthuman studies, the work examines how ancestral memory, plant intelligence, and artificial dreaming converge across human–machine–vegetal interfaces. Grounded in Michael Marder’s concept of plant-thinking—a mode of vegetal existence that compels human thought to “become plant-like” (Marder 2013) and Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter, which decentralises agency across human and non-human forces (Bennett 2010), the work challenges anthropocentric separations between nature, culture, and technology. Research Contribution In collaboration with Giang Nguyen Hoang, this new iteration links cassava’s bio-electrical signals to AI-generated imagery prompted by a lexicon of human memory, creating a live “cyber-organic dreaming” system. This interface enacts Marder’s notion of vegetal subjectivity and Bennett’s “thing-power” by granting plants creative agency within a generative media assemblage. The project contributes to artistic research by operationalising non-human co-authorship and establishing a Southeast Asian framework for bio-digital aesthetics and posthuman expression. Research Significance Exhibited at the INVENTX Creative Exhibition 2025: Sustainaissance (Emotion. Expression. Identity), Operasi Cassava 6.0 received the Gold Award in the Installation Category selected by an international jury panel. Within this peer-reviewed exhibition featuring 72 artists from six countries, the work advances sustainability as ontological continuity between memory, matter, and machine. It demonstrates how technological mediation can foster empathy, cultural remembrance, and more-than-human creative practice in Southeast Asia’s evolving art-and-technology ecology. Scholarly, this work contributes to trans-cultural dialogues on affect, heritage, and more-than-human creative futures. By activating a cyber-organic interface, Operasi Cassava 6.0 transforms sustainability into a field of relational being—where ancestral root, memory, and machine dream together toward new forms of expression and identity.</p><p><br></p>