Soundscape Thresholds: AI Hallucinations Reimagining the Sacred Experience of Ming Rituals
Ziwei Chi
This video work explores how AI-generated hallucinations can recreate the spiritual dimension of the “unseen soundscape space” in Ming Dynasty heaven-worship rituals. Based on studies of Jiajingera ceremonial music, the ritual constructs a liminal space for divinehuman dialogue through specific soundscapes—rhythmic chanting, instrumental resonance, and synesthetic cultural symbols. Unlike fixed visual representations, its sacredness emerges from auditory ambiguity, forming an ontological contrast between clarity and transcendence.
The triptych video consists of: (1) Visual archive: over a thousand layered cultural symbols evolving with ritual lyrics; (2) Ritual program controller: an interactive diagram of “sound-symbol-space” from a celestial perspective; (3) AI-generated audiovisual hallucinations: a particle system merging historical imagery and sonic fluctuations. Here, AI hallucinations are not flaws but emergent collective imaginaries—when deities and mythical beings carry multiple historical archetypes, their indeterminacy reconstructs the sacred as an unfixed epistemic threshold.
- Ritual Soundscape Research in the Ming Dynasty
- AI-generated audiovisual hallucinations
Bio
Ziwei Chi is an AI art researcher, AIGC filmmaker, and interaction designer based in Beijing and Hong Kong. Her practice blends generative models, moving images, spatial narratives, and human–AI interaction to explore how perception, memory, and cultural imagination unfold in technological contexts. Her work has been featured at international venues including NeurIPS, CVPR, Creativity & Cognition, and ICIDS, and was awarded at the MIT AI Filmmaking Hackathon. She also contributes to interdisciplinary research on intelligent spaces and interaction design, with publications in IEEE TVCG and ACM HRI.