In a sunlit Los Angeles gallery, visitors found themselves lining up to do something unusual: turn a heavy hand-crank until they broke a sweat—just to send a single prompt to an AI chatbot. After several minutes of straining, the machine clicked and whirred, finally printing out a mundane result: a standard "sick leave email" template, much like one an office worker might ask AI to generate. Alongside it came a printed "receipt" detailing resources used—water consumed, electricity burned, carbon emitted—grounding this simple digital convenience in its very real physical costs. This interactive installation, aptly titled Sweat for Generation, delivers a jarring message: while modern artificial intelligence feels effortless to use, behind each query lies a chain of labor and energy often hidden from view.
Creative technologist Amo (Mengying) Zeng is the artist behind this and other immersive works that treat technology not as an escape from reality, but as an extension of the human body and memory. In one moment, she has museum-goers sweating and cranking to illuminate the electricity-guzzling engine of AI. In another, she asks an audience to flip through an eerily blank book—and, by doing so, help recover stories that history nearly erased. That second work, The Book of Diaspora, invites visitors to turn large empty pages while a motion-tracking projector beams words and images onto them. As each page turns, fragments of personal letters, faded documents, and half-told histories appear in the blanks, evoking the experience of displacement, migration, and the gaps left by official records. The installation literally overlays missing stories onto the "official" text, symbolizing how much of the immigrant experience is routinely left out of archives. Beneath the top stack of these projected pages sits a pile of real immigration paperwork—a tangible foundation that gives the ghostly projections weight and credibility. Each gesture of turning a page allows the audience to act as both witness and participant in filling in these voids. It's as if Zeng is saying: the story of diaspora isn't complete without your hand in it.
The Book of Diaspora: Filling the Blanks of History
Zeng's The Book of Diaspora grew out of her own observation that "official" narratives of immigration often omit the human struggles and emotions behind the paperwork. Imagine a biography or résumé listing a person's degrees, jobs, and successes—the markers of a so-called "good immigrant"—with large blank spaces in between. As visitors approach this installation, a camera tracks their hand movements and triggers a projector to fill in those blanks. What appear are snippets of memories: stories of families separated by borders, copies of visas or refugee papers, lines of poetry about homes left behind. The once-empty paragraphs come alive with unofficial histories that bureaucracy tends to ignore. In one instance, a projection might reveal the anxious inner monologue of someone awaiting a visa approval; in another, a faded photograph of an ancestor appears alongside immigration stamps, bridging personal memory with public record. Each new page turn prompts a new combination of text and image, ensuring that every visitor encounters a slightly different narrative.
The effect is deeply personal. "Those who share these experiences find empathy beyond language," Zeng has noted, highlighting how the installation creates a space for collective emotion that transcends words. Crucially, The Book of Diaspora makes the audience's body part of the story—literally requiring their touch to surface hidden layers. By merging physical interaction with responsive projection mapping, Zeng prompts viewers to feel the act of recovering lost histories. This tactile storytelling resonates strongly at a time when global displacement is at record levels. By the end of 2024, over 122 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced from their homes—a sobering all-time high. In that context, preserving and sharing immigrant narratives carries a special urgency. Zeng's piece taps into this zeitgeist, using interactive tech to ensure the human stories of migration aren't lost in statistics. The art becomes an act of reclamation: each flip of a page symbolically restores voices that official archives may have silenced or overlooked.
The Book of Diaspora was recently selected as a finalist for the prestigious 2024 Lumen Prize Impact Award, one of the digital art world's top honors. The recognition places Zeng's work among significant contemporary art pieces that leverage technology for social commentary. The installation has traveled as well—featured at the 6th annual Artists of Color Expo & Symposium and other international exhibitions across the United States, China, South Korea, and Macao. In each venue, audiences have been both moved and unsettled by the power of participation: Zeng effectively turns gallery visitors into co-authors of an ever-evolving diasporic story.
