Body Oracle
2024
A language for bodily relationships
What would an alternative world look like if its written language made us more aware of one another's bodies?
Body Oracle is a speculative language system inspired by Chinese Oracle-Bone Inscriptions. It translates individual and collective poses into AI-generated pictograms, inviting participants to consider how a shared vocabulary might change the way they notice, describe, and perform bodily relationships. A posture becomes something that can be revisited, imitated, and discussed as a character.
The work brings computational linguistics into an embodied encounter. Its characters offer a proposition about language and bodily awareness; their meanings emerge through the installation and its participants. They are newly generated artistic signs, rather than translations of authentic ancient inscriptions.
Making a character
The screen-based installation begins with a camera and a participant holding a pose. Volunteers first recreated bodily forms from oracle characters to produce paired examples for the system. MoveNet detects body keypoints; a pix2pix image-translation model maps the skeletal arrangement to a glyph; neural style transfer refines its appearance.
The original interface waits for a stable posture, displays a countdown, and captures a frame for conversion. This pause turns an ordinary gesture into a deliberate act of inscription. Participants can compare the resulting character with the position they held and try another arrangement. The project archive collects these body–character relationships so that a gesture can outlast the encounter that produced it.
Caster, Archive, and Translator
The later installation develops three connected components. The Caster generates characters from poses. The Archive links characters, poses, and generated pronunciations. The Translator lets a visitor look at another person through a handheld mixed-reality viewer and encounter their posture as a sign.
The Translator encloses HoloKit and an iPhone in a binocular-like, oracle-bone-inspired shell. A fine-tuned YOLO11 pose model matches a body to the Archive; a screen button speaks the associated pronunciation. GPT-4o supplies pronunciations within this speculative system. Together, the components stage an alternative present in which a bodily language appears to have a long cultural history. Design and system documentation.
Publications
- 2025 — Body Oracle: Exploring Somatic Hieroglyphs for Collective Bodily Awareness. Proceedings of the Conference on Animation and Interactive Art (Expanded 2025). Linz, Austria. Art Paper. [→]
Demonstrations
- 2025 — “Body Oracle” Translator: Translating Body Postures into Speculative Hieroglyphs. SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 XR. Hong Kong. Extended Reality. [→]
- 2025 — Body Oracle. Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI 2025). Bordeaux, France. Art and Performance. [→]
Exhibitions and presentations
- SIGGRAPH Asia 2025, Extended Reality, Hong Kong — the Translator demonstration. Publication.
- IJCAI 2025 Art Gallery, Montréal, 16–22 August 2025 — selected artwork. Exhibition programme.
- CVPR 2025 AI Art Gallery, Nashville; TEI 2025 Art and Performance, Bordeaux; China National Art Exhibition 2024, Chongqing; and Digital Art China, Hangzhou. Artist's exhibition record.
- Expanded 2025, Linz — art-paper presentation. [→]
- ISEA 2025, Seoul — artist talk. Artist's presentation record.
Project documentation
