10 Questions with Yuguang Zhang

Yuguang (YG) Zhang is a New York-based new media / AI artist. His current practice, which incorporates interactive media, installation, and live performance, explores the connections we make with the ubiquitous AI systems embedded around us, the surprises and struggles we have when we (partially) surrender our authorship to intelligent algorithms, and the cultural & ethical shifts that come along in our society when we’re overwhelmed by such “creative” AIs.

He’s a recipient of the S+T+ARTS Towards Sustainability award and the Re:Humanism Art Prize. His works have been showcased internationally at MAXXI - National Museum of XXI Century Arts (Italy), Némo Biennial of Digital Arts (France), INDEX Media Arts Biennial (Portugal), NYC Media Lab, New Inc., CultureHub, Currents New Media Festival, Movement Research, The Center at West Park, Processing Foundation, Boston Museum of Science, Re-Work Deep Learning Summit, Cycling ‘74 (USA), Beijing Times Art Museum, B·O·N·D International Virtual Live Performance Festival (China), and at online venues such as CVPR Computer Vision Arts Gallery, AI Art Online, and ML x Art among others.

Yuguang graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University in 2020, and he is a member of the interdisciplinary artist collective NUUM.

www.ygzhang.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a coder turned artist, Yuguang is fascinated with how we are consciously and unconsciously entangled with the Artificial Intelligence systems that we deployed around ourselves over the past decade. Learned from humans, these systems carry our traits, intentions, and most of our unresolved biases, and yet they’ve become the de facto decision-makers in most, if not all, of our modern digital life. Thus, for Yuguang, such AIs are the ideal magnifier to examine the flaws in our values, the mirror to reveal our hidden thoughts, and the telescope to speculate where humanity will be landing in the near future.

In his practice, Yuguang hops between machine learning-driven interactive media, installations, and performances to dialogue with our artificial doppelgänger. He makes physical bodies for digital algorithms so that their decisions impact our three-dimensional space, and their thoughts bear a physical weight. He forces bots to talk to each other, to probe how much their exhibited intimacy is engineered vs. sincere. He created speculative worlds for our digital personas to carry out our ridiculous wills in our afterlives. And he uses generative graphics to abstract and visualizes the enormous ocean that owns all of our data droplets, in an attempt to see where we are coming from, how we collectively create trends and undercurrents, and in which direction these data waves drive our cultural and ethical boat.

(Non-)Human Concept Photo, Metal Bed Frame, Bedsheet, Stepper Motors, Custom Electronics, Custom GAN, 72x38x6 in, 2021 © Yuguang Zhang

INTERVIEW

First of all, introduce yourself to our readers. You got involved initially with coding before becoming an artist. How and when did you decide to shift your career toward art?

I am a new media / AI artist based in New York. Before my artist life, I had been working as a software developer/consultant in China for more than six years. For me, art, especially music, has always been around since I was small. However, I was mostly involved with it in a rather isolated context, e.g., an A capella group or a percussion ensemble. I liked solving puzzles in the code, and I enjoyed improvising a speech on a drum. It was just that they were two separate paths, and something always seemed missing.
So it came as a pleasant surprise when I learned about new media art in 2016 and realized, "Oh wow, this is probably the place where I can happily flex every muscle of my brain." It opened up the world of creative coding for me, and I was later introduced to a graduate program at NYU Tisch called the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where many of my favorite artists had attended. As a result, I made a career pivot, went to ITP in 2018, and started my new media art practice ever since.

Despite your young age, you have already exhibited extensively. What is your favorite experience as an artist so far? And what is the one thing you still want to achieve?

My favorite one so far is probably showing (Non-)Human at the MAXXI museum in Rome for the Re:Humanism Art Prize. It was a very lovely venue, and I heard a lot about it from a close friend who had lived in Italy for a few years. It was my debut show in Europe, plus the first mainstream AI art prize I received, so it meant a lot. At that time, I was still very uncertain about whether I should go down the path of AI Art (after all, the term "AI Art" wasn't as trendy and controversial as today, especially when compared to the current AI Art movement sparkled by numerous open-sourced text-to-image ML models). I gained a lot of courage and recognition from this show, and it inspired me to create many of my later pieces that explore our relationship with artificial non-humans, such as Doppelgänger. So I'm very grateful for this experience.
Looking ahead, I hope that I can have the opportunity to have a solo exhibition about everything I've worked on so far around intelligent algorithms. I want to show that AI Art is more than just generating graphics from words and our entanglement with sentient machines is actually much deeper than we might have thought.

