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, the SIGGRAPH Digital Art Community, 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), the Gold Muse Design Award 2025 in the Artificial Intelligence track, and other global art and technology forums.

程铭泳，出生于北京，现居美国加州，是一位跨学科艺术家，致力于人工智能、生成艺术与环境研究的交叉领域。她毕业于中国传媒大学广播电视编导（电视编辑）和数字媒体艺术双学位，杜克大学实验与纪录艺术硕士项目，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，专注于跨学科环境研究。她的创作融合计算媒体与实验生态艺术，强调生成式人工智能在艺术创作中的共创潜力。她的研究探索如何将生成式人工智能作为协作伙伴，创作生态艺术，以重新定义人类对自然与环境的理解和关系。通过与人工智能的共同创作，她重新审视创意边界，并探讨其应对当代生态挑战的可能性。她的作品曾获得2025缪斯奖（金奖）人工智能方向，另外在包括亚洲计算机图形与交互技术大会、数字艺术社区、神经信息处理系统大会、电子艺术国际研讨会以及计算机视觉与模式识别大会等国际艺术与科技平台展出。

👉🏻 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.