The Feather of Ma’at 玛阿特的羽毛
Weighing software’s soft power in a post-digital world
策展人CURATORS
Zinnia WANG
Melody Chenxuan YU
新媒体艺术家
DIGITAL ARTISTS
Yutong AO 敖宇彤
Zhuoxi DENG 邓卓茜
Xinwei Du 杜欣蔚
Congjin HE 何聪进
Suhas Kambhampati 苏哈斯 · 坎巴姆帕蒂
The Crypt Gallery, London
In ancient Egyptian cosmology, people were believed to face a judgement after death concerning whether their lives had remained in accord with cosmic order. A mythological scene in the Book of the Dead, known as the “Weighing of the Heart,” depicts the heart of the deceased placed on a scale against the feather of Ma’at. The heart, heavy with desire, action and memory, is weighed alongside the feather of Ma’at, which represents cosmic order itself—truth, balance, and harmony. They appear as two primordial cores of civilisation, embedded deep within humanity’s earliest imaginings of order.
Today, software plays a similarly human-like, if less visible, role. If the judged heart were replaced by a computer chip, could the intelligence, algorithms and computational logics it carries, together with the effects it exerts upon human life, also take part in this weighing of order? What forms of judgement might now take place? When the scale begins to move, what is measured is not simply good or evil, but whether life remains in rhythm with the wider world.
This contemporary digital art exhibition, The Feather of Ma’at, brings together five digital artists from London and China to explore how digital systems participate in the production of contemporary order. Using artificial intelligence, three-dimensional simulation software and immersive media, the artists reimagine recurring gestures of daily life, whale fall and regeneration, reflection and refraction, and the shifting processes of entropy between dispersal and aggregation. Through moving image, spatial audio and motion, these processes are transformed into multisensory environments that invite reflection on systems of control, instability and renewal.
The Feather of Ma’at thus becomes a contemporary metaphor: a symbolic measure of the shifting balance between technological systems and human civilisation. This exhibition draws on this powerful metaphor to ask whether, in the post-digital present, software possesses a form of soft power and can act as one of the ways through which humanity continues its search for order, tranquillity and a world that can still be understood.
在古埃及宇宙观中，人们相信死后将面临一场审判，以衡量其一生是否始终与宇宙秩序保持一致。《亡灵书》中有一幅极为重要的“称量心脏”图景：玛阿特（Ma’at）的羽毛与被审判者的心脏，被一同置于天平两端。天平的一侧，是被审判者的心脏，承载其一生的欲望、行为与记忆；另一侧，则是玛阿特的羽毛，象征古埃及宇宙观中关于秩序的尺度——真理、平衡与和谐。“羽毛”与“心脏”仿佛两枚远古的秩序原石，其间的衡量关系，早已深深镶嵌在人类早期文明对于世界秩序的想象之中。
如今，软件正扮演着一种近似人类、却更为隐形的角色。当被审判的心脏被一枚计算机软件芯片所取代，其所承载的智能、算法与运算逻辑，以及对人类生活产生的影响，是否也能够参与这场有关秩序的衡量？又将有何种新的审判形式随之展开？当天平开始摆动，被衡量的并不只是善恶本身，而是生命是否仍与世界的节律保持一致。
本次当代数字艺术展览《玛阿特的羽毛》汇聚来自伦敦与中国的五位数字艺术家，共同探讨数字系统如何参与当代秩序的生成。艺术家运用人工智能、三维模拟软件与沉浸式媒介，重新想象日常生活中反复出现的动作姿态、鲸落与再生、反射与折射，以及熵在扩散与聚合之间不断变化的过程。通过动态图像、空间音频与运动，这些过程被转化为多感官环境，邀请观众思考控制、失稳与更新等系统性议题。
《玛阿特的羽毛》由此成为一种当代隐喻，象征着技术系统与人类文明之间不断变化之平衡的尺度。展览借由这一有力的隐喻提出追问：在后数字时代的当下，软件是否具备一种柔性力量，并成为人类持续寻求秩序、宁静，以及一个仍可被理解的世界的方式之一。