Biography

Mingyong Cheng, originally from Beijing and now based in California, is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of AI, generative art, and environmental research. She holds two BFAs from Communication University of China (CUC), an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Art Practice and Art History at the University of California, San Diego, with a focus on interdisciplinary environmental studies. Mingyong’s work bridges computational media arts and speculative ecology, emphasizing the co-creativity of generative artificial intelligence in the artistic process. Her research explores how generative AI can act as a collaborative partner, producing ecological art that transforms our understanding of and relationship with nature and the environment. By engaging AI as a co-creative force, her practice reimagines the boundaries of creativity and its potential to address contemporary ecological challenges. Her work has been exhibited internationally at leading venues, including ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, SIGGRAPH and Creativity & Cognition, the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), the IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), and other global art and technology forums. Her work won the Gold Muse Design Award 2025 in the Artificial Intelligence category and was also recognized as the winner of the 2025 Digital Arts Student Competition – Speculative Futures.

程铭泳，出生于北京，现居美国加州，是一位活跃于人工智能、生成艺术与环境研究交叉领域的跨学科艺术家。她毕业于中国传媒大学，获广播电视编导（电视编辑方向）与数字媒体艺术双学士学位，后于杜克大学取得实验与纪录艺术硕士学位，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学位，研究方向为跨学科环境研究。她的创作实践融合计算媒体艺术与实验生态学，聚焦生成式人工智能在艺术过程中的共创潜能，探索AI作为协作伙伴如何生成生态艺术作品，进而重塑人类对自然与环境的理解与关系。通过与人工智能的共创对话，她不断拓展创意边界，探索其应对当代生态危机的潜在可能。程铭泳的作品曾在全球多个重要艺术与科技平台展出，包括计算机图形与交互技术大会（SIGGRAPH及SIGGRAPH Asia）、神经信息处理系统大会（NeurIPS）、电子艺术国际研讨会（ISEA）、以及计算机视觉与模式识别大会（CVPR）等。她的作品荣获2025年数字艺术学生竞赛——未来臆想（Speculative Futures）冠军以及2025年缪斯设计奖（金奖）人工智能类别奖项。

👉🏻 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.