Artist Talk and AI Workshop: Wanrong Zhu
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
The Birkbeck Centre for Creative AI is pleased to welcome artist and filmmaker Wanrong Zhu for an artist talk and practical workshop exploring the creative possibilities and critical questions raised by contemporary AI image and video generation.
Working across documentary practice, photography and generative AI, Zhu develops hybrid approaches to visual storytelling that combine lived experience with speculative imagination. Her work explores how emerging technologies might reshape relationships between people, place, memory and cultural identity, using AI not to document reality but to imagine possible futures.
The talk will focus on Symbiotic Ethnography, an ongoing artistic project inspired by Zhu's upbringing in Yunnan, one of China's most ethnically diverse regions. Combining documentary photography with AI-generated imagery, the project asks how future technologies might become part of existing cultural landscapes and what forms of coexistence between humans, machines and local traditions might be imagined. Rather than presenting predictions about cultural change, the work uses speculative visual narratives to explore one artist's perspective on the relationship between heritage, technology and the future.
Following the talk, Zhu will lead a workshop introducing participants to professional AI video production workflows using ComfyUI. Participants will learn techniques for character replacement, motion transfer and hybrid live-action/AI video production, gaining insight into the creative pipeline behind contemporary generative video practice—from preparing source footage and guiding motion to rendering and post-production compositing.
Bringing together artistic experimentation, technical practice and critical discussion, this event offers an opportunity to explore both the creative potential and the conceptual questions surrounding AI-generated visual media.
About the artist
Wanrong Zhu is a multimedia artist and designer whose work explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, documentary practice and speculative visual culture. Drawing on her experience growing up in Yunnan, China, she investigates how emerging technologies can be used as artistic tools to imagine new relationships between cultural memory, place and future forms of human-machine coexistence.
Contact name: Joel Mckim
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