Can You Feel My Diasporic Love? Affective Encounters of Wonder, Body, and Machine

Can You Feel My Diasporic Love? Affective Encounters of Wonder, Body, and Machine

22nd January, 2026 19:00h (CET)

alpha nova & gallerie futura (Am Flutgraben 3, 12435 Berlin, Germany)

A multimedia performance weaving sound, light, touch, sculpture, AI, and bioelectric systems to explore migration, love, and belonging within landscapes shaped by technology, surveillance, and rising global authoritarianism. By positioning desire and the body as subversive forces, the work stages moments of wonder in which embodied affect becomes a mode of aesthetic cognition—reorganizing perception, attention, and ethical orientation prior to reflective judgment.

Developed under Dr Gao’s SensoryHybrid³, the project integrates real-time AI with bioelectric sensing to create affective feedback loops between audience physiology and an evolving audiovisual environment. Through these encounters, meaning emerges not through symbolic representation alone, but through felt, bodily attunement. The performance explores how affect-driven aesthetic experience can destabilize cultural hierarchies, interrupt technopolitical control, and reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence.

Performer: Dr. Chang Gao
Berlin-based multimedia artist and postdoc researcher whose work explores AI bias, affect, and wonder as modes of aesthetic cognition. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art (London) and is a research associate at Intervenierende Künste (Freie Universität Berlin). She also serves as a board member and communication director of the feminist collective art&dialogue (Berlin), and is the founder and director of the Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (China). Working across robotics, bioelectric sensing, sculpture, film, augmented reality, and real-time AI systems, Gao investigates how embodied affect, desire, and sensory experience reorganize perception, agency, and ethical orientation prior to reflective judgment. Her practice treats aesthetic experience as epistemically productive, foregrounding moments of wonder in which bodily responsiveness generates meaning beyond symbolic representation. By mobilizing eroticism, supernormal stimuli, and affective computing, Gao develops immersive installations and performances that challenge technopolitical control, cultural hegemony, and the anthropocentric biases embedded in AI systems. Speaking from diasporic and often repressed positions, her work uses affect-driven creative languages to reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence. Her research and multimedia works have been exhibited internationally in Berlin, London, Seoul, Utrecht, Graz, Tokyo, Helsinki, and across China.

www.gaochangart.net
Instagram: @gao.chang_rca

Venue: alpha nova & galerie futura
Directors: Sylvia Sadzunski & Dr. Katharina Koch
Intro: alpha nova & galerie futura is a Berlin-based art space for exhibitions and cultural events with a decidedly emancipatory and feminist perspective, founded in 1986. alpha nova & galerie futura focuses on collaborations with women artists and FLINTA*, creating a space for linking political intervention and artistic practice in order to develop critical standpoints for artistic and academic communities, as well as for society at large. Every year, up to five exhibitions with visual arts of all genres are realized in cooperation with the participating artists as well as other partners and collaborators. Events like film screenings, performances, concerts, readings, lectures, and talks as well as thematic workshops and round-table discussions for and with women cultural producers complement the program. We regularly work and collaborate with various local, national and international partner institutions and individuals. alpha nova & galerie futura offers coaching and support in conceptional work and networking for FLINTA* in the artistic fields. Focus: Feminisms, postcolonialism, intersectionality, conceptual and investigative approaches, collaborative work, art as knowledge production, research as artistic format, feminist curating, feminist instituting. *FLINTA stands for Female, Lesbian, Inter*, Trans* and Agender
www.galeriefutura.de

More information:
https://vorspiel.berlin/events/can-you-feel-my-diasporic-love
Event registration:
https://www.eventbrite.de/e/can-you-feel-my-diasporic-love-tickets-1979588380134?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl