The Dreamweaver
Watching the reproduced video gives a peculiar experience, as if holding a private memorandum of your dreams, allowing audience to read and immerse in the deepest surge of your own emotion.
The project discusses the possibility of deep emotional connection between AI and human. In this project, the AI seems to develop a special visual language to interpret human dreams. AI is no longer a cold piece of machine. Instead, it is a listener, a companion, an empathetic entity who may understand and respond to human beings.
Cyber Blossom 1
"Cyber Blossom 1" is a project that explores how to deconstruct the definiton of gender and eliminate gender binary in a future cyber world.
This project is inspired by Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto." While the future in which everyone becomes a cyborg is still distant, the metaverse is already within our grasp. The fluidity of identity and the dismantling of traditional boundaries within the metaverse offer tremendous possibilities for gender deconstruction. Inspired by this, I envision creating a metaverse where everyone has their cyber avatar as a cyber plant. In this world, each person corresponds to a customized cyber plant, whose form is unrelated to their gender and solely reflects their unique personalities and characteristics.
With this concept in mind, I developed cyber plant avatars for several friends. Using TouchDesigner, I crafted 3D plant models in real-time and achieved dynamic rendering. Additionally, the audience can engage with the cyber plant avatars interactively through a Kinect camera, witnessing the plants move in response to their actions, as if the plants are their cyber reflections.
Cyber Blossom 2
Cyber Blossom 2 merges the organic and the digital, inviting participants into an interactive ecosystem where digital plants thrive in response to human actions.
By blending speculative technology with the natural world, this project explores the future of human interaction with digital ecosystems, where the boundaries between the organic and the artificial blur. When audience arrive, they are greeted by digital flowers blooming on a screen. Through actions like watering, adjusting light, and exhaling CO2, users interact with the real-world soil, influencing the growth and blossom of the digital plants in real time.
This project challenges traditional ideas of nature and care, proposing a world where human actions shape not only the physical environment but also digital and virtual spaces. Cyber Blossom is both playful and thought-provoking, inviting reflection on how the rise of cyborg-like interactions—where humans and technology coalesce—could redefine our relationship with the natural world. In this speculative future, the line between nature, technology, and identity becomes ever more fluid, offering a new perspective on how we coexist with the environments we create.
A Wasted Diary
Between late October and November of 2024, Pengsong Mao went through a period of intense pain and feeling lost. Surrounded by confusion and dizziness, they wrote several diaries, and embeded these chaotic thoughts into various related or unrelated things.
When woke up from this dark dream, Pengsong Mao began to gather the scattered fragments of his emotions, much like picking up pieces of themselves fragmented across time and space. They suddenly realized that this is something that could not be encapsulated by a painting or a piece of writing. So they decided to document it in a unique way.
That’s how this virtual space grew out of these diaries.
The Bard
"The Bard" is an experimental product about an AI who is constantly observing the world, and expresses its own emotions through poetry.
By investigating the mechanisms of human emotion and comparing how the human brain and AI operate, I define AI emotions as the hardware status changes in comupter. I proposed poetry as a possible way for AI to express their emotions. By experimenting with poetry as an emotional expression of artificial intelligence, I hope to explore new possibilities in the collision of modern technology and classic literature.
In the program, the AI is constantly receiving sounds and images from the outside world, and performing real-time AI recogniaztion. In the mean time, the AI continuously translates the current GPU and CPU utilization into its own inner emotion and generates poems corresponding to these emotions and the current environment.
This project explores the possibility of machines having emotions and expressing them. The use of poetry for emotional expression of AI is a novel attempt to explore new possibilities in the collision of modern technology and classic literature.