Reconfiguring Perception: The Unity of Dao and Artifacts

With the continuing evolution of artificial intelligence, AI is no longer merely a tool for assisting creative work. It has become a systemic cultural environment that profoundly shapes human perception, cognitive paradigms, and social structures. Drawing on recent artistic and technological practices at the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art, this talk explores how technology is transformed into perceptual experience, and how art develops its own creative language and modes of expression within new technological environments.

The talk focuses on data models, autonomous agents, and human–machine relations. It examines how algorithmic models participate in constructing reality and how machine autonomy is reshaping the creative subject. By exploring the emerging relations between humans and AI—including friction, misalignment, negotiation, resistance, and complicity—and engaging with questions of platform infrastructure, creative labour, and digital public life, the talk presents the realities taking shape under these new technological conditions.

Building on these discussions, the speaker draws on Yuk Hui’s idea of an “education of sensibility” and introduces the Daoist principle of the non-duality of Dao and artifact as an interpretive framework. The talk asks how, in an age when AI has become a cultural environment, the cosmos, ethics, perception, and technology might be woven into an integrated system. At the heart of contemporary art education is the cultivation of a capacity to perceive what cannot be calculated, encoded, or exhausted by models—and the renewal of open, responsive relations among humans, technical objects, and the world.