A participant viewing the visualization work.

This paper delves into Vilém Flusser's critique of media as mediators that distort the human perception of reality and diminish freedom, particularly within the Mixed Reality context, i.e., Misperceived Reality. It introduces a critical inquiry through Surreal Me, which engages participants to experience a two-phase virtual embodying process and reveal the “Misperceived Reality.” The process examines the obfuscating nature of media; as the Sense of Embodiment inevitably breaks down, users can discover the constructed nature of media-projected reality. When users reflect on reality's authentic and mediated experiences in MR, this work fosters a critical discourse on Flusserian media freedom addressing emerging immersive technologies.

This paper proposes an AI-assisted speculative narrative design workflow as a critical tool to address and respond to ecological ethics and anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene. Speculating on a post-climate collapse, ocean-dominated future, Project Serum constructs a multi-species narrative through the lens of a deep-sea court trial, where humans, whales, and robots contest ecological justice and species dominance. Combining speculative design methodologies with multispecies worldbuilding, this work builds a narrative blueprint using a structured 5W1H framework and AI-enhanced story design. This blueprint is then remediated into multiple formats, including video, postcards, and comic posters, through the proposed AI-assisted workflows integrating AI image generation and human editorial control. By applying these narrative remediation strategies with AI, this study challenges anthropocentric narrative structures and offers a reusable workflow for multi-modal, multi-species storytelling. It demonstrates the speculative narrative’s potential as a reflective intervention, capable of destabilising normative narrative hierarchies and foregrounding ecological justice with AI-mediated production.

Techno-empathy 2.0 is an interactive art installation that explores the relationship between humans through real-time biofeedback and emotion visualization. Utilizing heart rate data, the work visualizes the participants’ accumulated emotions, generating visual experiences that dynamically reflect and iteratively amplify their emotional interactions. By representing emotional states through iterative, particle-based, dynamic visuals, Techno-empathy 2.0 fosters empathy and deepens interpersonal connections. This work offers a new artistic approach that illustrates how technologies can enhance collective care and human connection.

Chinese Shanshui is a landscape painting document mainly drawing mountain and water, which is popular in Chinese culture. However, it is very challenging to create this by general people. In this paper, we propose an interactive and generative approach to automatically generate the Chinese Shanshui painting documents based on users' input, where the users only need to sketch simple lines to represent their ideal landscape without any professional Shanshui painting skills. This sketch-to-Shanshui translation is optimized by the model of cycle Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). To evaluate the proposed approach, we collected a large set of both sketch data and Chinese Shanshui painting data to train the model of cycle-GAN, and developed an interactive system called Shanshui-DaDA (i.e., Design and Draw with AI) to generate Chinese Shanshui painting documents in real-time. The experimental results show that this system can generate satisfied Chinese Shanshui painting documents by general users.