R = Live/Lines
There is no sky here, no wind, no season; only motor cars, sensors, and light rigged to imitate the stillness we associate with rock gardens, a kind of stillness——a staged rock garden with its own tendencies
2026
A Room That Forgets Its Own Walls
I once played a garden into being. As a percussionist in John Cage’s Ryoanji, my single notes marked time and the raked ripples in the sand, while my duo partner’s flute slid up and down the contours of the rocks — and what we were discovering, note by note, wasn’t a fixed piece but a garden chance had authorized to exist only in that moment.
We did not design this garden at R = Live / Lines to be big. The Lab is small enough to walk in under a minute, low enough to touch with intention — and yet I keep returning to Bachelard’s claim that a small space, held rightly, can open onto immensity: not of size, but of feeling.
There is no sky here, no wind, no season,
only motor cars, sensors, and light rigged to imitate the stillness we associate with stone gardens, a kind of stillness that Cage was trying to reach not through contemplation but chance, tracing fifteen stones hundreds of times until authorship itself fell away at the Mountain Lake Workshop.
Each stone in this room behaves like a small, stubborn technology. Some return again and again to the same paths, as if habit were their nature; others, once nudged, discover new routes and never look back. I think of this less as programming and more as negotiation — we set the rules, but the stones, like any technology released into the world, develop tendencies we did not fully intend. Your presence changes them further: a hand that redirects a stone, a body that simply stands in its way, becomes part of the score the room is writing in real time.
The repetition here is manufactured — we wanted the blackbox itself, its cables, its code, its artificial dusk, to stay visible as part of the work, so that whatever calm you find is calm you’ve earned honestly, not calm handed to you as décor.
This piece is not an invitation to meditate on nature.
It is an invitation to notice how we already live — surrounded by systems we build, that then act back on us, in a continual, unfinished negotiation between control and surrender. Cage removed his own hand from the drawing so that chance, not preference, could decide the shape of the garden — but chance, for him, was still a rule he chose and trusted absolutely. Our stones carry a different kind of indeterminacy: not a rule we consulted once and then followed, but tendencies that emerged after the fact, accumulating out of code, friction, and repetition until the system started to behave in ways we hadn’t written down.
Cage’s chance was a discipline; ours is closer to a habit the technology has quietly formed on its own — and the garden listens to the room accordingly: the calmer we become together, the more delicate and spacious it grows, though a few stones will always stay a little restless, refusing to fully settle — the most honest version of that dialectic, since even our stillest rooms carry a trace of the streets we came from.
We borrow the logic of the traditional garden —
where the gardener listens to the stone rather than commanding it — and ask what that listening means now, when the stone is a robot and the garden is inside a box. We don’t have an answer. We only have this room, this hour, and whatever you choose to do with the stone in front of you.
R = Live/Lines is a research and development project, presented as a work-in-progress performance and installation commissioned by the East Kowloon Cultural Centre in 2026. The premiere performance took place at The Lab of EKCC in August 2026.