viciouscircularity — Ni Hao Studio

Vicious Circularity
2018- ongoing

Vicious Circularity is an ongoing archive, video project, and research platform dedicated to rotational motion that exceeds its purpose. It collects videos, images, reports, and found materials in which things spin, rotate, orbit, or become caught in circular movement at the moment a system slips loose from its assigned function and begins to move on its own.

The project follows one rule: the circular motion cannot be deliberately staged, designed, or performed as a circle. A dancer choosing to spin does not qualify. A trained animal performing a turn does not qualify. A machine running exactly as designed does not qualify. What qualifies is rotation that emerges without authorship, through accident, instinct, distress, malfunction, natural force, or cosmic movement. A human may have set up many of the conditions, building the machine, caging the animal, mounting the camera, but is absent from the motion itself. The circle is the surplus: what a system does when it overflows its assignment.

The archive began as an Instagram platform open to public submissions and has grown to include accidents, animal behavior, bodily disturbance, machine failure, natural phenomena, astronomical events, and everyday encounters. The main feed prioritizes visible rotational motion, whether clockwise or counterclockwise. Related circular forms, articles, and research materials are gathered separately through notes and side archives.

The project moves between two scales. At one scale, rotation appears as breakdown or escape: a riderless motorcycle spinning after a crash, an animal circling in confinement, an object turning beyond control. At another, rotation appears as structure itself: the motion of vortices, cells, storms, and galaxies. Between these scales lies the project’s real subject: the threshold where circular motion stops being function and begins to reveal the forces acting through a body, object, or system.

Over the years the project has moved between formats: curated horizontal and vertical compilations, exhibition screenings, public submissions, and lecture-performances in which selected videos are presented in sequence and narrated live. Its most recent form is Circle TV, an endless online stream that plays a randomized selection of circular-motion videos and adapts between horizontal and vertical formats according to the viewer’s device. The project remains open and ongoing, continuing to take submissions and to develop new public, exhibition, and online forms.

The current development of Vicious Circularity extends this logic into a semi-automated discovery and review system. Using a hybrid cloud-AI and local review pipeline, the system searches across online video platforms, gathers and samples potential clips, screens them through title, thumbnail, resolution, and video analysis, and ranks them against a growing body of artist-reviewed examples. Each round of human review further calibrates the system’s ability to identify circular motion that fits the project’s rule.

The long-term goal is to transform Circle TV into a self-refreshing broadcast system: a stream that can continuously search for, filter, and circulate new instances of involuntary rotation with minimal human intervention. In this future form, Vicious Circularity would no longer function only as an archive of found material, but as a living detection system for a recurring phenomenon in the world. It would become a loop that keeps finding, feeding, and broadcasting other loops.

Rather than treating the circle as a symbol, Vicious Circularity approaches rotation as a force becoming visible: the recurring motion through which bodies, machines, environments, and larger systems reveal the pressures acting on them, and the point at which they exceed what they were made to do.