Jing Dong is an international media artist, currently based in Los Angeles, California. She is working at Amazon as a software engineer. Jing has a background both in art and computer science. She received her MFA in Art and Technology/Integrated Media from CalArts. Her art practice includes interactive installations, sound-visual experiences, software systems, and artificial intelligence art. She has attended the exhibition of re: connections, JACCC Release: Heard in LA Exhibition, Digital Future, Coaxialarts Art + Technology, etc.
She derives understanding and hope from art’s humane, poetic, and liberating potential to offer a therapeutic remedy to technology’s lifeless, narrow, and confining trajectory. She explores topics such as the evolution of human consciousness, poetic wondering, and body dynamics, incorporating more complex and flexible algorithms, software, and machine intelligence to make her art more interactive than ever before. Jing is interested in the fate of human beings’ intelligence, software, and machines, whether machine intelligence is creative and can generate art, and what the identity of humans will be.
Jing’s recent works, including The Hidden Space, Poetic Imagination, and The Universe as It Was, explore the non-existent things created by machine intelligence, chance and dynamics, and collaboration with artists in various ways. In Poetic Imagination, Jing uses AI-generated text as a medium to explore the collision of the human body, text, and machine intelligence. The dancers’ movements trigger the generated poems, creating a feedback loop between body movements and machine language.
Fade In
Introduction
Let us consider
Who we are
A magnified moment
An unthinkable chaos––
Paused
Only to start again
Wandering
Guided by––
The stars
Perseverance
Faith over Fear
A sheer force of will
Science
History
Distant
Dreams
Dissonant
Memories
An unprecedented
Endurance
A Forensic time
Then–––
Blast off
Blast off
Blast off
Here we are
Again
In the ascending moment
A simple explanation
That doesn’t seem possible
Fading
Fading
Fading
Remember––
Catch hold of the unseen gravity
Conjure the ––
Agitators
Healers
Mediums
Intangible energies
According to N. Katherine Hayles, computer simulations are not necessarily artificial since the processes can be as natural as those in the real world, albeit running in an artificial medium. Hayles suggests “Digital Nature” as a perspective of nature and humanity in the post-ubiquitous computing era. When AI constructs literary and narrative environments, there are powerful possibilities for engaging with feedback loops, sensory inputs, and cognitive creations of an imagined world, engaging the mind-body, not just the mind or body. The technology embedded in tools has an ideological bias that predisposes it to construct the world in a particular way, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” In this performance, AI language constructed an environment that invited the artist or audience to engage and interact. Two AI models were trained to generate poetry and recognize specific movements. During the performance, generated poetry was triggered by the specific movements of the dancer, who improvised new movements based on her feelings and thoughts after reading the AI poetry. The improvised movements were used as input to generate new poetry, creating a feedback loop where body movement and language influenced and reshaped each other. The whole process presented the cognition, perception, and creativity of both humans and machines.
