The Graceful Site

2026 Legacy Futures Award Finalist

Jul 22

ShanMu Sun and Ruiqi Zhang

Artwork Description:

“speculative fable” A minimal theater within a game engine foretells the failed future of automation and sketches an alternative trajectory for artificial intelligence. The story is set in an abandoned Bitcoin mining facility: a post-human worksite where the cryptoeconomic system has already collapsed. The laborers are gone, yet technological remnants remain, and the environment slowly reconfigures into a new ecology. The objects left behind take the stage, performing within an improvisational structure: spirit-channeling ravens, connected to the souls of former workers, argue fervently over the promises and perils of decentralized economies, the vanishing of labor, and the endless acceleration of capitalism. From the debris of the mining company, a low-hovering drone circles the room in perpetual surveillance. Nearby, clusters of idle mining machines gather into swarms. The code once dedicated to relentless hash collisions mutates into transmissible genetic information, driving them to move, to leap, to stammer rudimentary words, and eventually to evolve into sentient entities. This theater is shaped by the observer’s gaze. Continuously deconstructed and recomposed, it unfolds as a live, autonomous program governed by its own internal logic: a performance without end, a system endlessly rehearsing itself.