“Excavations” demonstrates Machine Learning moderated interactions between humans and living materials in an unorthodox laboratory setting. The first of three instalments of the FWF funded project Co-Corporeality juxtaposes animate and inanimate specimens, physical and virtual processes and living systems with coded algorithms. The laboratory becomes a responsive environment, hosting a new sensing interface, Machine Learning algorithms and selected bacteria and their performative behaviour. All of the virtual and physical specimens are essential in reconstructing technical structures, poetic methods and the construction of new forms of understanding between human and bacteria.