Los Angeles, USA Fri, Sep 11, 2026 at 1:00 pm PDT
New York, USA Fri, Sep 11, 2026 at 4:00 pm EDT
London, United Kingdom Fri, Sep 11, 2026 at 9:00 pm BST
Across today’s audiovisual practice, artists and technologists are increasingly working in creative environments where human perception, algorithmic systems, and media infrastructures shape one another in real time. From AI-generated imagery and responsive music systems to sensor-driven performance and immersive installations, creation now often unfolds through shared processes rather than isolated acts of authorship. This shift reflects a broader cultural moment in which computational systems act as co-creators, shaping the creative process with patterns, gestures, and variations that invite artists into new ways of sensing, interpreting, and creating, where computational patterning and embodied sensing fold into one another. As these hybrid practices multiply, questions arise about how agency, intuition, embodiment, and aesthetic decision-making evolve when creativity becomes a collaboration between human and machine.
This session brings together practitioners and thinkers from multiple fields to explore these emerging forms of co-creation, the experiences they produce, and the wider cultural and artistic transformations they signal.At a moment when machine learning systems shape everything from cultural production to everyday perception, understanding how these technologies participate in creative processes has become increasingly urgent.
As artists, designers, engineers, and researchers engage tools that can learn from vast datasets, respond to gesture and movement, or generate complex audiovisual material, new questions surface:
- How does creative agency shift when computational systems contribute to shaping form and sensibility?
- What kinds of intuition, improvisation, and embodied awareness emerge in environments where perception is co-constructed by humans and machines?
- How do curators, audiences, and practitioners interpret works that arise through distributed authorship, and what ethical or aesthetic implications accompany these hybrid practices?
Bringing together voices from multiple fields, this session creates a space in which artistic experimentation and critical reflection meet, offering insights into how human and machine imagination evolve together and how these developments are redefining contemporary audiovisual creation.
Weidi Zhang is a new media artist based in Los Angeles and Phoenix. She is an Assistant Professor at the Media and Immersive eXperience center of Arizona State University. Her research investigates Speculative Assemblages at the intersection of immersive media, data visualization, and AI art. Her works are featured in international awards, conferences, and museums, such as Best In Show Awards in SIGGRAPH, Red Dot Design Award, A’ Design Award, Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica, Lumen Prize Shortlist, ISEA, V2 Lab, Times Art Museum, Mutek, and others. She holds her Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Weilu Ge is a composer, media artist based in Cambridge, MA. She works with various media forms, from concert music, installation, performance to video and innovative technology. Her works explore theatrical expressions of sonic, visual and spatial media, taking composition as critical means to examine relationships between power, system, body, and technology in a social-cultural context. She is an active member of IMUU, an artist collective specializing in working with intermedia narratives to create interactive and immersive experiences. Weilu’s works have been presented at festivals and conferences internationally. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry at Harvard University.