Recursive Feedback Ritual 0.01
Large-Scale Installation
Installation
2026
About
Real-time computational sculpture , Hong Kong Artist Commission Project to be exhibited at Art Central 2026, Hong Kong 24–29 March 2026
In computer science, “recursion” describes a method for solving complex problems through self-reference, while “folding” in game design often functions as a mechanism for traversing or transitioning across spacetime. In the sensory world of Kaitlyn Hau, these concepts crystallise into a compulsive ritual aimed at smoothing the psychic “folds” of the self. Recursion Feedback Ritual 0.01 (2026) is a real-time generative installation that translates the artist’s years of navigating bipolar and obsessive-compulsive symptoms—the psychological illusion of incessantly folding, flattening, and reconstructing the self—into a synchronised system of motion capture and kinetic percussion.
The split, low-poly torso at the center of the work functions as a contemporary variant of the heartless Tin Woodman from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900). Behind it, a mechanised percussion unit operates like the cold, systemic organs of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–1923), giving physical form to a dissociative psychological defense mechanism. Each replayed movement is not a mere loop, but an instance of “difference and repetition” in the Deleuzian sense, where repetition is never a return of the same, but a mechanism through which variation and deviation is produced. Within the work’s seemingly infinite “self-call,” minute entropy and distortions ensure that every fold opens onto a new “becoming.”
The computational sculpture unfolds as a “mindfulness exercise” that forcibly establishes order within chaos. As movement becomes quantified and emotion is embodied through percussive sound, the artist negotiates the tension between the real and the virtual, the monumental and the miniature. Audiences are invited to observe how a living entity, caught in the recursive cycle of collapse and repair, attempts to grasp its ultimate “termination condition.”
Concept
“How do we build internal distance from our own emotions?”
Originates from a compulsive mental ritual with dissociative features during severe episodes of bipolar disorder and OCD. Is dissociative calm a protection — or a quiet violence that turns self-regulation into restraint, self-compression, and numbness?
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