Being-with the StoneJenny Jih (2026)
Short Film, New Art City Virtual Space, Interactive Installation
Being-with the Stone begins from a question that returned to me during fieldwork at Stonehenge: what happens when you press your hand against an ancient stone, and feel something the institution cannot regulate? It has developed organically into different forms that together act as micro-ritual devices—containers holding the sensory residues of ritual. The project comprises a short film, a virtual experience hosted on the New Art City platform, and a physical installation.
{ PART I: Short Film }
A journey of descent: beginning in the collective ecstasy of Stonehenge at the Summer Solstice, the agency of the sun, the way it orients bodies, and slowly withdrawing, until what remains is skin against the stone surface, and silence.
Drawing on Georges Bataille's notion of the sacred, the film holds a contradiction at its centre: is it possible to reach for an intimate kinship? This is an invitation to feel what it means to be porous, acknowledging we can never become the stone, but that in this entanglement, something emerges. The three assemblages — The Sun, The Touch, Being-With — then distributed across the virtual space as separate encounters that nonetheless accumulate into a larger whole.
{ PART II: Stonehenge Virtual Space }
The work does not attempt a perfect reconstruction but takes the form of assemblages composed of heterogeneous fragments of Stonehenge. Scattered throughout are sensory data gathered during my summer solstice fieldwork, anchored by three video movements.
#Interaction mechanism:
Follow the luminous path. Your presence triggers soundscapes and videos as you navigate. Your journey leads to the solitary Heel Stone. Step inside the stone to complete the encounter.
Enter Space
{ PART III: Interactive Installation }
It extends from the final assemblages of the encounters, invites visitors to touch physical stones to enter an intimate encounter. The work asks how one might orient towards a being that does not, and cannot, respond.
Each stone carries a capacitive sensor; when a visitor lays their hand on it, a projected moving image responds. What changes on screen is not the stone's reaction but how my perception 'intra-act' (Barad) and slowly attuning to the stone's frequency and deep time, where I segment the poetry generated from my encounter with the Heel Stone to four parts, tuned towards the stone's inclination, warmth, and living textures.