Soft Upload is an ongoing collaborative performance project with artist and researcher Young Sun Han exploring consciousness transfer, aging, grief, and collective care through participatory ritual and speculative technology. The work centers on a “Consciousness Transfer Protocol,” a digital interface that prompts participants to reflect on continuity, memory, and what we choose to preserve. Rather than offering answers, the system coordinates shared attention and creates conditions for people to respond to one another through collective actions and ritual.
Young Sun and I develop the work together through performance, research, interface design, and participatory experimentation. Our collaboration brings together his performance and research practice with my work in ritual systems, interaction design, and emerging technology.
Across each iteration, the structure changes in response to the site and audience, but the central question remains the same: can technology be used to coordinate collective presence rather than personalization, optimization, or isolation?
Every Woman Biennial, 2026, Pen + Brush, New York
The first gallery iteration presented Soft Upload as an intimate ritual station focused on memory, aging, and preservation. Participants’ responses were woven into a collective tapestry of language, becoming a shared spell of intention around what women wanted to preserve in the world.
Radical Faery Gathering, QNCC, 2026
At the Radical Faery Gathering, we began passing language between participants. Responses entered a growing collective pool and were returned to later visitors, allowing one person’s words to become part of another person’s ritual and creating a form of distributed authorship across the gathering.
Fourth World: One Day Rave, 2026
For Fourth World, this exchange became more explicit. Participants contributed fragments about transformation and community to a shared pool, then received a response written by someone else under the prompt “From the Collective,” while more private reflections on release remained personal. Projected language moved across layers of translucent fabric, extending the collective exchange into the surrounding rave environment.
Rutgers Faculty Show, 2026
At Rutgers, we adapted the protocol for an academic community, shifting the questions toward sustainability, responsibility, legacy, and knowledge carried forward. Language from previous participants was woven directly into new visitors’ ritual outputs, sometimes combining another person’s reflection with their own in the same sentence, while participant responses also accumulated across the installation.
