[ISEA2024] Paper: Aven Le Zhou, Jiayi Ye, Tiancheng Liu, Kang Zhang — Archiving Body Movements: Collective Generation of Chinese Calligraphy

Abstract

Keywords:
Embodied Interaction, Body Movement, Bodily Engagement, Chinese Calligraphy, Interactive Art, AI Art, AI-generated (Painterly) Content

As a communication channel, body movements have been widely explored in behavioral studies and kinesics. Performing and visual arts share the same interests but focus on documenting and representing human body movements, such as dance notation and visual work creation. This paper investigates body movements in oriental calligraphy and how to apply its principles to stimulate and archive body movements. Through an artwork (i.e., Wushu), the authors experiment with an interactive and generative approach to engage the audience’s bodily participation and archive the body movements as a compendium of generated calligraphy. The audience assumes the role of both writers and readers; creating (writing) and appreciating (i.e., reading) the generated calligraphy becomes a cyclical process within this infinite “book,” which aims to motivate further attention and discussion concerning Chinese calligraphy.

  • Aven Le Zhou (b. 1991, Wuhan, China) is an artist scholar and Ph.D. researcher in Computational Media and Arts at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). He is the chair of Leonardo LASER talk (Guangzhou), an elected Affiliated Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 2022. He has held an assistant professorship at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University since 2020. Prior to that, he was a Clinical Instructor (2019 – 2020) and Research Fellow (2014 – 2019) at Interactive Media Arts at New York University Shanghai.
  • Jiayi Ye (b. 1989 in Shanghai, China) is a calligrapher and researcher. She is primarily focused on digital calligraphy art, cross-cultural communication related to Chinese calligraphy, and the aesthetics of this ancient art form in the modern context.
  • Tiancheng Liu (b. 1996, China) is a computer science researcher currently focusing on computing aesthetics and Chinese calligraphy. He was researcher and engineer in cloud computing and networking, and intelligent transportation IoT (Internet of Things)..
  • Kang Zhang is Acting Head and Professor of Computational Media and Arts, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Professor of Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas, HKUST, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas, USA, and Guest Professor of China Academy of Arts. He was a Fulbright Distinguished Chair and among 2023 Stanford’s List of Top 2% Scientists (in Career).