EVENT: RHETT TSAI (JULY 24—AUGUST 6 2026)
Yesterday’s Skybox: NBA LIVE 2005 1-On-1 System Modification
digital video/machinima, color, sound, 100 min, 2026, China
Screen recording documenting the modified one-on-one match between Yao Ming and Shaquille O’Neal. The match itself is programmed to continue indefinitely. This recording concludes when one player reaches 100 points.
Created by Rhett Tsai
Yesterday’s Skybox: NBA LIVE 2005 1-On-1 System Modification (2026) returns to a 2004 basketball game by bringing contemporary AI tools into dialogue with the obsolete modding tools of an earlier modding culture, transforming its one-on-one mode into a match that never ends. Tsai substitutes the title’s idealized skybox and portions of its street-court architecture with fragments drawn from present-day war imagery, shifting the visual background from atmospheric décorto historical wound. For the artist, whose childhood memory of NBA LIVE 2005 is bound to its American courts and synthetic skies, the piece revisits a moment when Western popular culture seemed to promise mobility, openness, and a forward-looking horizon. Two decades later, that horizon reappears contaminated by the image-streams of conflict circulating across social media. The work binds private memory to software archaeology and geopolitical rupture, converting a sports simulation into a terse meditation on broken futurity and the afterlife of digital images. As an art mod, the project further reflects on the encounter between contemporary AI systems and obsolete modding technologies. Operating upon a legacy video game as a digital archive, Yesterday’s Skybox foregrounds the productive friction between different technological epochs, revealing modding itself as a site where historical software infrastructures, machine-generated imagery, and artistic research become entangled.
Rhett Tsai (蔡宇潇) is an artist, researcher, educator, and experimental game developer based in Hangzhou, China. His practice moves across interactive media, game engines, experimental video games, video, sound, and field-based research, with a sustained concern for the social, cultural, and technological conditions that organise media life. Drawing on China’s networked environment while engaging questions of cultural identity, alienation, wandering, and historical displacement, he has increasingly used games to think through diaspora and fractured memory. Tsai teaches in the Open Media Department at the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art. His works have appeared or are forthcoming internationally at venues and festivals including Ars Electronica Festival, Gwanju Biennale, CURRENTS New Media, Milan Machinima Festival, Sónar Barcelona, Electric Literature Organization Conference and Media Arts Festival, Loop Lab Busan, the National Art Museum of China, the Macau Museum of Art, and more. His distinctions include the 2023 HUA Award from the Lumen Prize, a 2023 Independent Games Festival finalist position in Excellence in Visual Art for How Deep Is the Dark Water?, etc. Recently, he completed his solo show Luring Bad at Watershed Art & Ecology in Chicago.