Can You Feel My Diasporic Love?

Join us for an immersive multimedia performance that weaves sound, light, touch, sculpture, AI, and bioelectric sensing to explore migration, love, and belonging within landscapes shaped by technology, surveillance, and rising global fascism. By positioning desire and the body as subversive forces, this work stages moments of wonder where embodied affect becomes a form of aesthetic cognition—reorganizing perception, attention, and ethical orientation before reflective judgment.

Developed within Dr. Gao's SensoryHybrid³, the performance integrates real-time AI with bioelectric sensing to create affective feedback loops between audience physiology and an evolving audiovisual environment. Here, meaning emerges not only through symbolic representation, but through felt, bodily attunement. The work invites audiences to experience how affect-driven aesthetic experience can destabilize cultural hierarchies, interrupt technopolitical control, and reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence.

Join us for an immersive multimedia performance that weaves sound, light, touch, sculpture, AI, and bioelectric sensing to explore migration, love, and belonging within landscapes shaped by technology, surveillance, and rising global fascism.

By positioning desire and the body as subversive forces, this work stages moments of wonder where embodied affect becomes a form of aesthetic cognition—reorganizing perception, attention, and ethical orientation before reflective judgment.

Developed within Dr. Gao's SensoryHybrid³, the performance integrates real-time AI with bioelectric sensing to create affective feedback loops between audience physiology and an evolving audiovisual environment. Here, meaning emerges not only through symbolic representation, but through felt, bodily attunement. The work invites audiences to experience how affect-driven aesthetic experience can destabilize cultural hierarchies, interrupt technopolitical control, and reimagine relations between human, non-human, and machine intelligence.

Performance
• Date: 22 January 2026
• Time: 17:00h
• Venue: alpha nova & galerie futura
Am Flutgraben 3, 12435 Berlin
• Entry: Free / donation-based
• More info: https://vorspiel.berlin/events/can-you-feel-my-diasporic-love

This performance is part of Vorspiel / transmediale & CTM Festival 2026, a city-wide initiative showcasing Berlin’s independent art and sound communities. The festival program runs 16 January – 1 February 2026 and is held in cooperation with transmediale and CTM Festival.

Performer: Dr. Chang Gao
Berlin-based multimedia artist and postdoctoral researcher working across AI, bioelectric sensing, sculpture, film, augmented reality, and real-time generative systems. Her work investigates embodied affect, desire, and wonder as epistemically productive forces that challenge cultural hierarchies, anthropocentric AI bias, and technopolitical control. Speaking from diasporic and often repressed positions, Dr. Gao’s practice foregrounds moments of wonder in which bodily responsiveness generates meaning beyond symbolic representation. Her research and multimedia works have been exhibited internationally in Berlin, London, Seoul, Utrecht, Graz, Tokyo, Helsinki, and across China. She also serves as board member and communication director of the feminist collective art&dialogue (Berlin), and is the founder and director of the Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (China).

Venue: alpha nova & galerie futura Alpha nova & galerie futura
A Berlin-based art space for exhibitions and cultural events with an emancipatory and feminist perspective, founded in 1986. The space focuses on collaborations with women artists and FLINTA*, creating a platform that links political intervention and artistic practice, and fosters critical standpoints for artistic, academic, and social communities. Events include exhibitions, performances, concerts, readings, workshops, and round-table discussions.

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Host or Publisher Royal College of Art