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86 Billion Butterflies / 정동 (情動)(2026)
Interactive installation with a simulated microbiome, generative language, pneumatic movement, light, sound, and vibration
86 Billion Butterflies explores how emotion and a sense of self emerge through relationships among a body, its internal processes, and its environment. The installation brings a simulated gut microbiome into a sculptural body, connecting microbial changes to movement, color, sound, vibration, and language. I approach this body as a site where biological models and computational processes meet, asking how we recognize emotional expression in an entity whose bodily organization differs from our own.
Visitors participate by choosing foods through a digital interface. These inputs feed the simulated microbiome, changing its microbial composition and modeled neurotransmitter activity. The simulation draws on more than 9,000 microbiome samples with associated psychiatric symptom data. Each visitor contributes to a shared, changing state: successive food choices influence the same microbial ecosystem and the mood expressed by the installation. Feeding becomes a way of encountering how an action from outside a body can alter its internal conditions and outward behavior.
I approach emotion as a shifting combination of qualities that cannot be fully described by a single label such as happiness or sadness. Within the work, emotional qualities are mapped across a computational space that includes positive and negative directions. Changes in the simulated microbiome move the system’s state through this space. Its position informs the colors of the installation and the activity of its pneumatic elements, allowing emotional expression to vary in intensity and combination. The sculptural body makes these transitions perceptible through changes in light and movement.
An open-weight large language model gives this changing state a verbal expression. The model continues unfinished sentences such as “Someday I…,” leaving their emotional direction open. Using emotion-labeled texts from the GoEmotions dataset, we identify patterns in the model’s internal activity associated with different emotional content. Through activation steering, the simulated microbial state modifies this activity as text is generated, while the model’s learned weights remain unchanged. Running locally within the installation, the model produces language in Korean and English.
This process extends my interest in the conditions through which emotional expression takes shape. A modeled bodily state influences activity within an artificial neural network, which in turn affects the language it produces. The work makes this relationship available for artistic exploration without assuming that the model experiences emotion or reproduces human neural pathways. The connections among microbial activity, emotional qualities, and sensory expression are artistic decisions informed by microbiome research.
Sound and vibration bring these processes into contact with the visitor’s body. Processed recordings of intestinal sounds form the sonic and vibrational material of the installation. A transducer beneath the platform produces a heartbeat-like pulse that visitors feel through their feet. Its rhythm speeds up or slows down with the system’s modeled emotional state. Together with pneumatic movement, light, and generated language, this pulse allows visitors to encounter the same changing condition through several senses.
86 Billion Butterflies develops my ongoing inquiry into regulation, interdependence, and embodied intelligence. Drawing on cybernetics and questions of how living systems maintain themselves, I consider how a sense of coherence can develop through continual internal change and exchanges with an environment. Giving AI a material body allows these questions to unfold through an encounter: visitors feed it, feel its pulse, observe its movements, and read its words. Through this relationship, I ask what leads us to perceive mood, intention, or a sense of self in a nonhuman entity, and how that perception shapes the attention and care we give it.
Hosted by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism
Organized by Korea Arts Management Service · Arts Korea Lab
