About

Ting-Chun Liu's work is about the aesthetics of complex systems: what images look like when they come out of feedback loops, recursion and long technical pipelines rather than from a single intention. It follows a question media art has always asked, that of medium specificity. Applied to artificial intelligence, this means going beyond prompting. Fed back into themselves, image and language models drift, saturate and break into patterns; each leaves a visual fingerprint that nobody designed, an order that grows from the system's own structure, like a Turing pattern.

Many of these images are operational images, made by and for machines rather than for human eyes: captions written for datasets, scores that rank a face, tokens that decide what a model can see before any training begins. Using feedback, misuse and hacking, his works and talks take such pipelines apart to show where perception, aesthetics and bias are produced inside them.

From there the questions lead to geopolitics and data politics. AI looks immaterial, but it runs on graphics cards, electricity and semiconductor supply chains, many of which lead back to Taiwan, where he grew up; as a Taiwanese media artist, this shapes how he imagines materials, technology and capital. Running small models locally is part of the practice: it allows more variation and more ways of operating them, and the aesthetics are not held by cloud companies.

Since 2025 he has been a lecturer and artistic associate at the Faculty of Art and Design of the Bauhaus University Weimar, where he teaches creative coding, critical AI and interactive video installation. He gives talks and workshops for anyone from people who have never written code to artists, companies and scholars, and works closely with Leon-Etienne Kühr on installations, curatorial projects and talks.

He studied New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts (B.F.A., 2018), came to Germany in 2019 and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Media and Fine Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2020–2025). His thesis Heat as (Generative) Image Making received the Weizenbaum-Studienpreis 2025.