Exercises in Regret: A Conversation with the Big Dipper

The planned observatory performance used modular synthesis as its live sound source, with the sound driving program-generated images on the observation dome in real time. To prepare, Bai rehearsed repeatedly—repatching, performing, adjusting the relationship between sound and image, and recording different versions.

When the typhoon cancelled the event, rehearsals that had been directed toward a future performance became the material that remained. Bai selected three recordings and organized them as an EP, allowing them to continue being heard away from the dome, the actual night sky, and the performance for which they had been made.

“Exercises” refers directly to these rehearsals. “Regret” points both to the loss of the intended large-scale event and to the later act of looking back at something already past. Related recordings were later shown in Buji alongside Memory Drift because Bai had come to regard the unrealized event and the practice surrounding it as part of his own memory.