For Data You Are, And To Data You Shall Return / 为数据所生，亦归数据而去

16 Nov 2023-30 Jul 2026

Overview

For Data You Are, And To Data You Shall Return is an online exhibition of generative, video and gamified works exploring diverse perspectives surrounding digital death, renewal and reincarnation in the virtual domain. Surveying the nuance of long-standing and newer ruminations around the circularity of life and death, in technological, bodily, and spiritual contexts, the exhibition sees death as a narrative with which to discuss life. Death in the digital world is, in a particular dimension, describable, observable, and even manufacturable, as well as manageable and repairable. Life in the digital world is, on the contrary, more mysterious.

The online exhibition comprises works that span a range of digital media processes and outcomes; from hypnotic encounters with concealed code to custom playful gamifications, and planetary-scale simulations, the exhibition presents expanded video practices, role-playing narratives and reconnection with devices and their material origins, drawing links between communications across ethers and the encounters of rogue or unknown agents acting on behalf of their meatspace counterparts. Decay, sites of renewal, and rethinking our existence in the digital and environmental domain are foregrounded.

The exhibition title is a subtle twist on the theological reference in the book of Genesis which infers non-immortality. This concept aligns with the Chinese Buddhist philosophy of "sheng-si-lun-hui," which is tied to the idea of karma and its role as social currency in the afterlife. By imbuing the interface with a uniquely generative background - a mystical quality of exposing the underside of codified processes - and by referring to data as the dust you shall return to, the exhibition seeks to symbolise this continuous cycle of existence of all things.

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