As a bio-inspired designer and interdisciplinary researcher, Shontelle Xintong Cai is currently based in Toronto and London. Her works explore the intersections of design, art, science and technology. She experiments with information visualization, experience system and multimodal interaction with audiovisual communication technologies, programmable materials, ‘moist media’ and life science data. Her art and design practices are influenced by her academic background related to visual communication, digital media studies and plant physiology. She considers Design as Discussion: a design protocol centring around the non-human and ecological approach by sensory narratives and fictional objects. She critically and parametrically engages in designing the innovative dialogues between complex scientific knowledge and cross-sensory experience. To practice the design methodologies and transmedia storytelling via scientific systems and computation, she opens the discussions about the inherent values of more-than-human participatory research, technoscientific interventions, synthetic bio-design, political ecology and objecthood to the potential audience. She has shared her creative practices and design paradigm through several workshops, symposiums and exhibitions in China, Canada, Franc and the United Kingdom.
Education:
OCAD University-BDes Graphic Design,With Completion of a Minor in Digital & Media Studies (2016-2020)
Royal College of Art- MA Information Experience Design, with distinction of degree dissertation (2020-2022)
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Index
|| 2022
Machine Learning in Visualization and Sonification; Morphology; Biotextile
There are numerous foreseeable definitions and frameworks of posthumanism. My initial intention is to make the undefined, abstract, generalized concept of posthumanism embodied by creating the profile of posthumanism in my view, collecting and recreating futuristic embodied artifacts and artworks and narrating the posthuman ideology [e.g. the discourses of nonhuman agents’(animal, plants, computers etc.) roles; what would exist, behave, live and occur; ]. After literature review and contemporary visual research, I would experiment multiple mediums to create the possible tangible and visible form representing posthuman idea, and defining the quality and feelings of emerging tech and science. From this process, I reflect the responsibilities and expectations of human designers in the posthuman era. To what degree that emerging technologies (e.g. Artificial Intelligence and algorithms) would influence the human aesthetics, behaviours and thinking patterns. When AI can massively produce design works, it is designers’ responsibilities to “plug in” a wider range of ideas/images/codes/ algebraic expressions to enhance empathy, and the production process of serial visual forms that are comprehensive, aesthetically tolerable, pleasant and palatable. My final presentation expects to present the epitome of posthuman world and posthuman designer’s pieces of work.
(The works are still uploading due to the site renewal)