Sweat for Generation: Powering AI with Human Effort
If The Book of Diaspora connects our memories to technology, Zeng's Sweat for Generation connects our muscles to it. This installation confronts a hyper-modern concern: the enormous, yet hidden, energy appetite of artificial intelligence. At first glance, the setup looks almost playful—a retro-looking hand crank attached to some gears and a little printer, like a DIY science project. But as you engage with it, the metaphor becomes clear. Visitors must continuously turn the crank to accumulate enough "energy" to run a single AI text-generation request. A digital counter ticks up with each joule produced. Only after sustained effort—sweaty minutes of cranking—does the system finally generate an output from an AI model (the exhibit uses a mock ChatGPT prompt for demonstration). The output is deliberately unremarkable: often just a generic piece of office text (that sick-day email, for example) or another trivial answer. The point hits home as you catch your breath: We expend astonishing amounts of real-world energy for digital conveniences that we take for granted.
To drive that point further, Sweat for Generation prints out a receipt for each AI query the participant "powered." On it, technical terms like "token usage," "model access," and "server uptime" are listed alongside metrics such as total joules expended and milliliters of water theoretically used to cool data center machines. The receipt resembles what you'd get at a store, reinforcing the idea that using AI isn't a free lunch—it has a price, just one paid in kilowatts and resources. The artwork brilliantly transforms AI's effortless facade into what one curator called "a raw display of human labour," forcing people to confront the "hidden power consumption" behind the seamless digital interactions we log daily. In other words, Zeng has made the invisible visible: you can literally feel (in burning arm muscles) what normally happens out-of-sight in a faraway server farm.
Zeng's piece also arrives amid a broader cultural reckoning with technology's footprint. In 2023–24, as generative AI went mainstream and companies raced to deploy chatbots and image generators, questions about sustainability and "AI ethics" moved from academic journals to front-page news. Tech firms themselves have begun releasing environmental impact reports under pressure. In this climate, Sweat for Generation stands out for its visceral approach. It doesn't deliver a lecture or a slideshow of statistics—it puts a crank in your hand and makes you feel the dilemma. Unsurprisingly, the work earned its own accolades: it won an Excellence Award at Synthetica & Alterica, an international art-and-technology exhibition held in Silicon Valley earlier this year. The installation has been showcased in cities from New York and Los Angeles to Turin and Chicago, often as part of forward-looking art programs interrogating our relationship with the digital, the embodied, and the real.
Flesh and Circuits: A Common Thread
Seen together, Zeng's two signature projects—The Book of Diaspora and Sweat for Generation—might seem to tackle very different issues. One is about memory and migration; the other about machinery and energy. Yet a common philosophy binds them: technology is never truly separate from human lives and bodies. Zeng essentially rejects the notion that the digital world is a weightless realm divorced from physical reality. In The Book of Diaspora, the simple act of turning a page becomes a conduit for remembrance, as the body revives stories that official databases and bureaucracies have tried to bury. In Sweat for Generation, the act of cranking forces the body to account for the otherwise unseen labor that powers our smart gadgets and algorithms. In both cases, the message is that interaction is not passive. To interact is to exercise effort, to carry responsibility, whether for preserving history or for fueling our devices.
Why It Matters
Beyond the art galleries and awards, Zeng's work resonates with pressing discussions in society. We live in an era when AI-driven tools, from facial recognition to language models, are becoming everyday infrastructure—often touted as frictionless enhancements to our lives. Zeng urges a pause, a reflection on what's underneath that glossy surface. Her art reminds us that every "smart" convenience, every seemingly magical algorithm, runs on real human and natural resources: human memories, human labor, physical electricity, water, minerals. By foregrounding those often-unseen elements, she invites a kind of accountability that feels especially timely. How do we honor the stories of migrants in a world that's rapidly digitizing and automating record-keeping? How do we reckon with the environmental and human cost of our AI habit, even as we marvel at its possibilities? These are the questions her installations spark in viewers.
Crucially, Zeng's work also offers a counter-narrative to tech fatalism. It shows that technology doesn't have to alienate or numb us—it can be used to deepen our connection to material reality and to each other. A page of a "diaspora book" can become a meeting place between strangers' histories. A crank generator can become a mirror, reflecting our own dependence on a broader energy system. In Zeng's hands, technology isn't a cold, distancing force; it's a medium to engage and even to empathize. Her recent recognitions—from the Lumen Prize nomination to gallery awards—underline that this melding of tech and touch is striking a chord. As we navigate a future where digital and physical worlds are ever more entwined, artists like Amo Zeng are helping ensure that we don't lose sight of the human heartbeat behind the machines. In a very real sense, she's making sure that technology "meets flesh" — not to collide and injure, but to converse and illuminate.
This article was written in cooperation with Lili Xie