On April 19, 2025, six of us — five Kafkas and a child — went to a Zoo in Chengdu. We read the day’s news under a bamboo grove, then wandered. Afterwards we uploaded photographs, fragments and diaries to are.na, and from those traces I edited a stage script in the form of a theatre dialogue.

The recording below is a reading of that script. Each participant is voiced by a deceased artist or writer, all of whom — in this Chinese rendition — speak with a strong countryside accent. Some sound from Northeast China, and some sound like a Cantonese local.

AI naturally presents an alienated feel — a kind of Kafka-world quality.

There is another thread in it though. In the diaries we collectively submitted, a child shrieks at the giraffe — I’ll pull off your legs — and immerses himself in it with pleasure.

Many of us work hard to prove they are real humans. People try to prove it in their relationships, in their families, to their browsers. But it should be an undoubtable question. The doubt itself, is a reflection of what a person themself is.

I felt AI’s texture is what presents it into the visible. Although, it remains unclear how to improve the work to be more articulated.

Cast of voices

• rui-ya — Simone de Beauvoir
• Lia — Frida Kahlo
• Lingxiao — Nam June Paik
• 苗子 — Sylvia Plath
• breobyhnaug — Susan Sontag
• 小马 — Isamu Noguchi
• default / narrator — Virginia Woolf

Stage script

The full bilingual text — diary entries, a Wallace Stevens poem, a black swan poem, fragments of Kafka’s diaries, and the recruitment notice — is available as a plain text file: Download the script (.txt).

Black swan, black swan
Refusal of conceptual
Refusal of concept entering another man
When someone was showering a rain under the tree
Anubis weighed their heart with a feather

Within a few hours of digital companion
Someone spoke softly
And felt good about keeping up so
Full humanity had the clarity of
not needing anything else

Maybe, a concept says, it’s not crazy
Different cities will visit him
Like leg-pinched dreamtigers

The double exiled
Refuses the entering of concept
The digital the analog the cinnamon smell
Black swan, black swan

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Participants: rui-ya, Lia, Lingxiao, 苗子, breobyhnaug, 小马, and 超酱 (the kid).

License: CC BY-NC 4.0

Date: April, 2026