A multimedia performance weaving sound, light, touch, sculpture, AI, and bioelectric systems to explore migration, love, and belonging within landscapes shaped by technology, surveillance, and rising global authoritarianism. By positioning desire and the body as subversive forces, the work stages moments of wonder in which embodied affect becomes a mode of aesthetic cognition—reorganizing perception, attention, and ethical orientation prior to reflective judgment.
Developed under Dr Gao’s SensoryHybrid³, the project integrates real-time AI with bioelectric sensing to create affective feedback loops between audience physiology and an evolving audiovisual environment. Through these encounters, meaning emerges not through symbolic representation alone, but through felt, bodily attunement. The performance explores how affect-driven aesthetic experience can destabilize cultural hierarchies, interrupt technopolitical control, and reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence.
This performance takes place as part of @vorspiel.berlin / @transmediale and @ctmfestival 2026 (Jan 16 – Feb 1, 2026).
Dr. Chang Gao Berlin-based multimedia artist and postdoc researcher whose work explores AI bias, affect, and wonder as modes of aesthetic cognition. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art (London) and is an associated researcher at Intervenierende Künste (Freie Universität Berlin). She also serves as a board member and communication director of the feminist collective art&dialogue (Berlin), and is the founder and director of the Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (China). Working across robotics, bioelectric sensing, sculpture, film, augmented reality, and real-time AI systems, Gao investigates how embodied affect, desire, and sensory experience reorganize perception, agency, and ethical orientation prior to reflective judgment. Her practice treats aesthetic experience as epistemically productive, foregrounding moments of wonder in which bodily responsiveness generates meaning beyond symbolic representation. By mobilizing eroticism, supernormal stimuli, and affective computing, Gao develops immersive installations and performances that challenge technopolitical control, cultural hegemony, and the anthropocentric biases embedded in AI systems. Speaking from diasporic and often repressed positions, her work uses affect-driven creative languages to reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence. Her research and multimedia works have been exhibited internationally in Berlin, London, Seoul, Utrecht, Graz, Tokyo, Helsinki, and across China.
www.gaochangart.net
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