The Oyster of Time

The Oyster of Time (2024) is a intermedia corporeal opera project featuring AI-generated composition and arrangement, incorporating lyrics adapted from Jorge Luis Borges' poem "You are Not the Others." 

This project starts from a sense of fragmentation in time, exploring the human desire for coherence and wholeness, as well as the impossibility to reach it. And responds to this impossibility, providing an answer: to move towards your desires even if they are unreachable. Confronts your desires with the spirit of Sisyphus, never compromising.

 The flesh incessantly passes in desire and time. We attempt to traverse through loss and rupture, to locate our desires, and to move towards them.









AI Generated Music
Intermedia Corporeal Opera 



March 2024 
Whitc City, London, UK








You are Not the Others
Jorge Luis Borges

The writings left behind by those whom

Your fears implore won’t have to save you;

You are not the others and you see yourself 

Now at the center of the labyrinth woven 

By your own steps. The agonies of Jesus or 

Socrates will not save you, nor will the 

Strength of Golden Siddhartha who, 

At the end of the day, accepted death 

In the garden. The word written 

By your hand or the verb spoken 

By your lips, these too are dust. Fate has no pity , 

And God’s night is infinite. 

Your matter is time, ceaseless 

Time. You are each solitary moment.











Concept Summary The completeness and coherence we wish to reach are an irrevocable lost, and time, like gravity (in general relativity, the time field and the gravitational field are the same thing), can only flow incessantly.

Digital imagery attempts to simulate and construct a spatial orientation of the real world. Here, time is passing, the other is passing, the body is passing, the self is passing, desire is passing, everything is irrecoverably lost.

The performer use her bodies to experience and endure all the losses in this world, attempting to reconstruct time and rewrite desires.

The direction of time is the direction of entropy increase. Entropy increase means that everything becomes separated and disordered, and life and existence itself will eventually be exhausted and disappear. In the loss and dissipation where everything will disperse and vanish, we also see Han Byung-Chul's summary of time in the current information world. Here, time is fragmented, contingent, trivial, and unable to enter deep relationships. This "unable" becomes a kind of pain and loss.

Lacan's explanation of coherence and completeness is that the return to coherence is merely a nostalgia, an attempt to return to the feeling of being one with the mother's body at the very beginning of life. Every moment of living in the real world is a kind of loss, a constant losing. This loss is like the trauma that the Real continuously inflicts on our bodies in Lacan's theory, and our lives are like a continuum of trauma.

How do we face this loss, dissipation, trauma, and impossibility?

"The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open," this is Shakespeare's answer. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus said. "Do not give ground on your desire," is Lacan's response. "where it was , there I shall be," is Freud's conclusion. Traverse the mist, find your own desires, and never give ground.










Bibliography Han, Byung-Chul. Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. John Wiley & Sons, 2022.

Berger, John. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others. Pan Macmillan, 2014.

Baudrillard, Jean. L’échange Symbolique et La Mort. Editions Gallimard, 2017.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Gollancz, 2016.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Corte Madera, CA : Gingko Press, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Columbia University Press, 2006.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays. Vintage, 1991.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Modern Library, 2014.