How would you define yourself as an artist today?

For me, artists have always been the group of people who are at the forefront of uncovering feelings and emotions that are generally hidden or undiscovered, and pushing them to their extremes, although the media through which this process happens has changed. Artists in the past might do it via a paintbrush and a canvas; artists of today, on top of the paintbrush, might also do it via software, a screen full of pixels, a robotic arm, or a simulated environment. I'm just one of those people who's trying to pinpoint the perfect epitome of some feelings and stories that have been sticking around in my mind for a long time, and computer code and algorithms just happen to be my paintbrush.

In your work, you use AI and analyze the impact this has on our decisions, for example, through algorithms. How did you develop this concept? And how much did you derive from your personal experience?

It was initially conceptualized via a long and gradual process of repeatedly indulging in AI-based digital products and reflecting on how much they picked up on my way of thinking, so it was very personal at the beginning. It is fascinating and a bit terrifying to witness how my attitude towards these AIs has gone from "Well, you know nothing about me." to "Hmm, that's interesting. How do you know I like this?" to "OMG, you are reading my mind!", and realizing that they're behind almost every app I'm using. My core questions back then were mostly lingering around the creator authorship split between AIs and humans, and how much they resemble our way of thinking.
As I've become more familiar with the inner workings of these AIs and the social and economic infrastructure behind them, my interests have expanded to observe macro-level events, such as the inevitable involvement of foundational ML models in almost every aspect of our digital lives, and how these digital decisions are perpetually physicalized via consumer products that we wear, digest and inhabit. One question I've been wondering recently is, "Do we collectively function as tentacles / physical sensors for an enormous digital AI brain?". It'll probably be the main topic that I will explore in my next series of works.

You work with various mediums, including interactive media, installation, and live performance. How do you incorporate AI, bots, and algorithms into your practice?

Since my interest is in the broad spectrum of relationships between us and intelligent algorithms, my choice of medium and technology is very flexible, and it usually depends on the subject that I would like to highlight for a specific piece or type of experience.
For instance, in (Non-)Human, the goal was to recreate the impression of myself through a moving bedsheet, so the AI that was used to detect, learn and generate sleeping movements was the center of focus. I worked extensively on the customization and training of the ML models so that the generated outcome could reflect the way I moved when I was sleeping. In Doppelgänger, a dance production I made as part of NUUM Collective, the key was to create the illusion that the dancer on stage was having a conversation with her timed-delay live footage. So, whatever technique that worked for dialogue-building could be incorporated, be it a fixed four-second delay, a timeline scrubbing based on the amount of detected motion, or an AI picking the moments from the recording that mimicked or contrasted whatever the dancer was doing live.
In general, AI, bots, and algorithms are oftentimes co-creators that take over part of my art-making process. Sometimes I point out a direction, and they find a resolution for me. Sometimes they raise a question, and I try to find an answer using my human intuition.

Doppelgänger Performance 3 at MAX 2021 the Neuroverse 3, AI-Manipulated Timed Delay Duet, 40mins, 2021 © Yuguang Zhang - Photography by Maria Baranova

How did you evolve this way of working?

Looking back, I think it stems a lot from my coding background and my iterative approach to many things. As a technologist, the embrace of brokenness and disorder has always been a hidden thread in my life – this might sound counterintuitive for practices like coding, which requires precise manipulation of 0s and 1s, but the best moments of surprise I found in my work always came as a result of blending the right amount of randomness into a carefully constructed framework. This randomness – sometimes as bugs or glitches in a generated graphic, sometimes as "errors" in a neural network that connect seemingly unrelated patterns together – exists in different forms and opens up new possibilities for me to explore a topic from a different perspective. And through iteratively coping with various types of digital errors and failed systems, I gradually learned when and how to build my computation scaffold for the vines of random and let them bloom.
My life experiences over the past decade have also played an important role. Growing up in an age of globalization, and now de-globalization, we've witnessed some of the greatest achievements in human history (e.g., an international supply chain), and some of the greatest failures (e.g., how we coped with the recent pandemic). It's really hard for me to turn a blind eye to the limitations in our specie's capabilities of addressing issues with sizes far beyond our reach, and the impermanence of life. So at some level, my art practice is also my emotional outlet and my journey of learning to live with the out-of-control.

