Biography

Mingyong Cheng (she or they), originally from Beijing and now based in California, is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and creative technologist working at the intersection of generative artificial intelligence, computational media, and environmental research. She holds two BFAs from the Communication University of China, an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art Practice and Art History at the University of California San Diego, with a concentration in interdisciplinary environmental studies. Her background spans visual arts, filmmaking, and computational media, grounding her work in both critical inquiry and professional production contexts. Her practice integrates artistic research with real world creative technology development. She designs and delivers immersive installations, interactive environments, and real time audiovisual systems that combine generative AI, sensing technologies, and spatial media. Across her work, AI is treated not as a neutral tool but as a creative collaborator that participates in shaping perception, narrative, and experience. This perspective informs how she conceptualizes, prototypes, and deploys complex media systems for public audiences, often working closely with curators, choreographers, composers, and researchers.

Cheng has contributed to and led commissioned projects for major cultural and performance institutions, including the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Arts, and Jacob’s Pillow Doris Duke Theater, where her work involved end to end system design, real time generative workflows, and on site installation and calibration.Her research draws from speculative ecology to examine how generative AI participates in ecological imagination, cultural memory, and embodied experience. Through interactive installations and performances, she investigates how human and non human agencies co produce meaning and how artistic systems can offer experiential ways of engaging with environmental questions. Her work positions artistic practice as a form of research that makes processes of intelligence, perception, and environmental awareness tangible through interaction rather than representation alone.

Cheng’s projects have been exhibited and presented internationally at leading art and research venues, including ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Creativity and Cognition, NeurIPS, ISEA, and the IEEE CVPR AI Art Gallery. Her work has received multiple recognitions, including the Gold Muse Design Award in Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Arts Student Competition Speculative Futures award, and the IEEE TCPAMI Art Award presented by the CVPR AI Art Gallery.

程铭泳（她／他们），原生于北京，现居加州，是一位跨领域艺术家、研究者与创意科技工作者，创作与研究聚焦于生成式人工智能（generative artificial intelligence）、计算媒体艺术与环境研究的交汇。她拥有中国传媒大学（Communication University of China）双学士学位，并取得杜克大学（Duke University）Experimental and Documentary Arts 硕士学位，目前于加州大学圣地亚哥分校（University of California San Diego）攻读艺术实践与艺术史博士，研究方向为跨学科环境研究。她的背景横跨视觉艺术、影像创作与计算媒体，使其创作同时立足于批判性研究与专业制作实践。她的实践结合艺术研究与实际的创意科技开发，创作形式涵盖沉浸式装置、互动环境与实时视听系统，并整合生成式人工智能（generative AI）、传感技术与空间媒体。在其作品中，人工智能并非中性的工具，而是参与感知、叙事与经验生成的创作协作者。这一视角塑造了她如何为公共场域构思、原型开发与部署复杂的媒体系统，并经常与策展人、编舞家、作曲家与研究者密切合作。程铭泳曾主导或参与多项文化与表演机构的委托项目，包括圣地亚哥艺术博物馆（San Diego Museum of Art）、摄影艺术博物馆（Museum of Photographic Arts），以及雅各布枕舞蹈中心多丽丝·杜克剧院（Jacob’s Pillow Doris Duke Theater），负责端到端系统设计、实时生成流程，以及现场安装与校准。她的研究路径源自推测性生态学（speculative ecology），探讨生成式人工智能如何参与生态想象、文化记忆与身体经验的生成。通过互动装置与表演作品，她研究人类与非人类能动性如何共同生产艺术意义，以及艺术系统如何提供超越再现的方式，使观众以经验性的形式进入环境议题。她将艺术实践视为一种研究方法，通过互动使智能、感知与环境意识的运作过程变得可感可知。其作品曾在多个重要国际艺术与研究平台展出，包括 ACM SIGGRAPH、SIGGRAPH Asia、Creativity and Cognition、NeurIPS（Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems）、ISEA（International Symposium on Electronic Art），以及 IEEE CVPR AI Art Gallery，并获得多项肯定，包括 Gold Muse Design Award（Artificial Intelligence 类别）、Digital Arts Student Competition – Speculative Futures 首奖，以及 IEEE TCPAMI Art Award（presented by CVPR AI Art Gallery）。

👉🏻 Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of generative systems, participatory media, and speculative ecologies. My practice engages with computation not simply as a tool but as a way of sensing, interpreting, and transforming the world. Drawing from my background in filmmaking and my current work in art history and theory, I approach media as a site where perception, memory, and agency collide, where forms of intelligence, human and nonhuman, begin to blur. Lately, I have been drawn to the subtle entanglements between synthetic systems and organic processes, between technological abstraction and emotional resonance. I am particularly interested in how generative AI reshapes how we think about authorship, knowledge, and artistic emergence, and how it might be approached not only as a productive force but as a speculative companion, a system that distorts, reflects, and co-creates. I think with AI not to automate vision but to estrange it, to open up unfamiliar channels of perception that might reveal something real, however nonliteral or uncomfortable.

My inspirations often emerge from ambiguous environments, both physical and conceptual, abandoned buildings, artificial landscapes, internal feedback loops, poetic disorientations. These spaces carry contradictions, traces of desire and neglect, and I treat them as materials through which to reflect on larger questions of care, justice, and co-existence. I am moved by invisible patterns, such as eye movements, neural signals, and embodied gestures that escape categorization. These forms speak to a kind of knowing that resists language yet is deeply affective. I translate them into interactive and generative artworks that invite audiences to encounter these patterns not as data but as living, transforming expressions.

My process is grounded in crafting systems that are open to influence, including participatory installations, real-time interfaces, AR environments, and expanded animation. These works are not meant to instruct but to sense with, to open new relationships between the body, technology, and environment. What interests me most is not resolution but resonance. Making art, to me, is not about explanation or performance. It is a space for listening, for unlearning, and for imagining how we might feel otherwise.