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Peeling Cycle (2026) is a live audiovisual performance that combines a DIY laser device, multimodal AI, and embodied interaction to investigate how artificial intelligence participates in the production of gendered visibility. The work understands AI as part of a surrogate human order shaped by racialized and gendered structures embedded in social data. Language-based AI inherits social bias as well as structured relations: associations, proximities, and symbolic hierarchies, through which social reality is organized and interpreted. From this position, the project asks whether machine perception can be reoriented through the lived experiences of Asian female immigrant artists, shifting AI from abstract recognition toward situated interpretation.

Technically, the work integrates endoscopic camera input, breath classification through spectral analysis, DIY laser projection, live object detection, word-vector association, language-model interpretation, customized voice synthesis, and real-time image and audio generation through TouchDesigner and Ableton Live. These processes are incorporated as representational procedures: sensing, scanning, associating, narrating, and re-rendering become ways of staging how bodies are made visible, classified, translated, and misrecognized through technological systems. By embedding AI outputs within live gesture, sound, material interaction, laser movement, and manual visual control, Peeling Cycle resists the model of AI as an autonomous generator and instead stages machine intelligence as a contested mirror of social reality.

Learn More:Peeling Cycle

Created By: A Happy Mennn trio

AHM, A Happy Mennn Trio, is an interdisciplinary multimedia performance trio formed by Anqi Liu, Han Zhang, and Mingyong Cheng. AHM’s work explores the lived experiences of immigrant Asian women artists building artistic practices, careers, and everyday lives in the West through technology, sound, multimedia, and free improvisatory performance. Their practice moves fluidly across audiovisual ecologies, experimental performance, interactive systems, and embodied sonic environments, approaching performance as a site where identity, migration, memory, labor, and cultural translation continuously intersect and unfold.

Anqi Liu, music composer, interdisciplinary/multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker

Han Zhang, multimedia artist, computer musician, cross-media performer and engineer

Mingyong Cheng, new/digital media artist, interdisciplinary visual artist, creative technologist

Social:@ahappymennn

Performed By: Milana Aernova

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