Maggie Chang I'm a creative technologist, designer, and artist using digital technologies as carriers for both poetics and function through interaction, generative design, metaphors, and performance. [...]
My work reflects on how the ecology of humans, tools, and environment continuously shape each other. Using frameworks of speculative design, I create alternative technological and social narratives to reimagine the possibilities for the tools that we use and the infrastructures that we inhabit in the present. [...]
I studied sculpture with a concentration in Computation, Technology, and Culture (CTC) at the Rhode Island School of Design. Inspired by the notion of a website being "a shifting house next to a river of knowledge", I see my own website as evolving snapshots of my growing practice, as some projects speak more directly to my current inqueries while others sediment on this interface.
I'm a creative technologist, artist, and designer interested in exploring systems of interaction and generation, metaphors, myth-making, worlding, etc...
This is an online environment where people can make sentences and poems together. In the writing mode, one can write a whole or partial sentence by clicking and stringing the exisiting words on the website. The written phrases are stored on the column on the left. In the editing mode, one can edit the existing phrases by adding two additional words to the end of the phrase. The added words will then appear as new word options on the website. Every once in a while, some existing words will disappear as options. All the existing words and written phrases are collectively stored on the backend, allowing the environment to continuously propagate.
localhost:8000 began by asking how technology can be better connected with the natural environment. Hosted on a Raspberry Pi attached to sensors that detect the temperature, brightness, and volume around it, the website reflects these changes in real time through its design and accessible content. In response to the ecological impacts brought by data centers,this project embraces shifts in locality and encourages a more holistic view of the internet.
This is the first iteration of the project, with the working server and website built in 6 weeks. A new web interface is currently in development.
Exploratory visual worldbuilding using Blender, miscroscopy, and AI
2023-ongoing
Mementogenesis currently embodies a series of visual research stemming from a speculative narrative in which human DNA becomes the only storage for all data and memory. It imagines a probable future where conventional data centers proves to be too environmentally costly to maintain, while existing research on DNA storage becomes widely adopted. Considering the social influences of the computer as it migrated from military contexts to our homes, the narrative imagines a reality in which technology and biology becomes increasingly entangled. The current visualizations include:
A series of maps made in relation to a solar geoengineering experiment in Northern Sweden. Focusing on the different perspectives present in the context of technological determinism and climate change, these comparative maps speculate the different points of views involved in conducting and protesting against the experiment, including that of the geoengineering lab, the local indigenous population, and the air itself. This project was made in collaboration with Miriam Lellek and Matters of Activity, as one component of a larger exploration and exhibition around the topic of air.
As a part of the Cyberfeminism Index Book Tour, Mindy gave a performative reading of the Cyberfeminism Index, and was later joined by the panelists in a conversation around the dynamics within holding cross-disciplinary practices as creatives.
A story of a creature that is born inside the screen and their attempt at navigating the world around them.
This video contains a sample of "A Little Noise in the System" by Pauline Oliveros courtesy of Table of the Elements, and "Suiren" by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster & Panaiotis courtesy of The Orchard Music on behalf of New Albion Records. Environmental images are sourced from Google Earth.
Performance with video projection, music, and steel
2019
To the pace of music, the performer carries the steel sculpture structure as she attempts to travel through an ever-shifting landmass projected on and beyond her body. Throughout her journey, she treats the steel structure as a tunnel, playground, chair, and eventually a shelter.
The projection also creates a doppleganger--the performer's and steel structure's shadows. The performer continuously gazes at her shadow as she traverses the virtual land, and gradually abandons her physical attachment to her structure in service of her shadow.
Sculpture and video performance
2019
Performance | pər-'fȯr-mən(t)s : an act of presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment : the action or process of performing a task or function Oxford Languages
Video essay
2020
This video essay questions the conventional method of recording time and the relationship between time and labour through the consumption of a pear.
Book and magazine design
2018
A handbook that provides a small origin story and instructions for Mahjong, a four-player tile-based game that originated from China.
Website
2019
Family Tree of Twins
Each family unit is responsible for storing their own generational memories and a portion of the social collective data. As an attempt to prevent the loss of data, each family unit must give birth to twins and store a copy of the data in each twin. A family tree of 7 generations is visualized in 3D.
Twin Modules
Modular visualizations following the structure of the family tree: two base modules pair together to create two new twin modules.
Microscopy, Mutation, Language
A preliminary, mutating language system based off of the structure of DNA, drawing inspiration from examining my own tissue under a microscope and experimenting with machine learning algorithms as visualization methods.
Invisible to the human eye, DNA is often understood through cerebral means. Hoping to approximate an embodied experience of working with DNA, I extracted, broke down, and observed my cheek cells under 400x and 1000x magnification. While it is impossible to see the actual strands of DNA at these levels, this process reveals the importance of perceiving beyond human scales. With the help of interfaces, worlds reveal themselves in different orders of mangnitude.
If language is an interface, what might be the language of DNA? A preliminary language system is developed based on the structure of DNA's chemical bases. As adenine is paired to thymine, and cytosine is paired to guanine, such pairing patterns are applied to the structure of the language glyphs. As the strands of DNA coil together to form chromosomes, the glypcs can link to each other, expand, and contract.
Since the data stored within DNA can be subject to mutate, I visualized a set of possible mutations using Midjourney. The outputs were then compiled into motion with the help of RunwayML's Frame Interpolation algorithm. If the basis of the language is in constant flux, the rereading of history in this world will always be an archeological act as people reread and reinterpret the data within their own bodies.
The language modules were also rendered in Blender and spatialized.
