Mountain of Many Voices

March

2025

Momv, Installation view at Times Museum, Guangzhou, China. March, 2025

Brief

Mountain of Many Voices is an alternative reality game and installation that begins with digital narrative experiences and hands-on creation, culminating in a communal ritual of divination and offering.

Through intuitive digital interfaces, players embark on a pilgrimage, assuming the role of an urban traverser who eventually ascends a mystical mountain. Along this journey, they encounter layers of memories, voices, and visions that are intricately interwoven into an evolving narrative. Each participant’s thoughts and choices reverberate back into the collective storyline, spawning new realms and experiences for subsequent players—a recursive and curvilinear narrative unfolding over time.

As players engage, their input generates distinctive patterns and icons that serve as the building blocks for creating personal maps. These maps not only chart individual journeys but are also gathered into a virtual space, providing a venue for communal display and contemplation. The backend of the project was partially powered by an LLM.

Screen capture of game interface.

Talisman prints.

《众鸣山》是一款结合对话游戏与装置艺术的作品，从数字叙事体验和动手创造开始，最终达到一场集体占卜的仪式。 通过直观的数字界面，玩家扮演一位城市行者，登上一座神秘的山峰。在旅途中，他们将与记忆、声音, 和幻象交织相遇，这些元素被巧妙地融入逐步发展的叙事中。每位参与者的思考与选择都会影响到共同的故事线上，为后续玩家开启新的体验——形成一种随着时间递归与循环展开的叙事结构。 在玩家参与过程中，他们的互动将产生独特的图案与符号，成为个人地图的基石。这些地图不仅记录每个人独一无二的旅程，还被收集到一个虚拟空间中，供社群共同欣赏与思考。此项目的后台部分功能由大型语言模型（LLM）支持。

Conceptual Insipirations

Current discussions on artificial intelligence and creativity have long been trapped in polarized narratives: one side views AI as a threat that can supplant human subjectivity, while the other extols its instrumental rationality for eliminating the drudgery of creative labor (e.g., OpenAI, 2023). However, neither of these stances addresses the essence of technology as a “mode of revealing” — as Heidegger put it, technology, through Gestell, reduces the world to calculable resources while simultaneously concealing other potential modes of unconcealment (1954/1977). The epistemological crisis of AI is further rooted in colonial logic: from cybernetics erasing the boundaries between organism and machine (Hui, 2019) to reducing meaning to algorithmic “calculation” (B.C. Smith, 2019), its development has always relied on exploitative labor chains, environmental violence, and data colonialism (Crawford, 2021). We reject the binary “tool-dominion” framework and propose to reconstruct our relationship with AI through a dual practice of “Demystification” and “Remystification” — the former exposing the political and material costs hidden within technology’s black box, and the latter embracing incommensurable ambiguity to transform it into a resource for ethical creativity.

In past projects, we have practiced Demystification through critical technological education, whereas Mountain of Many Voices is a radical experiment in Remystification: when mainstream discourse treats AI outputs as commands or knowledge, we recast them as divinatory, ambiguous revelations that demand human interpretation to confer meaning. Beyond theoretical critique, this choice also stems from our commitment to narrative — whether through video games or interactive ceremonies, we have consistently explored how collective creation can convey a generation’s spiritual map. Players’ inputs become seeds that return to reshape the worlds within the narrative, and the interplay among players evolves into a collective reconfiguration, with large language models generating and inserting symbolic, ambiguous narrative elements behind the scenes. Participants are required to interpret this ambiguity within their own contexts, culminating in a ritual display of collective talismans. The gradual fusion and dissolution of these talismans serves both as a resistance to the deterministic logic of technology and as a tribute to the inexhaustible nature of the human spirit.

This project is also a continuation of our “Computational Haze” series, an effort to reconstruct a poetic vision of human–machine symbiosis through recursive narratives and ambiguous interactions in an era dominated by automated software. If AI’s “rationality” is fated to collude with colonial modernity—manifested, for instance, in the hegemonic gaze embedded within its training data—then Remystification is a struggle to reclaim the right to interpretation. It does not deny the materiality of technology but insists on sowing a multiplicity of universes within the fissures of its algorithms.

当前关于人工智能与创造力的讨论长期陷入两极化的叙述之中：一方将人工智能视为可以取代人类主体性的威胁，而另一方则赞扬其工具理性，认为它能消除创作劳动的繁琐性（例如：OpenAI, 2023）。然而，这两种立场都未能触及技术作为一种“解蔽方式”的本质——正如海德格尔所言，技术通过Gestell（有译为「座架」，或者「订造」）将世界化约为可计算的资源，同时也遮蔽了其他潜在的解蔽方式（1954/1977）。人工智能的认识论危机更深层地植根于殖民逻辑：从控制论抹去有机体与机器之间的界限（许煜，2019），到将意义简化为算法式的“计算”（B.C. Smith, 2019），其发展历来依赖于剥削性的劳动链、环境暴力以及数据殖民主义（Crawford, 2021）。我们拒绝“工具-统治”的二元框架，主张通过“去魅”与“复魅”的双重实践重塑我们与人工智能的关系——前者揭露技术黑箱中隐藏的政治与物质代价，后者则拥抱无法通约的暧昧性，将其转化为伦理创造力的资源。

在过去的项目中，我们通过批判性的技术教育实践了去魅，而《众鸣山》则是一次激进的复魅实验：当主流话语将人工智能的输出视为指令或知识时，我们将其重新诠释为需要人类阐释才能赋予意义的、具有占卜性质的暧昧启示。这一选择不仅是理论批判，也源自我们对叙事的承诺——无论是电子游戏还是互动仪式，我们始终在探索集体创造如何传达一代人的精神地图。玩家的输入成为种子，反过来重塑叙事世界，而玩家之间的互动则演变为集体的重构过程，大型语言模型则在幕后生成并嵌入具有象征性与暧昧性的叙事元素。参与者需要在自己的语境下阐释这种暧昧性，最终以集体符箓的仪式展示达到高潮。这些符箓的逐渐融合与消解既是对技术决定论逻辑的抵抗，也是在向人类精神的不竭本质致敬。

本项目也是我们“计算迷雾”系列的延续，这一系列致力于在自动化软件主导的时代，通过递归叙事与暧昧互动重塑一种人机共生的诗意愿景。如果人工智能的“理性”注定与殖民现代性合谋——例如表现在其训练数据中隐含的霸权凝视——那么复魅便是重新夺回阐释权的抗争。它并未否认技术的物质性，而是坚持在算法的裂隙中播种多个宇宙的可能性。