Title: “Ancestors” Portrait Series

“Ancestors” imagines the ancestral altar as portal to digital spirits that haunt the interface between Taoist structural code and digital data. This machine-spirit interaction features the pearl of knowledge engraved with the Five Elements hooked up to the eight trigrams of the Taoist Bagua (八卦), each representing a principle of reality interpreted as computational binary code: yin vs yang, 0 or 1. As professor Alvin Eng Hui Lim states in his book Digital Spirits in Religion & Media: "Trigrams produce networks, simply by operating as nodes where gods pass their visions and energies to human subjects with the right access codes...Gods are only accessible when human agents enact the trigrams and numbers and use them as codes and passwords to tap into the divine sphere." Through numbers, the god in the machine speaks.

We have the opportunity now to re-imagine the Taoist binary - thinking of yin and yang not as fixed gendered arrival points but as vectors in motion: data storage in flux that when combined can reveal an infinite spectrum of possibilities. Or as Laozi riffed over 2000 years ago:

"Tao produced the One.
The One produced the Two.
The two produced the three.
And the three produced the ten thousand things."