A call from ancient times —— What would it sound like to hear myself rambling from my own guts —— How the past entangles itself with the present, and inevitably, with the future ——
Ingestible Alien
2024
(This is a work-in-progress project that includes the fabrication of an ingestible device and performance. The following text is a fragmented record of somnolent murmurs, abandoning logic .)
An alien is an object. To be honest, everything is ingestible.
An ingestible microphone reveals the merging of bodies and objects, the tension between fusion and rejection—an instinctive fear of the foreign. The device embodies a poetic logic of integration, where the body unhinge signals from the inside, and exposes it to the public domain as sampling approach. This device bridges us to the past, evoking a connection to those who came before.
Objects once stored memories; now, signals carry and store fleeting information, existing not in the binary of 0s and 1s, but in the ephemeral space between them—like poetry, where meaning arises from the gaps. What if information could be stored in the instant of transmission? Could this moment create something akin to a spatial sculpture?
When the body’s signals are imbued with meaning and placed in public spaces, they emulate the panoramic exposure of bodily information—a present and future condition where the mystery of selfhood dissolves within the generative flows of data networks. This encoded transmission mirrors the body's unveiling, blurring the boundaries between intimacy and display, presence and absence, continuity and transformation. In this way, the body becomes a site for sculpting signals, embodying the entanglement of the physical and the informational, the personal and the collective.
Contingency, generative, impermanence, immanence
Sound, air, and material vibrations are the most abstract yet fitting expressions of information and material—unseen but omnipresent. With the advancement of biotechnology, the body is no longer merely a "site of production", but also a node of material integration. This integration is a closed internal loop, encapsulated within a space connected to a subject we call "human" or "consciousness." When external entities intrude upon this material space, the subject reacts defensively, akin to the body's immune system misrecognizing threats or political discrimination against outsiders.
Internal organs, though alive, only become visible or audible in public spaces during surgery or near death. The sacredness of death, once revered, has been dissolved, becoming multifaceted and used as a political symbol. Technological extensions of life and bodies and the blurring of boundaries between species shifted all binary oppositions to recurring cycles of differentiation and regeneration.
Death in society is no longer merely a personal event. Epidemics and wars transform global networks, while technology, resources, and policies redefine and manage death. The body anticipates its end, imagining a shared, collective return to a void. Intimacy once comforted this void, but in its absence, we seek fleeting connections, framing them as communal belonging. Yet this is an illusion, rooted in the body’s inherent secrecy and containment.
In the cyborg era, internal organs merge with external machines, extending life while exposing us to unprecedented risks and proximity to death. In public spaces, death is normalized, and in Chinese contexts, it often appears as a vacuum—others’ deaths are perceived as mere elements of the world’s design, evoking no systemic awareness. Government control over information shapes the symbolic perception of death, numbing bodily responses.
Globalized media reinforces this desensitization, training individuals to detach from their bodies as sites of information, symbols, and political narratives. Capturing these spaces' sounds without pain and broadcasting them transforms invasive anxieties into public exposures—a therapeutic confrontation with the unknown.
This project samples history and physical presence, blending them generatively in the sounds of individual organs. It highlights haecceity (Deleuze)—the distinctiveness of moments, experiences, and events, resisting full definition. Through this, it carefully calls for a personal and collective rebirth, symbolized not by sculptures, but by an expansive, healing chamber for the future.
Coming Soon.