Aven Le Zhou

The Endless Collaborative Book: Wushu

Wushu, 2023. Aven Le Zhou (https://aven.cc). This interactive artwork, Wushu, 2023, is an endless collaborative book that intends to encourage and archive active participation in Calligraphy while extending its scope as an art form. This piece engages the audience in generating ink strokes and effects from their motion input. Two customized neural networks generate bilingual inscrutable characters from the audience’s engagements through a "Motion Caption" process. Procedural algorithms derived from calligraphy research and “Four Principles” manipulate the generated characters and their layout compositions, responding to the motion data, and automatically “write” them in the Chinese calligraphy genre. This offers the audience an accessible method to interact with the calligraphy, regardless of their previous knowledge of this oriental art. Wushu accumulates participant-generated calligraphy works and serves as a compendium and digital archive that keeps expanding with the audience’s collective participation. The process of creating (“writing”) and appreciating (“reading”) Calligraphy becomes a cyclical process within this infinite “book.” Wushu seeks to stimulate further attention and discussions concerning the visual forms, linguistic meanings, and cultural essence of Chinese characters and Calligraphy. Artist Bio 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. Acknowledgments Our long research paper entitled Archiving Body Movements: Collective Generation of Chinese Calligraphy discusses this artwork and will appear at the 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Wushu was initially proposed and subsequently exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, during the summer of 2023. Following this, it was selected for the DAC (Digital Art China) exhibition in April 2024 in Zhejiang, China. Additionally, Wushu was shortlisted for the Arte Laguna Prize.