Creative technologist Amo (Mengying) Zeng treats technology not as escape, but as extension — of memory, of effort, of the body itself. In her interactive installations The Book of Diaspora, Sweat for Generation, and its evolution Embodied Intelligence, the audience doesn’t just watch: they flip, crank, sweat. These works insist that machines and human lives are bound more intimately than we might admit.
The Book of Diaspora
Picture turning pages that appear almost blank. Then, with each flip, projections fill in missing words and fragments — immigration documents, stories, records of displacement. That is The Book of Diaspora.
Using projection mapping and computer-vision tracking, Zeng makes visitors co-authors. Each hand movement reclaims what bureaucracy has obscured, exposing the silence built into official records. The piece doesn’t merely recall forgotten histories; it makes audiences feel their incompleteness in real time.
Sweat for Generation → Embodied Intelligence
If The Book of Diaspora confronts erasure, Sweat for Generation confronts effort. Audiences turn a crank to generate power, only to discover that their exertion is converted into receipts: water consumed, electricity burned, carbon emitted. The installation literalizes the hidden labor of AI, rendering the “invisible” visible through the body.
Its successor, Embodied Intelligence, pushes the idea further. Still crank-driven, the work now connects to a web app where visitors can scan and track AI’s resource use on their phones. The app not only breaks down energy, water, and carbon costs, but also suggests practical tips to reduce one’s digital footprint. Where Sweat for Generation exposed, Embodied Intelligence extends: from recognition to responsibility.
The Common Thread
Across these works runs a single principle: technology is never abstract. In The Book of Diaspora, the body animates what bureaucracy erases. In Sweat for Generation and Embodied Intelligence, it powers and accounts for the hidden cost of computation.
Zeng’s practice has already gained international recognition. Sweat for Generation earned the Excellence Award at ArtX Gallery’s “Synthetica & Alterica” and has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Turin, and Chicago. The addition of Embodied Intelligence signals a maturing of her vision — one that refuses to let digital culture remain immaterial.
On October 17, 2025, Zeng will present both The Book of Diaspora and Embodied Intelligence at Hook Space in the Fine Art Building, 410 S Michigan Ave, Chicago — marking a rare occasion where her two signature explorations of memory and machine will be experienced side by side.
Why It Matters
At a moment when AI, projection, and computer vision slide seamlessly into daily life, Zeng makes us feel their underside. She dismantles the myth of effortless technology, reminding audiences that every prompt, every swipe, every algorithm rests on human labor, human memory, human cost.
Her installations are not spectacles to consume, but situations to endure: to sweat, to flip, to account. They force a recognition that interaction is not passive. It is labor. It is remembering. It is responsibility.
In Zeng’s hands, participation becomes confrontation. And through that confrontation, we are reminded of the flesh beneath the machine.
