2022-24.
Interactive Performance and/or video installation.
When you are asleep, your Morphai arises. “Morphai” (2022-24) is an interdisciplinary CG short film that explores the agency of the dreamed self in dialogue with the mythical concept of metempsychosis — the transmigration of the being across bodies. In Greek mythology, a “morphai” refers to the human shape that God of Dreams sends to the sleeper. An extension to the self in a continuous landscape of consciousness, the digital Morphai is animated through the sleeper’s motion as well as AI-generated motion from dream talks. As a reference to J.L.Borges’s Circular Ruins, each sleep stage opens a different psychedelic arena where dreaming becomes a concentrated practice, and Morphai’s movement starts from sleeping and transitions into more energetic and hypnotic trance dance. Light illuminate the environment in pulses materialize the sleeper’s alpha waves through brain-computer interface (BCI) feedback, as a direct response in the virtual world to a sleeper’s somatic rhythms.
Morphai’s Previous Versions
The exhibition of the first iteration of “Morphai” as part of the Sociability of Sleep exhibition opened on June 20th 2023 as a result of a 2-month residency, and more information can be found at sociabilityofsleep.ca
The Morphai universe as a long-term, multi-branch project interrogates sleep characterization, sleep choreography, plural/other mind-body relationships, and the paradoxical axis of sleep as a performative activity. Incorporating my own diary-based sleep performance and collaborating with other performance artists, the Morphai universe continues to grow in astounding magnificent otherness with Morpheus watching.
First version developed in Unity
Sensor data by Lee Wilkins
Performance artists: Dayna McLeod, Yiou Wang, Laurie-Anne Gosselin
Installation adapted from work of Michèle Barcena-Sougavinski
Morphai – the Digital Dream avatar
Game engine as a language of mythical thought:
In the technical mothodology of Morphai, I used the connection between Arduino and Unity to complete the procedural animation of the morphai avatar in real time. Marshall McLuhan makes an intriguing observation: “technology forces us to live mythically.” Game engine is a language of mythical thought as it easily lends itself to the animist world of movement and various responsive sensual elements. I find it very potent not just as a tool, but as a language that articulates exactly what has been in my dreams and imaginations – alter egos, animated animist world, transformations, surreal happenings that always exist but through this game language, can be rendered to a form.
Morphai as alter ego:
Morphai is not only a digital avatar but ultimately it is an attempt to encapsulate our dreamed self as an alter ego parallel to our waking self. It exists outside the western individualism that recognizes a person as having a body and a soul, which is a philosophical foundation of modernity under which the realm of sleep is always regarded as an absence of conscious mind or agency and dream life always inferior to day life as it is deemed unreal. The avatar, as not just a symbol but an output of morphai, lands in a strange spot of consciousness, in a strange and performative realm of mind-body synchronicity.
Data collection
Still from Dayna’s performance:
Still from Morphai recording sleep performer’s biometrics:
The Morphai Chamber.
In a dance of silkworm, Yiou is entering pupation:
On Feb. 25, 2023, I slept in a mocap suit and did a 27-min mocap’ed sleep performance, retargeted onto an avatar made in 2 minutes. The following video is a pilot to a branch growing from the Morphai universe – Yiou’s repeated, authentic diary-style sleep performance. I was not a performance artist before, and have no dance background. But I imagine myself performing a dance of silkworm, in which I mimic the metamorphic phases of the silkworm, an animal my grandmother’s ancestral home used to keep1. Now I am entering pupation. All that is required of me is lie down and sleep in the comfort of my bedroom. What will happen from here?
The sleep activity in these performances is authentic sleep. They take place in Yiou’s Cambridge (Massachusetts) home, so far. Work in progress, parallel to the above-mentioned Morphai project.
footnote:
1.My grandmother is a descendent of a traditional northern Chinese lineage that owned a small silk farm in the 1930s. They lived in symbiosis with a large colony of silkworms, and produced silk, before some historical changes stopped them in 1950s. Grandma used to tell me a lot of silkworm stories from her childhood with a smile on her beautiful wrinkled face. As a child, I also kept sterile pet silkworms, though in much smaller numbers and urban home environment. Without direct experience with silkworm farm handling, I epi-genetically inherit my grandma’s silkworm memories and emotions, which is some kind of soft, deep, unspoken love. As an adult, I sometimes dream back to the smell of the silkworm food that came with my childhood pet kit, which had a distinct, unforgettable scent that is neither desirable nor undesirable, just strange. My grandmother’s traditional silkworm symbiosis and the smell from my modern leisure silkworm keeping become mixed and intertwined. I guess I love silkworms, their lovely metamorphosing vitality, their creation magic, their gentleness and innocence demonstrated in their complete trust of humans, who usually sacrifice them after they exert their magic. After all, I have so far never dreamed of another scent, but the scent of my silkworm pet food.