Entering Futurescapes: Bobby Xiong’s Interactive Art

Artist Bobby Zhaocheng Xiong creates interactive works inviting audiences into his well-imagined futures. In these deep installations, nature and humanity prosper centrally yet both appear confined within the structures of contemporary technology. Through his visual language and tone, he merges technical precision with poetic-like reflection, building hushed, meditative spaces that ask questions of how technology reshapes our sense of the natural and the human.

His practice evolves from a background in industrial design, fine art, and visual communication, allowing him to balance material control with conceptual depth. Beyond its practical function, Bobby approaches technology as a system of belief, connected to mysticism and numerology, which bring a mysterious atmosphere in his works. Each installation forms a small corner of a speculative world, where nature and our culture survive as a dystopian artificial memory. These truly fragile landscapes offer a glimpse of what our life might feel like when the technological, the organic and the spiritual have indeed merged.

The Vanishing of Nature

Flower is the entry point to Bobby’s art world, gently guiding audiences into a corner of his imagined future where nature and technology coexist. Placed on a patch of artificial grass, a CRT monitor displays a single white daisy swaying on its screen. Visitors are invited to relax, sitting or lying down, to engage with this humming digital-esque bloom. When they blow softly toward the flower, as one might do in a park, the image responds and moves as if stirred by real wind. 

Through this simple and poetic interaction, Flower turns a gesture into an encounter with a synthetic-like nature. The work bends the boundary between the organic and the artificial, between the living and the coded. It is both tender and unsettling, evoking a future where the natural world survives only as simulation. 

Earlier this year, Flower was shown in Paradox and Poem- Objects at Purist Gallery, London, where the work was also briefly highlighted in our previous article. 

When the Sacred Dissolves

One of Bobby’s most significant works, New Deity, expands his vision from ecological to human and spiritual dimensions. Taking inspiration from the digitalisation of religion, the work imagines another corner of the future, one where people pray not to our old gods, but to a newly born machine deity. As religious communities migrate online, the traditional image of divinity becomes unstable, and the sacred rituals that once grounded faith begin to dissolve. Congregations turn to technology as an omnipotent presence, while the blending of religious symbols across cyberspace creates a chaotic fusion of belief systems. 

At the centre of the installation stands an altar made of exposed screen modules, each continuously generating hybrid divine figures through machine learning. These faces, merging the iconography of multiple world religions, pulse with uncanny vitality. The audiences are invited to kneel before the altar, activate their phone flash, and receive a personalised blessing text, a unique scripture generated by the machinery god. The act of taking a flash photograph, often deemed disrespectful in sacred spaces, becomes here a ritual of devotion to the new deity. And all the artificial candles around speak a spiritual absence. 

Deception in the Ruins

Shifting from nature’s public spaces to a confined interior, Prophecy envisions a survival news studio that continues to operate long after the world outside has collapsed. An old typewriter and a CRT monitor are producing news, indifferent to whether the content is true or false. These two devices echo the forms through which the public most often meets AI: language and image. However, in this setting, they become instruments of distortion. The continuous production of “news” critiques the misinformation and artificial authority of generative AI, exposing how truth collapses when machines speak in the language of fact without meaning. The piece pictures a future collapsing under misinformation and false truths, where humanity survives on artificial intelligence that fails to understand our world. 

A Participatory World in Constant Formation

Bobby’s exhibitions trace his ongoing attempt to construct a personal worldview of a possible future dystopia. From the V&A Museum to independent galleries across the UK, his works bring in art enthusiasts who line up to step into these surreal-like corners of the future. Distinguishing his practice is the transformation of each space into an immersive environment, inviting participation rather than bare observation. Every installation becomes a living eco-system where viewers engage with the work, experiencing how technology reshapes the art and contemporary technology. And even those unfamiliar with the deeper concepts, behind the pieces can still enter, play, and feel the subtle tension between humanity and the so-called machine, an indeed rare quality that makes Bobby’s vision both accessible and profound.