Zen Machine

Curators: Qiu Zhijie (CN), Jo Wei (CN)

AlphaGo was able to beat humans at chess because playing chess is the perfect activity for a robot. If we could connect AlphaGo’s “brain” to a computer, we would quickly see that it possesses a level of concentration much greater than that of humans, that it never grows tired, and that, unlike us, it is not a slave to its emotions. For thousands of years, Eastern monks have used various forms of meditation to tap into hidden wisdom. Now, however, using technology such as AI and big data, we have created a type of wisdom that vastly surpasses our own.

The purpose of Zen Buddhism is not just limited to harnessing wisdom through concentration and meditation. The Zen Buddhist notion of “huatou” (dialectical meditation) is a highly original method of teaching: by asking themselves a question that, on the surface, seems illogical, monks are forced to confront a series of existential doubts. By reflecting on these doubts, they are able to gain new forms of enlightenment. Huatou is not mere occultism — it teaches us that everyone can develop their own interpretation of a certain issue.

The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) EAST Season is a platform devoted to international dialogues across multiple disciplines — namely education, art, science, and technology (EAST). This year’s exhibition revolves around neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Based on the theme of all things Zen, works in this exhibition reflect on how human thought may change under the influence of external equipment such as brain-computer interfaces, as well as the possibility that computers will develop the same capacity for thought as humans.

Overview of projects

ARTificial Banality, The Faking of Looking, and Alchemical Gaming

Baoyang Chen (CN)

This project explores the ontological dichotomies among us, technology and society by again questioning if machine can think. A brain in the vat craves to be awakened.

Body Poetry

Liu Guiyu (CN)

Body Poetry is an exploration of future body data and poetic human data. When linking the body to the data, perhaps our sadness, fear and enthusiasm are not only the spirituality of poetry, but the result of the algorithm.

Brainwave Project to Help Patients with Disorders of Consciousness

Qi Chen (CN)

In this project, I hope to provide an approach to help people who are in a minimally conscious state (MCS) and have partial preservation of conscious awareness by using wearable devices to detect real-time brain waves and generate images to help doctors and families understand the different brain responses to different audiovisual inputs.

Gaze into Haze

Qiu Siyao (CN)

Will the rise of single gazes also mean a decline of the global view? Every single gaze means letting go of the larger picture. The person being gazed at may feel embarrassed. Is it possible for the inorganic object being gazed at to change? Who can remember what happened in the moment before a distraction?

Mappa Mundi: An Interactive Artistic Mind Map Generator with Artificial Imagination

Qiu Zhijie (CN), He Xiaodong (CN)

A multi-level mind map and corresponding graphics are generated via an LSTM model to form an artistic image based on live stimuli, injected with AI imagination. This work recognizes semantics via ASR and POS tagging, and further processes and generates associations among them.

Mind Particles

He Xuan (CN)

The particles are suspended and aggregated in the air, and the brain waves generated by concentration during meditation control the substances in the container. When the control stops, the air movement stops, the particles return to the absolute steady state and are scattered.

RASA-BOX

Iris Long (CN), Deng Hanbin (CN), Wu Tiancheng (CN)

Rasa is a “mirror” – it evaluates your “emotional state” in real-time based on your gestures. The project explores the limits of the comfort zone of the “privacy of one’s own feelings.” A camera and the algorithms will detect in real-time the skeleton data of the viewers and deduce their emotional state in order to write a sentence that falls in the same emotion category.

Time

Jianhao Lei (CN)

What I present in this project is a trapped clock. The audience takes an EEG and the data extracted from their brain activities reinvigorate the clock. Then, the clock is no longer moving second by second, but at a real-time pace according to the brain activity of the viewer.

Tracing

Ao Yanxi (CN)

Wind Charm

Liu Zhicheng (CN)

What were the earliest musical Instruments of mankind? How did humanity start enjoying music? This work attempts to transform emotions into simple signals produced by blowing air on bottlenecks, which is directly controlled by brain waves. Like the hand of a pioneer musician, the users explore the boundary between sound and emotion with their brain waves.

Biographies:

Qiu Zhijie (CN) is a professor, artist and curator at the experimental art school of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and planned the first media art exhibition in China. Promoter and organizer of art, science and technology (AST) in China.

Jo Wei (CN) is a curator, a researcher and the founder of the Pan Bio-Art Studio (PBS). She is currently researcher of art, science and technology (AST) at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). Among her many curations are Quasi-Nature [Bio Art, Borderline, Laboratory], Kairos, etc. Wei was also the co-curator of Ethics of Technology (2016) and Post-Life (2018), first and second edition of Beijing Media Art Biennale.