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Information
Saliva Commune
Green Sun
Pattern Test (No. 1)
Chlorophyll Grid
Fluid Dynamics Study
Britannia
Stay With Your Tribe
Spent Landscape
Sun and 80 Consonents
Matadero
CUERPO Collective Body
Supernormal Vision Machine
Terra
Night Stories
Field Condition
Untitled



   Sy Di 2026

I am a Chinese Canadian artist currently based in Toronto and Vancouver. My work explores post-extractive sites, toxic substances, and forms of biopolitics mediated through fluid matter. My current research focuses on DIY mist installations and biological media, including bodily fluids such as saliva. Through these materials, I explore tensions between affective experience, social control, and utopian thinking. In my resarch, fluid matter offers a way to imagine how relationships among bodies, technologies, and possible futures might be reorganized. 

In my installation work, I often use repurposed objects, biological media, plants, electronics, environmental data, and live coding tools to assemble multimedia environments. My thinking is informed by lineages of socialist thought and by scientific and cosmo-spiritual traditions that move between myth and science, including Russian Cosmism, Eastern costomology and ritual practices.

sy.di [at] mail.utoronto.ca

01.Saliva Commune



2026




saliva, petri dish, copper wire, MIDI Sprout, amplifier, transducer, software codes, sever rack, MDF board


Saliva Commune
is an installation composed of bacterial cultures grown from saliva collected from various people. The cultures are housed in Petri dishes and connected by copper wire, forming a living circuit that feeds into bio-mediated sound devices. Using code written in SuperCollider, biological input is translated into MIDI data, which is then used to compose, modulate, and distort a soundtrack. The soundtrack incorporates an excerpt from Biocosmist Poetics by Alexander Svyatogor, a Russian poet, anarchist, and founder of the anarcho-biocosmist movement, read by an AI voice.

The work positions saliva both as a site of intimacy and biopolitics, where the medium is closely associated with biocitizen profiling, policing and forensic science. The work revisits avant-garde concepts of bio-techno utopia as a commune where biological processes, coded systems, and architecture might co-compose a sensory environment in which the kinetic forces of biology, intimacy, and technological mediation are no longer separate conditions, but active forces shaping one another.


1/4    Installation view
1/4    Saliva culture and bio data interface
3/4    A surface transducer is attached to the building's ventilation duct, transforming the ductwork into a resonant speaker that distributes sound throughout the space.
4/4    SuperCollider coding interface