SoulFish

Every SoulFish carries its own genome, which records whether it has fins, how wide its body is, how many lines it has and the value of every parameter; what I define is the DNA, and the fish grows itself. The hash of each edition first becomes a stream of random numbers, and the stream decides sixteen traits in order: palette, background, body size, solid or gradient colouring, main and dark colour, the number of tendrils, the density of lines, the type of scales, the vertical fin, the spine, the upper and lower fins and their sizes, and the chord set it will keep for life. The same stream also feeds the noise and the physics, so the same hash always grows the same fish.

In earlier works such as Sliderverse and Soul Sea the sound was synthesised with the Web Audio API; with SoulFish I placed a set of real piano samples inside the work for the first time, and the moment the work starts running it decides its chord progression and melodic line. Because the music is generated live, every fish has a melody of its own, a higher melodic line woven over a lower accompaniment, and each fish is a melody automaton composing its own tune.

It works like a loom, except that what it weaves is notes rather than cloth; when the fish swims faster the whole piece quickens, and the instant a bubble bursts, a single piano note falls an octave higher.

DIGI-FI Yilan 2023, Illusions of Light and Shadow, opened on 23 December 2023 at the Zhongxing Cultural and Creative Park in Wujie, Yilan County, and ran until 23 January 2024. It was organised by the Yilan County Government and curated by WA Co., Ltd. (Wei-Yun Chang). The floor plan posted at the venue marks SoulFish as A1, beside the entrance, with Ke-Chun Wu’s Zendō in the next space. It was the first time SoulFish became an interactive installation.

A vertical touchscreen stands on the right; rest your palm on the light and a glow slowly gathers around your hand and settles into a colour, while the screen reads that a soul fragment has been extracted and a fish is being generated. On the projection wall to the left, the fish that was there dissolves into points of light, and a new fish in that colour slowly grows.

Visitors stood before the wall comparing: why is the fish blue, why is mine so flat, why is yours so large. The feeling is like drawing a fortune stick at a temple; having placed a hand on the light, a person believes that this fish belongs to them.

The interactive version grew during the twelve days of installation. Work on site began on 9 December 2023, and the code for the touchscreen went into the repository that night. Around noon the next day a small remote server was switched on, and fourteen minutes later the code was pointed at it: each colour the touchscreen drew was sent to the server, which passed it on to the fish on the wall. On 20 December, the day of the press preview, the code changed nine more times between a little after seven in the morning and a little after one in the afternoon; the last two changes set the range the colours were drawn from, widening it from one stretch of the colour wheel to the whole circle.

The server wrote one line with a colour code for every fish it received, from the day it was switched on, 10 December 2023, until 29 June 2025. Before it was retired in October 2026, the full log was retrieved: leaving out the 368 test fish from the first day of development, it holds 9,316 fish and 10,071 connections.

The fish differ from one another only in hue; saturation and brightness are the same for all of them, because each time the touchscreen draws an angle on the colour wheel and the program fixes the rest. Cut the wheel into twelve equal slices and each slice holds between 743 and 807 fish, 64 apart at the extremes. In a screen’s eight-bit colour codes this ring can be written in only about 1,380 ways, and nine thousand draws used 1,377 of them.

The log has no timestamps, so there is no telling on which day any fish arrived. In those eighteen months the only exhibition known to have connected to this server is Yilan: the Venice machine was switched to run on its own on 17 April 2024; the web version on this site is an https page, and the browser blocks its calls to an http server; and which build the permanent screen at Tempo House runs has never been checked on site. That most of the fish come from the month in Yilan is therefore an inference. These are also fish sent to the server, not a count of visitors: one person can send many, and some only watch.

On 30 June 2025 the server was switched to https to link the two ends of the LG exhibition Physis, and by its last entry on 8 August it had received another 154 fish. In October 2026 the server was retired. The interactive version now at soulfish.art.cheyuwu.com/yilan/ was rewritten for LG in June 2025 and keeps the Yilan name; it is not the build that ran in the room in 2023.

During the Yilan festival the interactive version was covered by ELLE Taiwan, Marie Claire Taiwan, Vogue Taiwan and the Central News Agency; in 2026 it appears again in episode 267 of BLTV's Art Metaverse and in a PTS Plus feature. Links are at the foot of the page.