Alice Yuan Zhang is an artist, designer, and program organizer working across the IRL and URL. Her projects often take on a playful and collaborative approach, using mixed reality technologies to invite public empathy into ecological and social futuring. She is the co-organizer of virtual care lab, a series of experiments in remote togetherness. Alice holds a B.S. in Business Administration from University of California, Berkeley and is influenced by object-oriented ontology, interspecies collaborations, Eastern philosophy, and magical realism.
“How do we begin to practice an alternative relationship with our natural ecosystem, one based on consent rather than control and exchange rather than usage? Tender Data is a yearlong project of reimagination through frameworks new and ancient, leaning into organism-scale interactions as building blocks toward interspecies empathy. Through AR filters and virtual mini-experiments, I invite the public to join me in deconstructing the ‘usefulness’ of a plant, tapping into fungi-powered ‘social media’, and co-creating rituals as a companion species, as we lay our blessings as playful ancestors of the future.”
A durational participatory performance by Resident Artist Alice Yuan Zhang experimenting with the potentiality of our online attention and the labor of digital sovereignty.