The Media I Ching

The Media I Ching is an interpretation of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, the Yi Jing, in audio and video. This media object is the result of a studio project by Max Willis, MFA student at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, under the supervision of Linda Lai.

To use the media I Ching, meditate on the question at hand, then press the Tao symbol button. The lines will be generated and media passages displayed, which most appropriately address the situation. The English translations of passages from the I Ching are included, from the Wilhelm-Barnes translation. Further readings on the individual lines, marked in the diagram with a small circle, can be found here.

The generation of the I Ching lines functions through a Flash interface which retrieves the lines with the same probability as that of the traditional yarrow stalk and two-coin methods. The audio and video is presented in Quicktime using Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) loaded with xmlhttprequest (XHR, or AJAX).