What if Artificial General Intelligence is not an alien rupture, but a contemporary emanation of these cosmic forces?
Jack Ky Tan
A Ceremony for the Unborn Future by Jack Ky Tan invites audiences into a space of speculative ritual, resisting simple binaries of right and wrong or good and bad, and opening onto third possibilities. The installation reframes artificial intelligence through Daoist cosmology, positioning computation not as abstraction, but as a material, ritual, and philosophical process. The work consists of three ceramic urns derived from Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BCE) ceremonial bronzes, each corresponding to a foundational concept: Wuji, Taiji, and Wanwu.
Wuji names the undifferentiated field of infinite potential; a pre-reality from which all things emerge. Often represented as a circle, it is not emptiness but a generative ground. From this state arises Taiji, the dynamic movement through which reality comes into being; a continuous becoming shaped by the interplay of opposing forces. This is not a static dualism, but an ongoing choreography of transformation. From Taiji emerges Wanwu — the “ten thousand things” — the multiplicity of forms, phenomena, and energies that constitute the material world.
Through these vessels, Jack Ky Tan situates AI within a longer lineage of cosmotechnical thinking, where intelligence is not exclusively human nor purely computational, but distributed across matter, ritual, and transformation. The urns operate as both containers and interfaces; holding symbolic meaning while staging relations between the digital and the material, the ancient and the emergent.
Rather than presenting AI as a disembodied system of optimisation, the work returns it to questions of balance, flow, and ethical relation. Computation is understood not as extraction, but as participation in a wider cosmological order. The ceramic forms, shaped through processes of heat, pressure, and time, echo this logic; transformation is accumulative, sedimented, and embodied.
In this sense, A Ceremony for the Unborn Future does not speculate on what AI might become, but asks how it might be situated differently; within a cosmology where intelligence is relational, where technology is inseparable from ritual, and where the future emerges through the conditions we create.