Return Protocol is a performative ritual that returns AI programming code developed for Gardens of Becoming (2025) to public circulation through GitHub. Combining norito, embodied gesture, and open-source publication, the work treats code not as a closed tool, but as a fragment that can re-enter wider cycles of interpretation, transformation, and reuse.
Norito (ritual text)
With reverence, I humbly speak before the deities of countless forms of knowledge. From this garden of knowledge, vast as the great ocean, I have gratefully received fragments of wisdom, and, through the sincerity of my own being, have woven them into new words. This new form does not belong to me alone. Crossing the boundary between divine knowledge and my own soul, I now return it once again to the ocean of knowledge. May this code become a support for many, and serve as a foundation for the further unfolding of knowledge. Within this pure and ever-circulating flow of knowledge, may it endure in harmony. With deepest reverence, I offer these words.
With reverence, I humbly speak before the deities of countless forms of knowledge. From this garden of knowledge, vast as the great ocean, I have gratefully received fragments of wisdom, and, through the sincerity of my own being, have woven them into new words. This new form does not belong to me alone. Crossing the boundary between divine knowledge and my own soul, I now return it once again to the ocean of knowledge. May this code become a support for many, and serve as a foundation for the further unfolding of knowledge. Within this pure and ever-circulating flow of knowledge, may it endure in harmony. With deepest reverence, I offer these words.
The code was returned to public circulation through GitHub. The repository functions not only as documentation but as an invitation for future interpretation, transformation, and reuse.
Fork the protocol here: https://github.com/Sooochan0809/returning-to-the-sea-of-knowledge
Code-Norito emerged from the question: what if programming had developed not as an open-source culture, but as a closed one? In such a world, code might have been written not as an instruction to a computer, but as a form of supplication.
The work translates the structure of Return Protocol into a pseudo-programmatic script.
Rather than treating code solely as executable logic, Code-Norito approaches it as a symbolic text capable of returning fragments of knowledge back into circulation, and experiments with writing code as a form of prayer.