Between Reality and AI Hallucinations: Reimagining the Sacred Soundscape of Ming Rituals

This paper focuses on the soundscape art of the Ming Dynasty’s Temple of Heaven sacrificial rituals, innovatively employing generative AI hallucinations as a means to reshape spiritual perception and cultural memory. By integrating traditional archival reconstructions—ritual texts, spatial models, and restored music—with AI-generated blurred and dynamic audiovisual hallucinations, the work creates a dynamic tension between historical rigor and machine ambiguity. A three-screen interactive installation combining traditional soundscape data, AI hallucinations, and ritual timeline enables real-time audience participation to influence the hallucinations, enhancing the sacred atmosphere and individual experience of the ritual soundscape, and reflecting the fluid boundaries of memory, perception, and imagination. This project does not pursue historical reproduction but embraces the instability of AI generative systems to explore new possibilities for cultural heritage, synthetic memory, spiritual experience, and collective imagination.