How important are new technologies for your work? And how do you keep up to date with the latest trends and innovations?

The importance of new technology in my works is closely related to their subject matter. For those that discuss technology's ever-increasing impact on us, using state-of-the-art algorithms and ML models is one of the best ways to demonstrate things like the imminence of a change in social values, or a new way of living and experiencing our physical reality. Many times, they also serve as milestones that mark how much "human capability" we have handed over to machines to rid ourselves of "mundane" tasks.
A good case in point is the Bureau of Cloud Management, a simulated environment piece where new media artist Tong Wu and I created a fictional government agency that oversees the entry of clouds into its jurisdiction. The introduction of one of the earliest text-to-image AI models back then represented the modality shift in our ways of visualizing our imaginations and questioned whether this brand new What-You-Say-Is-What-You-Get technology could get us closer to the infinite freedom of creativity.
In terms of keeping up, I'm currently working as a machine learning technologist at a creative studio called DE-YAN, where experimenting with new technology is part of my daily routine. Besides my art practice, I also teach AI Art workshops at NYU and other creative communities in NYC to stay on top of the latest trends.

Your work is a poignant analysis of our society, which is increasingly dependent on technology and data. What do you think is the role of art in addressing such themes? How do you think art impacts the way we perceive our world?

To me, art is like a mirror that reflects how our perception of the world has changed over time and how our mode of reaction flows from one type to another. In a techno-society, many of us, willingly or unwillingly, are used to / forced to experience physical reality second-hand. We are overwhelmed with curated media content or so-called ghosts of the past. We immerse ourselves in synthesized metaverses or gigantic hollow rooms with endless projections. We become increasingly reluctant to spend time with the raw, rough, messy, and noisy nature and to dig the dirt with our own hands for any undiscovered truth. We consume a fraction of experience from everyone and spit out our own tiny fraction. The world, in general, seems to be understood more in a flat and flowy fashion through the lens of our digital devices or others'.
It's hard to say whether this is good or bad. It's just different, and we're already aboard this one-way train. The role of art, in my opinion, is to simply lift us out of this context, so that we can see where we came from and what's lying in front of our track. The "best" art of our time might be the ones that could either isolate our perception entirely in a vacuum, or the ones that manage to derail our entire train. In either case, art is the best friend for anyone who wants to not just go with the flow, but to look sideways or backward.

Speaking of the digital world, what do you think of NFTs and digital exhibitions? Do you think these are just temporary trends? Or are they here to stay?

Both NFT and digital exhibition platforms are very interesting technologies, and they indeed helped a lot to make digital arts marketable. To me, the existence of the NFT bubble can be seen as a solid and well-acknowledged statement that value can be associated with a virtual, non-physical thing, which is by itself a milestone. Crypto's speculative nature stems partly from the plurality of blockchain and the existing financial system, and it's unlikely to change fundamentally in the near future as long as the current authorities responsible for producing and distributing resources hold on to their power. So, like most bubbles, it'll burst and revive in new forms in multiple ongoing iterations, although it'll probably have a different name, live on a different device, and be exchanged via a different interface.

Finally, what are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

I'm working with NUUM folks on a new dance production called 1920, which is about space, sculptural forms, and the meaning and implications of different types of spatial relationships between a human body and a bunch of automated geometries. It's going to be our first large-scale floor-projection piece, and we're all very excited.
I'm also experimenting with short generative animations using text-to-image ML models such as Stable Diffusion together with artist Tong Wu. Our first series of Edward Hopper-inspired animations, "Edward", was successfully launched in October this year, and we've received a lot of positive feedback from our friends. In the upcoming year, we'll be producing a series of Stable Diffusion-based workshops for artists who are interested in using AI-generated content in their practice, so stay tuned!

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