BROOKLYN, NY – August 6, 2026 – Underground Art and Design (UAAD), an international curatorial platform, presented Disconsent on Sunday, August 2 at The Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn, curated by Amy Xiaofan Jiang. The evening brought together three pioneering artists working across performance, interactive AI, and speculative ecology to examine what happens to consent once agency is distributed across algorithms, interfaces, and institutions rather than held by a single, autonomous individual.
Consent, the exhibition proposed, is usually imagined as a clear agreement between two parties: an informed “yes” that authorizes participation and a “no” that withdraws it. But in systems where agency is spread across machines, institutions, and ecological networks, consent rarely holds still. It is negotiated, deferred, or quietly assumed in real time. Disconsent asked a further question: once we are already embedded in a system, is refusal still possible? Can we interrupt, redirect, or renegotiate participation, or does disconsent only surface as a rupture that exposes the limits of consent itself?
“Consent today is no longer really about a choice between yes or no. It is entangled with power and control over access, bodies, data, information, labor, and planetary ecology. These artists made that entanglement visible,” said Amy Xiaofan Jiang, founder and director of UAAD.
Katherine Helen Fisher presented Cyborg Mirror, an interactive AI photography installation that transformed gallery visitors, in real time, into imagery drawn from women and nonbinary artists and archetypal feminine figures across art history. Built with real-time network design by Shimmy Boyle of Hyperreal Labs and prompt contributions by C. Finley, the piece routed audience data through machine vision, diffusion imaging, and a custom-tuned language model, projecting the results back into the room as a continuous, collectively authored feedback loop.
Mengna Da presented Sour Gummies Don’t Cry, a 20-minute lecture performance from her ongoing series Artificial Agency, with live music by Chienn Tai. Audiences controlled the artist’s body in real time through a custom web app while she delivered a live talk on data extractivism, digital labor, and queer cyberfeminism, turning the performer into a kind of human avatar and the audience into her operators.
Until the Bees Return, a curated live activation of Shihan Zhang’s Department of Species Services, closed the program. In the piece, a dancer takes on the role of a Seasonal Human Pollination Technician, moving through an installation of California poppy flowers, spatial sound, and AI-generated visuals to reimagine pollination as embodied labor after ecological collapse. Zhang was unable to attend the performance in person; her collaborators Mingyong Cheng, Han Zhang, Ziwei Liu, and Jiaye Leng realized the piece on-site, with movement improvisation performed live by Yilin Ye.
Following the performances, Fisher and Da joined a live conversation moderated by Jiang on authorship, desire, and algorithmic control. “Who controls the framing controls the narrative,” Fisher said, describing how audience prompts, AI interpretation, and her own body continually renegotiate authorship inside Cyborg Mirror. Da located her own work in a similar tension: “Play is a very compelling tactic to resist current systems, hierarchies, and power structures. It’s how we regain agency.”
About Underground Art and Design (UAAD)
Underground Art and Design (UAAD) is an artist-led curatorial platform founded in 2022 by Amy Xiaofan Jiang. UAAD amplifies artists working across new media, speculative design, live performance, and publication whose practices engage technology, ecology, consent, and community outside traditional institutional structures. Its global network spans more than 20 countries, and its programming has included Alt-Alterity, Matrix of the Not-Yet, Attention // Distraction, and Worlds Adrift.
About the Mesh Art Center
Mesh Art Center is a cultural hub where art meets research, technology, and science. Based in Brooklyn, they operate as a networked ecosystem that connects organizations, artists, curators, researchers, engineers, activists, makers, and thinkers across disciplines and geographies.
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