留白 (Liubai) at a Hushed Sanctuary: Layered Reflections on an Artist Residency

Paper Title

留白 (Liubai) at a Hushed Sanctuary: Layered Reflections on an Artist Residency

Publication Info

• Topic area: Intersection of art, spirituality, and HCI through the lens of silence and reflection.
• Keywords: silence, liubai, techno-spirituality, slow technology, artist residency, meditation, noticing, reflection, collective practice, posthumanism.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing HCI research has not fully explored how silence, as a medium for reflection and noticing, can inform interaction design, particularly in the context of techno-spirituality and collective creative practices.
• Significance: Silence and reflection have the potential to enhance personal and collective wellbeing, offering alternative paradigms for designing technologies that prioritize slowness, mindfulness, and spiritual connection.
• Motivation and related work: Prior HCI studies have explored slow technology, mindfulness, and R/S practices, but they often lack integration with lived experiences and artistic practices. The paper builds on these gaps by investigating silence as an interaction paradigm through an artist residency.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Using an artist residency as a site for exploring silence, reflection, and the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai (留白, “empty space”) as design inspirations for HCI.
• Novelty:
  1. Positioning artist residencies as spaces for situated, embodied inquiry in HCI, emphasizing arts-based approaches.
  2. Framing liubai as a design space through empirical reflections on silence, pause, and noticing.
  3. Advancing a reflective design orientation that values slowness and alternative modes of making and thinking in techno-spiritual contexts.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a one-month artist residency in rural Finland with limited Wi-Fi, daily silent meditation, and collective silent activities.
  • Used first-person inquiry, journaling, interviews with participants, and the creation of two artistic artefacts (The Subterranean Mute and The Snow in March) to explore silence and reflection.
  • Analyzed data through reflexive conversations, affinity diagramming, and artistic interpretation.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Silence fosters multi-layered noticing, enhancing awareness of self, others, and the environment.
  • Shared silence enables collective coordination and care, creating a sense of communal resonance.
  • Artistic practices, such as layering and improvisation, translate meditative experiences into tangible forms, reflecting the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of silence.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Demonstrates how silence and liubai can be integrated into design processes to move beyond efficiency-focused paradigms.
  • Highlights the potential of slow technology and inward-oriented design for fostering reflection and relational attunement.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Fieldwork involved daily meditation, journaling, and noticing practices.
  • Semi-structured interviews with eight participants (diverse in age, gender, and spiritual traditions) explored their experiences of meditation and silence.
  • Two artistic artefacts were created to embody and communicate the residency’s themes.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited generalizability due to the focus on a single artist-researcher’s experience.
  • Future work could explore how inward-oriented design methodologies and collective silence practices can be scaled or adapted in broader HCI contexts.

Summary

This paper explores how silence, reflection, and the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai can inform interaction design through the lens of a one-month artist residency in Finland. By integrating meditation, noticing practices, and artistic creation, the study highlights the potential of silence as a medium for personal and collective meaning-making. Findings emphasize the value of slow technology, inward-oriented design, and relational attunement in fostering mindfulness and spiritual connection. The work contributes to HCI by advocating for alternative, reflective approaches to designing technologies that support wellbeing and ecological awareness.