“Mutant Bagua” is a 3D sculptural reinterpretation of the Taoist Bagua (八卦) as a machine-spirit interface. In the center lies the Chinese mythical pearl of knowledge engraved with the Five Elements, adorned with the Taoist talisman for “Opening of the Heart.” Enshrining the pearl are the eight trigrams of the Bagua, each representing a principle of reality translated into computational binary code: yin vs yang, 0 or 1. This sculptural digitization of ancestral code reinvents the form as a hybrid mutant sci-fi abstraction suggestive of queer robotics, drones, and imagined extraterrestrial technology.
By uploading ancient Taoist script into virtual form, “Mutant Bagua” serves as an ancestral portal to digital spirits that haunt the interface between Taoist structural code and digital data. As professor Alvin Eng Hui Lim states in his book Digital Spirits in Religion & Media, “Trigrams produce networks, simply by operating as nodes where gods pass their visions and energies to human subjects with the right access codes... Gods are only accessible when human agents enact the trigrams and numbers and use them as codes and passwords to tap into the divine sphere.” Through numbers, the god in the machine speaks.
“Mutant Bagua” presents an opportunity to reimagine the Taoist binary—thinking of yin and yang not as fixed gendered arrival points, but as vectors in motion: data storage in flux that when combined can reveal an infinite spectrum of possibilities. Or, as Laozi riffed over 2000 years ago:
“Tao produced the One. The One produced the Two. The Two produced the Three. And the Three produced the Ten Thousand things.” —Laozi, Tao Te Ching
