`   ❥~     TIANRAN QIAN    ✶.✩  

Exploring how to make space in this alien aesthetic machine~

Tianran is a transdisciplinary, research-based creative practitioner born in Hangzhou, China, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work investigates the aesthetic mediation of digital writing, the materiality of artificial intelligence, agency and algorithmic affect, as well as space-making and community organizing practices. Her multimedia projects encompass independent publishing, photography, installation, writing, and workshops.

Professionally, she has worked as a digital talent agent and producer at the intersection of new media art and marketing. This role provided her with market-driven insights into how new media infrastructure shapes visual culture and value production, transforming urban fabric and public space.

MFA: Design and Technology
@Parsons School of Design, The New School

BA: Global Liberal Studies in Contemporary Culture and Creative Production

@ New York University


Research interests:
- computational aesthetics
- technopolitics of infrastructure
- digital writing as imperial technology

- (im)materiality and transmediality of digital media
- trasnlingual practice
- embodiment and affect
- image and value production
- human agency, space-making and creative intervention
- epistimology knowledge representation



Contact:
tianran.space@gmail.com

@_tianran_


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Keychain Connections

Keys are symbols and tools of protection by gatekeeping. How to reimagine protection through connections instead?

Keychain Connections includes a workshop and designed objects that explore how to connect with strangers through keychains as a method.

Collaborators: Sirui Liao, Oliver Zichen Yuan
Presented at Brooklyn Art Book Fair with Sequence Gift Shop

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2024/09
Workshop, Bags, Chains



Diffusion Delusion Confusion

 Artist talk panel on AI image generation and  diffusion models based practices.

Artists featured: Yufeng Zhao, Jakob Sitter, Shane Fu, Tuğrul Şalcı

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2024/06
AI Art Panel






From Chinese Calligraphy to Typewriting

What happened between Chinese Calligraphy to Typewriting? 

This research explores embodiment of calligraphic writing and the history of technologuistic innovations during China’s quest for modernization, and how it changed our bodies’ relationship with language in the digital age.

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2024/04
Academic Research & Presentation





Enter The Bad Object

Anarchival project on the space-making practices of Chinese community in New York through various ways of self-organizing. It features a collection of interviews documenting how they achieved content independence through self-sustainability.

...ongoing in the making...

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2023-ongoing
Art Publication





大 Big

Big transparent inflatable of the Chinese character “大 (big)”, taking space with air.

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2023/05
Site-specific Installation





Cheetah Skirt Book 豹纹书

A collection of 500 photos from 2019 June to Oct, featuring people wearing cheetah print skirts.

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2019.06-10, 2022/01
Photo Book





(Not A) Maze

There’s only one exit/entrance, so it’s not a maze. Questions are only problems of the mind.

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2021/11 
Objects and Images



🩵🌟🤪👾👽🫶💛