JINGXUAN FAN
A series of performance works
Lend me your body
2024 Interactive sound installation
In my hometown, there is a lake where, 9,000 years ago, there was a tribe that worshipped a bird god. The tribe's shaman made flutes from crane bones, believing that the sounds played during rituals could communicate with the divine. However, the archaeological findings of the flute remains were dismembered, suggesting a profound sacrifice, a desire for the individual to dissolve into transcendent power. This ancient mystery resonates across time with contemporary media theory, which posits that technological devices take precedence and shape the subject. Whether it is the headless flute player—whose personal will seems to recede in the face of the powerful ritual medium—or today's artificial intelligence, which operates on its own logic and appears to us as a "black box," both reveal how subjectivity is historically constructed and even suspended under different technological configurations.
Inspired by this, I created a bone flute. The material of the flute is not crane bone, but rather the bones of vultures used in Tibetan sky burial rituals—believed in local faith to possess the power to summon the souls of the deceased. This bone flute is not played by a human but is driven by an AI system. This system utilizes OpenPose-based machine learning technology to recognize the dancer's movements and their potential emotional states in real-time, automatically generating and playing corresponding flute sounds as accompaniment. In this process, the visible dancer and the invisible AI "musician" form a symbiotic relationship of mutual sensing, mutual "pollution," and ultimately, fusion.
This AI system, like the underlying large language model that drives it, "consumes" vast amounts of human civilization data—texts, images, sounds, digesting billions of sentences, stories, and dialogues. This data is not just information; it is the sediment of countless thoughts, experiences, and emotions, the digital ghosts of human collective experience. So, when the AI drives this flute made from the vulture bones that carry the meaning of "summoning," does it also, to some extent, "summon" the countless "souls" of voices that it has digested and absorbed? Is the sound of the flute purely algorithmically generated, or does it unconsciously echo fragments of human collective memory under the mediation of technology?