Lend  me your  body

In my hometown, there is a lake where, 9,000 years ago, there was a tribe that worshipped the bird god. The shamans of the tribe made flutes from crane bones, and during sacrificial ceremonies, the sounds of these flutes were believed to communicate with the divine. However, the flute player was beheaded, and the loss of their subjectivity points to a kind of sacrifice, a longing for unity with transcendent powers. This ancient mystery resonates with Friedrich Kittler's assertion that media technology precedes and defines the subject. Whether it is the headless flute player—whose individual consciousness may have become secondary in the operation of the ritual medium—or today's AI black box—operating autonomously through its own algorithmic logic—both vividly reflect how subjectivity has been historically shaped, and even suspended, under different technological apparatuses.

I made a bone flute from the bones of a natural-death vulture, which is believed to summon the souls of the deceased in the Tibetan sky burial ritual, and used machine learning based on openpose to recognize the emotions behind the dancers' movements, providing automatic accompaniment for the dancers. The dancers and the invisible musicians merge in a mutual "contamination."

Large language models "devour" the texts, images, and sounds of human civilization, digesting billions of sentences, stories, and dialogues. This data is not just abstract information; it is a container of countless authors' thoughts, experiences, and emotions. When the flute sounds driven by it resonate, does it also, like that vulture bone, in some way "summon" the "souls" of the countless voices it has digested in its lifetime?