SoVA Anderson Lecturer

Ziyang Wu

Headshot of SoVA Anderson Lecturer 26-27 Ziyang Wu

Anderson Lecture – March 17, 2027

Ziyang Wu is a digital media artist exploring how large technological systems shape the way we live, connect, and understand the world. Having lived across different continents, he is interested in how technology is experienced differently across cultures and political contexts. His practice is often based on firsthand research in places shaped by colonial histories, rapid technological change, or geopolitical conflict, including the Philippines, Ukraine, and several countries in Africa.

Wu examines how digital networks and infrastructure affect local environments, politics, everyday life, and intimate relationships. Working with AI simulations, video games, interactive installations, and speculative video, he enters and reimagines these systems to make their hidden rules and power structures more visible. His work asks who builds technological systems, who benefits from them, and how they quietly influence our choices, relationships, and ideas about the future.

Digital scene showing a seated figure among ruined concrete walls and scattered debris, overlaid with charts, numerical data, and interface graphics.

Artist's Statement

Ziyang Wu is a digital media artist investigating the geopolitical and psychological impacts of planetary-scale technological infrastructures.

Informed by a complex trajectory of living across multiple continents, this profound transnational experience drives his commitment to rigorous, firsthand fieldwork in regions navigating post-colonial realities and geopolitical conflicts – such as the Philippines, Ukraine, and Africa. Wu critically examines how digital expansion and infrastructure reshape local ecosystems, politics, and intimate relationships. By infiltrating these unseen systems through AI simulation, video games, interactive installations, and speculative video, his work dismantles preexisting post-globalized imaginations, offering a nuanced confrontation with the algorithmic violence and infrastructural hegemony defining our contemporary human condition.