Peeling Cycle I (2026)
Live audiovisual performance with endoscopic imagery, DIY laser projection, embodied gesture, and multimodal AI, by A Happy Mennn (AHM) — Anqi Liu, Han Zhang, and Mingyong Cheng.
Premiered at the Every Woman Biennial, Pen & Brush Gallery, New York City.
Peeling Cycle is a live audiovisual performance that uses endoscopic imagery, DIY laser projection, embodied gesture, and multimodal AI to examine how AI systems and regimes of visibility render Asian immigrant women artists legible through processes of detection, classification, translation, and misrecognition, while foregrounding the embodied acts of refusal, negotiation, and self-determination that challenge and reconfigure these forms of representation.
This project investigates 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.
Teaser (3min):
Next: Peeling Cycle II → the expanded iteration performed in San Diego