Ash Xu

A Tuber is a speculative artwork integrating AI generation, participatory media art and digital moving image. It imagines a post-humanist future in which animals are no longer treated as objects to be watched, performed or consumed, but become active participants, audiences and co-creators within digital society. In this fictional platform, “Animal Tubers” and “AI Tubers” coexist, forming digital communities centred on non-human agency.

The work combines AI-generated moving images, simulated behavioural data and vertical short-form video aesthetics to construct a speculative prototype of an animal-centred media system. Animal emotions and perceptual responses are translated into generative data inputs, shaping AI-produced visual narratives and participatory interaction mechanisms. In this process, invisible affective states become active forces within a shared digital environment.

By repositioning animals and AI within a co-generative system, A Tuber explores whether future technologies might enable more open forms of interspecies communication. If social media no longer served only human users, the work asks whether animals could become data sources, content creators, spectators, or even new members of digital society.

A Tuber critically examines the platform structures that transform emotion, attention and life itself into data. It reflects on a contemporary media economy in which visibility, affect and participation are increasingly quantified, circulated and monetised. Through the familiar format of vertical short-form video, the work invites audiences to reconsider the relationship between life and data, humans and animals, and humans and AI, while expanding the imaginative boundaries of what a “digital community” could become.

➤➤ More About A Tuber

Ash Xu is a digital artist and curator whose practice explores collective perception, intuitive interaction, and the instability of human connection within post-digital society. Working across BCI (brain–computer interface) art, participatory media, and immersive environments, he creates interactive systems that transform internal cognitive states into shared audiovisual experiences.

Rather than treating technology as spectacle or a purely functional interface, Ash approaches technological systems as mediators of human relationships. By lowering barriers between audiences and technology, his works create direct, embodied experiences that move beyond language-based communication, reflecting on the complexity of shared human experience and the limitations of technological connection.

Drawing from speculative design, posthuman discourse, and participatory contemporary art, Ash uses future-oriented interaction scenarios to reflect on conditions already embedded within contemporary society. His practice examines how technological systems shape perception, spectatorship, and social relationships through participation, collective experience, and intuitive interaction.

Ash Xu is a member of The London Group and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His work has been presented internationally through exhibitions and programmes associated with Milan Design Week, London Design Festival, Berlin Art Week, New York Design Week, National Galleries of Scotland, and The London Group.

➤➤ Instagram: @ash_xuuu

➤➤ Website: ashxu.com