Towards a Techno-Hauntological Aesthetic: Immiscible Time and the Spiritual Imagination in <i>Bodyless</i> (Shishenji, 2019) by Huang Hsin-Chien
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article discusses and explores acclaimed new media artist Huang Hsin-Chien’s virtual reality (VR) experience Bodyless (Shishenji, 2019). In this film, through the process of the body illusion or the body replacement program, a component specific to VR, viewers embody the soul of a political prisoner deceased during Taiwan’s martial law era. Bodyless juxtaposes Taiwan’s traditional spiritual traditions with references to the Ghost Festival (中元節) and includes a dystopic vision of the future that appears towards the end of the film. This article establishes, through a close reading of several key sequences of the film, the emergence of a techno-hauntological aesthetic. It creates a dialogue between Huang’s dream-like imagery and various interpretation of Bliss Cua Lim’s concepts of immiscible time and heterogeneous space. How does Bodyless visually enact, perform, and develop a techno-hauntological aesthetic? How does the artist explore philosophical concepts related to memory, time, and space by using VR?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".