Mixanthropy is an imaginary shapeshifting journey about the body in transition, visual, and behavioral. The term, mixanthropy, encapsulates a deity’s potential to glide between versatile body forms. Explored through media art incorporating motion capture, retargeting, metamorphosis, and machine learning, it is a future bio-mythology with the idea of animal-human shapeshifting while in motion.
Transitioning between animal and human states, we create animal-human hybridity through body transformations based on anatomical isomorphism with mimetic skin textures echoing different environments with dataset of AI-generated latent space walk. The hybrid mixanthrope morphs into other bodies with mocap retargeted on human and nonhuman bodies. We synchronize motion, as an externalization of the intrinsic psyche, with 3D body deformation and metamorphoses into humanoids, chimeras, and otherworldly beings.
The mixanthrope encompasses multiple identities. It is not one object, one organism, but a mechanism of a mind that cannot be categorized but only rests in fluidity. As an observer, we see them change in time. But every metamorphic figure is an identity of the mind itself, manifested differently in different time periods. The mixanthrope incessantly reuptakes and renews different properties and exhibits different figures as shades of the mind.
Read about the whole project: https://mixanthropy.com/
Mixantropy was part of SXSW 2023 selection. Read more about SXSW 2023 Art Program.
Yiou Wang is an experimental multimedia artist and game/interaction designer whose works explore nonhuman agency, mind-body relations, myth, and the environment through game, video, extended realities, BCI, painting, and immersive interactive installation. With backgrounds in social science and architecture, Yiou constructs picture-worlds in the convergence of the ancient mythology and future science fiction as dual but nonbinary modes of worldbuilding. Yiou’s research-based projects mediates artistic and technological interrogation on transhumanism and the production of biomythical cosmologies – organismal, machinic, and environmental. Yiou’s works have appeared in art festivals and galleries in the U.S, Canada, and China including SXSW. Visit artist website for more works: https://yiouwang.org/