Signal

At the centre of SIGNAL is a meditating figure rendered through 8-bit and digital pixelation. Bai traces this visual language to strong early memories of electronic images, video games, and retro digital culture, translating them into a contemporary image of meditation, quasi-religious presence, and internal activity.

To create the work, Bai used a custom Audio Vision Generator System together with a modular synthesizer. Sound and image were produced and related in real time within the program, so each run constituted a specific audiovisual generation. Bai imagines activity during meditation as something analogous to signals continuously travelling through an electronic circuit; the work “compiles” this artistic analogy into pixels, sound, and movement rather than proposing a scientific model.

For exhibition, the program did not continue generating live in the gallery. Instead, Bai recorded the result of a real-time generative run and replayed it through large-scale multichannel projection and sound. The real-time system is therefore the method through which the audiovisual work was made, while the immersive space is the later condition through which that recorded generation is viewed and heard.