Exercises in Regret: A Conversation with the Big Dipper

Bai was originally invited to create a live projection for the observation dome at Shenzhen Astronomical Observatory. The Big Dipper was not chosen first as an abstract mystical subject; it emerged from the specific site and time, when the constellation would be positioned above the dome. Bai planned to perform with a modular synthesizer whose sound would drive program-generated images in real time, bringing an artificial audiovisual system into temporary relation with the actual night sky.

In preparing for the event, he repeatedly rehearsed and recorded states produced by the real-time system. The typhoon ultimately cancelled the performance, but the generated material remained. At later exhibitions including UNLOCK, the work moved from a public projection directed toward the sky to a small screen, presented as a recording rather than as a live generative system.

At Buji Cultural and Sports Center, the work appeared as a dual-screen recording and was again not generated live. Bai placed it in the same exhibition as Memory Drift because the unrealized event and the rehearsals made for it had become part of his own memory archive. Three modular-synthesizer rehearsal recordings were separately selected and released as an EP of the same title.

“Exercises” refers literally to rehearsals for the original event. “Regret” points both to the unrealized large-scale presentation and to a later act of looking back at something already past. Rather than reconstructing the absent site, the subsequent versions keep working with what the unrealized event left behind.