Aven-Le Zhou is an artist-scholar whose practice-based research examines the sociocultural and ecological dimensions of technological advancements, exploring alternative pathways for technodiversity through interactive art.

His recent research, From Interactivity to Relationality, critiques the narrowing of “interaction” and “embodiment” within the art-technology nexus. By recentering intercorporeality and introducing post-anthropocentric perspectives on the body, he proposes Relational Embodiment—a framework that extends embodiment beyond anthropocentric perspectives toward the technological, the nonhuman, the ecological, and the planetary. His work foregrounds an urgent call for relational thinking across interactive art and related applied sciences, e.g., AI, robotics, and human–computer interaction.

His artworks have been exhibited internationally at leading institutions and festivals, including Ars Electronica Festival, ISEA Creative Works, Digital Art China Exhibition, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, and Guangdong Times Museum. His scholarly publications appear in renowned art and technology venues such as Leonardo, SIGGRAPH, and ISEA.

Five Keywords

1. Relationality — Replacing interactivity in (interactive) art with ethical, affective, and sociocultural relating across human and nonhuman bodies.
2. Relational Embodiment — Extending embodiment beyond the human toward technological, ecological, and planetary scales.
3. Technodiversity — Advocating diversity and plural and hybrid technological futures as an ethical and creative imperative against homogenized AI cultures.
4. Companion Species — Rethinking AI and nonhuman entities as partners in co-evolution, empathy, and care rather than control or alignment.
5. Worlding — Co-constituting worlds through situated, plural, and relational processes of artistic and theoretical practices.

Assistant Professor, Xian Jiao Tong - Liverpool University. 2020 - Present.

Instructor, New York University, Shanghai. 2019 - 2020.

Research Fellow, New York University, Shanghai. 2014 - 2019.

Artist Works with Emerging Technology. Shanghai. 2014 - Present.

IND 407 Advanced Design Visualisation and Communication

IND 209 Studio: Concept Generation Interaction

IND 118 Introduction to Human Computer Interaction

[Selected Course at NYU Shanghai: ] Artificial Intelligence Arts

1st prize, Tencent Next Idea Competition.

Winner, Google PoweredByTF 2.0 Challenge.

1st prize, Intel AI On PC Early Innovation.

1st prize, Google Developer Group Shanghai Design Sprint Hackthon.