Hatching Machines for the Future: Conversation with shuang cai x Koi Ren from k0j0
Join us for Hatching Machines for the Future, an evening with shuang cai and Koi Ren (k0j0) exploring speculative technologies, artistic research, and alternative ways of imagining the machines around us.
Through artist talks, shuang and Koi will share practices spanning interaction, humor, new media art, and technological worldbuilding — asking how everyday systems, interfaces, and objects shape the ways we live, relate, and imagine the future.
Following the talk, participants are invited to join a collaborative workshop to reimagine daily appliances through a simple 4-panel comic. What futures might be hidden inside daily machines? What strange personalities, rituals, or desires might emerge if we looked at everyday technologies differently? No drawing experience needed — just curiosity.
About the guests:
shuang cai is a curator, writer, and multimedia artist. Their art practices focus on logic, interactions, and humor. Their curatorial works aim to bring forth the power of interconnectedness and diverse voices across communities. They hold a Bachelor's degree from Bard College, majoring in Computer Science joint Studio Art, and a Master's from New York University Interactive Telecommunication Program(ITP). Currently, they are getting their PhD in Human Computer Interaction at Cornell University and actively curating in New York City. They were an ITP research resident, the curatorial fellow at NARS.
Koi Ren is half of k0j0, a New Media Art duo creating subversive and frictional “intrafaces”, artifacts that reveal the power, politics, and posthuman subjectivities embedded within systemic interactions. Their research-based practice pulls from backgrounds in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, media studies, and speculative design.
Through the defamiliarization of seductive seamlessness and tacit expectations, k0j0 provokes moments of epistemological rupture, inviting viewers into intimate proximity with the unfamiliar and the emergent dynamics shaping our futures.
Their work has been shown at venues and events such as Ars Electronica, National Asian Culture Center, ACM SIGGRAPH, TEDAI, MUTEK, Gray Area, Heckscher Museum, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Diego Rivera Gallery, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Sundance Film Festival, and Denver International Airport.