Enter
Each user-performer enters the Greater Yijing panorama at a particular time and meets a specific constellation determined by previous individual and collective interactions — hazardous, but not quite.
Cosmical
Reframe
The classical diagram becomes a field: from oracle sign to painted constellation, from reading to embodied interaction.
With this transmedia-art painting-work, THE GREATER YIJING, Nikunja develops a new artistic grammar from the traditional Yijing. The work transforms the line-based diagram into a spatial and performative system of painted plates, sound presences and user-performer decisions.
It allows a transmedia art experience exploring further Nikunja’s Interactive Matter art concept: the artwork is not fixed as a single object, but appears as an evolving relation between matter, sound, human movement, memory, time and collective situation.
This is an in-finite artwork in progress, starting 2025.
Interactive
Matter
Interactive Matter is Nikunja’s art-theoretical conception of the artwork as a living field of relations rather than a fixed object or a closed statement. In this field, painting, sound, space, time, visitor movement, memory and collective situation interact with one another and create a multi-layered phenomenological field in which emergence becomes possible and can actively form.
In analogy to quantum field theory, reality is understood not as a set of isolated positions, but as an energetic field of relations, potentials and transformations. The artwork becomes a zone in which small gestures may create a quantum leap of perception: a shift from the affirmation of a position toward the emergence of a new reality.
Emergence is more important than the definition of a fixed position.
In THE GREATER YIJING this becomes directly experienceable. The user-performer realizes that the creation of emergence is more important than the definition of a fixed position. Even more, the will to impose a position appears weaker than the will to bring forward evolution, relation and transformation.
Inside the Greater Yijing system, the interplay between individual freedom and the collective whole allows the utmost freedom of the individual without destroying the collective good. At the same time, the collective field does not suppress the individual, but receives the individual gesture as an important contribution to its own evolution. The importance of the collective toward the individual and the importance of the individual toward the collective become reciprocal.
This powerful interplay could also be understood as a model for social structures: a structure in which freedom does not need to be reduced by pressure, control or limitation, because the creative process itself allows individual action and collective coherence to emerge together.
Video
Folio
Integrated original video material · Musical excerpt: Arnold Schoenberg — Transfigurations
The Painting
Installation
THE GREATER YIJING expands the three to six long or broken black lines of the original Yijing diagrams into nine painted square stainless steel plates, each 27 cm × 27 cm, arranged as a square diagram of approximately 87 cm side length.
Nine diagrams are assembled into one sentence. Nine sentences become a circular panorama with entrances between the sentence-panels. Thus the complete work contains 729 individual painted plates. Partial panorama-installations of three or six sentences remain possible.
9
plates per diagram
81
diagrams
729
painted plates
∞
evolving constellations
Dynamic diagram: a living visual echo of the nine-part system.
The animation is graphic interface design; the photographs remain original and unaltered.
Rain-Studio
The paintings are created in Nikunja’s Rain-Studio in collaboration with rain, atmospheric conditions and cosmic interactions during the creation process. Oil and acrylic paint form painterly events in which controlled artistic decision and open environmental participation enter into a shared field.
Some plates carry a coloured finger-print at the center. These finger-prints are applied partly by the artist and partly by user-performers during special exhibition events, bringing the human gesture directly into the work’s cosmical and social diagram.
Interaction
Interplay
01
02
Read
The work can be approached as a game, an introspection, a meditation on oneself, loved ones or the world-situation — in a way similar to the original Yijing, but expanded into a transmedia field.
03
Move
The user-performer may exchange individual plates inside the panorama. A section on each sentence-panel allows up to six plates to be placed outside the diagrams, making each exhibition state a temporary constellation.
04
Continue
From one exhibition to the next, the last constellation becomes the first constellation of the new show. A continuity is created, and histories are written through local culture, time-frame, geography and collective perception.
Sound Field
To each plate a specific sound is composed, constantly emanating at low volume. The closer the user-performer approaches a singular plate, the more clearly its particular sound can be heard in concert with all nearby sounds.
The movement of the user-performer defines the perceived sound composition. Audio is transmitted through wireless headphones, allowing the panorama to become a mobile acoustic reading of the painted constellation.
Individual free will enters the collective and cosmical interplay — and unfolds its presence and reality.
Original
Photographs
Background
Continuity
A page from a Song Dynasty printed book of the I Ching / Yi Jing / Classic of Changes belongs to the historical background of the project. THE GREATER YIJING does not replace this history; it opens a contemporary transmedia passage around it, connecting ancient diagrammatic thinking to painting, sound, live decision and future collective memory.
Web address for publication: www.nikunja.net/iying
Studio / artist website: www.nikunja.net