Materials: Real-time evolutionary system, Cellular Automata, Genetic Algorithms, IMGs: city under reconstruction, IMGs: city under deconstruction
A/HLife is an artwork that incorporates a real-time computational, ever-evolving system, engaging with the conceptual parallel between Artificial Life (ALife) and microhistory. The underlying system is based on Cellular Automata (CA), visually represented through collective worldwide urban skylines that function as historical indices. These skylines are referenced as individual units within the CA, and are evolved through Genetic Algorithms (GA). By fusing technology with aesthetics, A/HLife aims to present ALife as an alternative microhistory—an unconventional perspective and decentralized approach to understanding the field of history. Correspondingly, this historical methodology is aesthetically materialized as an evolutionary, observable artificial life form, triggering viewers' reflections on the critical juxtaposition between technoscience and the humanities.
Fashionable” Nov. 2025
Materials: Photographs from a fashion magazine, Texts, Coding
Locations: Shot in Quzhou, China; Written and coded in Los Angeles, US
Materials: Photographs from a fashion magazine, Texts, Coding
Locations: Shot in Quzhou, China; Written and coded in Los Angeles, US
Time: 6 minute, 35 seconds
Materials: single-channal video, color, sound; black steel, rusty wood, hemp rope
Vajra Warriors, whose original Sanskrit name is Vajrapanibalin, emerge as a spirituality and an ontology of bravery, protectiveness, and the dispelling of evil in service of the righteous, traversing time, geographies, and religious thought. Across the long, turbulent course of civilization, Vajrapanibalin diffuses, iterates, and transforms—both in material tangibility and in spiritual intangibility. Crafting—carving the beauty of the Buddhist icon—and dancing—performing the vivacity of Buddhist movement—stand as two primal human media and externalized aesthetic forms that carry forward Vajrapanibalin’s “xing” (form), “qi” (vital breath), and “jing” (aura/realm) through drifting eras. Moreover, the fluid temporality of humanity, region, technique, and hierarchical power has endowed Vajrapanibalin with a high degree of fluidity in its entanglement with society. In our erratic digital context, what are the transformations of Vajrapanibalin’s physicality and essence? What is its contemporary beauty? And how might we inherit this art today?
Thermal Muscle August 2023