Biography

Mingyong Cheng (she or they) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and creative technologist from Beijing, now based in California, working at the intersection of generative artificial intelligence, computational media, and environmental research. She holds dual BFAs from the Communication University of China (CUC), an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, and is completing a PhD in Art Practice and Art History at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), with a concentration in interdisciplinary environmental studies.

Her background spans visual arts, filmmaking, and computational media. She creates immersive installations, interactive environments, and real time audiovisual systems that integrate generative AI, sensing technologies, and spatial media. She approaches AI as a creative collaborator that shapes perception, narrative, and experience, and works closely with curators, choreographers, composers, and researchers to design and deploy complex public facing media systems. She has led commissioned projects for the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), the Museum of Photographic Arts at SDMA (MOPA), and Jacob’s Pillow Doris Duke Theater (Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival), overseeing full system design, real time generative workflows, and onsite installation.

Grounded in a framework she called, Speculative Ecology, her research examines how generative AI engages ecological imagination, cultural memory, and embodied experience. Her work has been presented internationally at ACM SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques), SIGGRAPH Asia, Creativity and Cognition (ACM C&C), NeurIPS (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems), ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), and the IEEE CVPR AI Art Gallery (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition). Her honors include the Gold Muse Design Award in Artificial Intelligence, the Speculative Futures Digital Arts Student Competition award, and the IEEE TCPAMI Art Award presented by the CVPR AI Art Gallery.

程铭泳（she or they）是一位来自北京、现居加州的跨领域艺术家、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、计算媒体与环境研究的交汇。她拥有中国传媒大学双学士学位、杜克大学硕士学位，目前在加州大学圣地亚哥分校攻读艺术实践与艺术史博士，研究方向为跨学科环境研究。她的背景涵盖视觉艺术、影像创作与计算媒体，创作形式包括沉浸式装置、互动环境与实时视听系统，整合生成式人工智能、传感技术与空间媒体。她将人工智能视为创作协作者，关注其如何塑造感知、叙事与经验，并与策展人、编舞家、作曲家及研究者合作，为公共空间构思与部署复杂媒体系统。她曾为圣地亚哥艺术博物馆、摄影艺术博物馆以及雅各布枕舞蹈中心多丽丝·杜克剧院完成委托项目，负责整体系统设计、实时生成流程与现场安装调试。基于推测性生态学的研究方法，她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建构。其作品曾在 ACM SIGGRAPH、SIGGRAPH Asia、Creativity and Cognition、NeurIPS、ISEA 及 IEEE CVPR AI Art Gallery 等国际平台展出，并获得 Gold Muse Design Award、Speculative Futures Digital Arts Student Competition 奖项以及 IEEE TCPAMI Art Award 等荣誉。

👉🏻 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.