Three days after I published an article about turning the refresh button of my website into an artistic compositional gesture, Prof. Yvonne Dohna-Schlobitten unexpectedly invited me to participate in her developing international project as an artist—and, almost in the same breath, in a scientific capacity as well. She had not yet seen this particular work. I sent it to her, explained that every refresh or navigation could produce another composition, and asked her to try it. Her first response…
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Essays
A collection of interdisciplinary essays and long-form reflections on theology, philosophy, ethics, art, cinema, artificial intelligence, digital culture, and lived experience. Moving between close reading, conceptual analysis, personal encounter, and practical observation, these writings explore how technologies, institutions, works of art, and forms of belief shape human judgment and responsibility. They are united less by a single subject than by a continuing interest in the moral, spiritual, and existential questions that appear where different fields of knowledge meet.
奇迹与 Loïc 被赋予的道德代价：论《冬天的故事》（1992）里的希望、信仰和确信（及其区别）
我原本以为，埃里克·侯麦（Éric Rohmer）的《冬天的故事》（Conte d’hiver, 1992）最终会让我思考爱情中的忠贞、偶然性，也许再加上一点神学。然而实际发生的却完全不是这样：我发现自己不断地在与菲莉茜（Félicie…
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What Loïc Taught Me About the Moral Cost of a Miracle: A Tale of Winter (1992) and the Difference Between Hope, Faith, and Certainty
I expected Éric Rohmer’s Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter, 1992) to leave me thinking about romantic fidelity, chance, and perhaps a little theology. Instead, I ended up arguing with Félicie, defending her, criticizing her again, correcting some of my own criticisms after returning to the screenplay, questioning whether her “faith” is really faith, and finally becoming much more interested in Loïc than in the miraculous return of Charles. The film grew richer every time one of my…
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Refreshing the Webpage as an Act of (Artistic) Composition and Encounter
My Background Studio began as a practical website feature, but it gradually became a form of browser-native art. Technical writing, photography, animated animals, religious imagery, mathematical structures and Internet vernacular now coexist in compositions generated by twelve algorithms. The central page and its moving margins are complementary: each gives the other a context, rhythm and character that it could not produce alone.
A background that completes the foreground
It would be misleading to divide the website into “important content” and…
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冬夜在嘎嘎家， 3DMark 06 和罗马
今天在海弗利一家中餐馆吃饭时，突然想起了一幕场景。那是我高中时，大概是2009年或2010年左右，一个冬夜。那应该是寒假期间，我在外婆家——也就是我妈妈的妈妈家，我们用湖北方言叫她嘎嘎。
我当时正在用我爸爸在我奶奶的劝说下买的电脑玩（更准确地说，是“使用/运行”而非“玩”） 3DMark 06 演示版。
From 3DMark 06 to Rome: A Winter Night at Gaga’s House
Today, while dining at a Chinese restaurant in Heverlee, a scene suddenly came to mind. It was me in high school, probably around 2009 or 2010, on what I think might have been a winter night. It must have been a night during winter break at my grandma’s house, my mother’s mother, whom we call Gaga （嘎嘎） in the Hubei dialect.
I was on a computer that my dad had bought at the urging of my grandma, playing the 3DMark 06 demo.
候麦电影中的爱、愧疚与解脱：《女友的男友》（1987）观后感
（口述转录）
《女孩的男朋友》或者《我女友的男朋友》之类的。
总的来说，我挺喜欢这部电影的。它非常有名，据说是他一系列道德寓言故事中的一部。我之前多次听过它的名字，但从未认真看过。过去几天，我一直在等待英国签证申请的结果。我昨天提交了申请，现在正在等待，所以自然有点紧张。因此，我断断续续地看了这部电影，通常每天吃饭的时候看几分钟，最后分几次看完了。
Love, Guilt, and Relief in Rohmer: Some Thoughts After Watching “L’Ami de mon amie” (1987)
(Oral transcription)
Anyway, today I finally finished watching a film by Rohmer—the French director Éric Rohmer. The film is called something like The Girl’s Boyfriend, or My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend—something along those lines.
Overall, I quite liked it. The film is very famous and is supposedly one of his series of moral tales. I had heard its title many times before, but I had never watched it carefully. Over the past few days, I have also been waiting for the result of my UK visa application. I submitted it yesterday, and now I am waiting, so naturally I have been feeling a little nervous. I therefore watched the film intermittently, usually for a few minutes while eating each day, and eventually finished it over several sittings.
The Weight of the News from Venezuela
I had heard the news about the earthquakes in Venezuela earlier today, but I’d only seen the text headlines and hadn’t looked closely at the reports. That was until I scrolled through Instagram and saw the devastating footage: collapsed buildings, people filming the destruction, and a voice off-camera screaming for his mother toward the rubble.
In another video, a young man sat atop his home, which had been reduced to a pile of ruins. The video was shot in HDR…
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Lunchtime Observations at Alma, KU Leuven: The Set Meal Rule
At the Alma 1 restaurant at KU Leuven, they clearly had chicken cutlets, but they absolutely refused to let you buy one separately, stipulating that you could only buy it as part of a set meal (5.6 euros for students).
If the set meal didn’t include the combination you wanted, and you just wanted to add something extra—for example, the set meal originally included a chicken cutlet, vegetables, and rice, but you only wanted the chicken cutlet—that was absolutely impossible there. You had to buy a whole set meal. But by then, I had already eaten lunch and couldn’t possibly eat a second one.