Where code becomes material: Jing Dong’s art of human-machine encounter

Software engineer and creative technologist Jing Dong has unveiled SoulArts Art & Dreams, an artificial intelligence application that transforms drawings, dreams, and written musings into creative material. Developed through her interdisciplinary studio, inno Art & Tech Studio, SoulArts represents a new chapter in Jing's exploration of AI, interaction design, and contemporary art.

Other works like Hearing Space-Time and interactive installations further delve into questions she has pursued through installations, performances, wearables, and augmented reality.

Jing is captivated by human experiences that enter computational systems. Her goal is to enable individuals to explore these human elements rather than allowing the machine to define them. From emotion capture systems to generative images, Jing's work investigates how computational outputs can serve as new layers of material for examination, questioning, and rejection.

Initially, Jing pursued a career in software engineering, working at Instagram and later studying computer science. However, she eventually redirected her focus towards questions of perception, embodiment, emotion, and machine interpretation. She earned her master's degree from California Institute of the Arts in 2021, studying both in the Art and Technology and Integrated Media programs.

In her performances, such as Poetic Imagination X AI (2021), Jing designed AI systems that translated a dancer's movements into poetic language. The movement-recognition component interpreted gestures as keywords, while the language-generation component transformed these keywords into lines of poetry. The performance functioned as a recursive exchange among body, data, and language, showcasing the fluidity of choreography.

In The Hidden Space (2022), Jing connected a wearable sensing device with cloud-based language processing, collecting ambient sounds and transforming them into poetic text in real-time. Both performances shared a common system architecture: sensing, interpretation, transformation, and human response. Jing treated computational uncertainty as a condition that could generate new associations, rather than an error to be eliminated.

Beyond her software foundation, Jing's earlier works often emphasized the weight, fragility, and uniqueness of physical objects. Pieces like Material Sound (2022), featuring translucent CD cases containing remnants from everyday life, contrast the computational processes with tangible materials. Virtual Sculpture (2022) utilized augmented reality to depict an irregular form in a desert landscape and urban street, questioning how virtual objects can alter perceptions of physical spaces without any physical presence.