Exercises in Regret A Conversation with the Big Dipper

Exercises in Regret: A Conversation with the Big Dipper was originally conceived as an audiovisual work for a specific time and location at Shenzhen Astronomical Observatory. Zhiwei Bai planned to project moving images onto the observatory dome at its highest point while presenting sound across the site. According to the celestial position at that moment, the Big Dipper would have appeared above the dome, establishing a temporary encounter between the projected image below and the actual night sky.

In the original conception, the observatory was not merely a surface for projection. The dome, mountain summit, night sky, sound, and celestial configuration of a particular moment together constituted the conditions through which the work would take place. The image was to be directed upward from the ground, while the Big Dipper remained a distant object beyond the artist’s control. “Conversation” did not imply that the cosmos could answer, but described an attempt to establish a position from which the human subject might address the unknown through technology, perception, and imagination.

The event was ultimately cancelled because of a typhoon, and the planned encounter never took place. “Regret” consequently ceased to be only a predetermined emotional theme and became part of the actual history of the work. Weather interrupted the technical plan while exposing the dependence of site-specific practice upon time, environment, infrastructure, and contingency. The cancellation was not simply an accident external to the artwork; it transformed the way the work could subsequently exist.

For the UNLOCK exhibition later that year, Bai transferred the intended moving image to a small screen. A public projection originally directed toward the sky and dependent upon the scale of the observatory was compressed into an image encountered at close range. Rather than attempting to reproduce the absent site within the exhibition space, the work retained the distance produced by this change of scale. The viewer encountered not a completed dialogue with the cosmos, but a visual remainder of the site for which the image had originally been made.

At Creation Factory A LOT, the work was subsequently developed into a dual-screen moving-image installation. The upper screen presented the central visual sequence, while the lower screen displayed variations generated from Bai’s symbolic system. Operating simultaneously at different scales and rhythms, the two images established an ongoing feedback between a principal image and its proliferating symbolic transformations. The installation was presented alongside the listening station for the Memory Drift sound album, although the two remained independent works.

Glitches, divisions, repetitions, and geometric structures make the images resemble signals that are searching, calibrating, and transmitting without ever reaching their destination. The moving image does not function as a substitute for the unrealized projection. Instead, it allows the conversation that failed to occur at the observatory to continue under different technological and perceptual conditions. Absence is not filled by the image but becomes a structure of interruption and repetition within it.

The sound component was subsequently edited and released independently as an EP under the same title. The EP shares the conceptual source and perceptual atmosphere of the moving-image work but can be heard apart from the installation. It should therefore be understood not as an unrelated sound project, but as an autonomous extension of the same work into the medium of sound.

Exercises in Regret returns to astronomical imagery used in Interval and Star Atlas, but the actual sky, a specific location, and unpredictable weather no longer serve merely as visual sources; they determine whether the work can occur. The cosmos becomes an external condition that the artist cannot control or fully incorporate into a technical plan.

Exercises in Regret is therefore not simply about a cancelled site-specific proposal. It considers how an artwork continues to generate forms after its original realization has become impossible. The intended site becomes a screen-based image, a single projection develops into a dual-screen relationship, and sound extends into an independent EP. Regret is neither repaired nor eliminated but becomes the force driving the work’s movement between media. What the work ultimately presents is not a completed conversation with the Big Dipper, but the persistence of a human signal directed toward something that cannot answer and can never be fully reached.