The 108 Defilements of the Mind

Chosen for solo exhibition at the 8th Czong Institute for Contemporary Art New Media Art Conference in Gimpo, South Korea (Summer 2024).

2023-24 (revised 2025)

The 108 Defilements of the Mind presents a nonsectarian digital meditation on the ubiquity of short-form content. This iterative work expands temporally from its original five-second duration to nine minutes, using identical audiovisual elements to examine how duration fundamentally alters perception and meaning. The visuals, programmed in TouchDesigner, depict Buddhist prayer beads, yeomju in Korean, some of which traditionally comprise 108 beads corresponding to the defilements that obstruct enlightenment. I developed complementary video effects in collaboration with Claude and Gemini, inviting these models to propose visual processes that respond to the work’s contemplative and programmatic frameworks. The piece interrogates our contemporary relationship with time and attention, proposing slowness as both resistance and revelation within an increasingly compressed media ecology.