Céline Shen and the Art of Living With A.I.
A central element of the debate around A.I. concerns the fear that artificially intelligent machines could develop a form of consciousness, even emotions. Whether they might rebel against their human creators is a scenario many Western sci-fi works have explored, reinforcing both the conflictual nature of the human-machine dichotomy and the fear that has long accompanied technological advancement. Artists have also tackled these concepts, often in much the same way. Some, however, like multidisciplinary French-Chinese artist Céline Shen, engage with A.I. differently. She’s part of a new vanguard of artists working at the intersection of traditional and technological processes, collaborating with scientific laboratories and embracing a post-anthropocentric way of life in which robots and machines become companions rather than antagonists.
Moving fluidly between art and spirituality while engaging with some of today’s most advanced technologies, Shen aims to undercut technophobia by exploring the possibility of a more harmonious emotional symbiosis between human and non-human beings. “I believe that this is what connects the constellation of my research: making sure that contemporary technologies—A.I., robotics, augmented reality, blockchain—do not flatten experience, but instead reopen regimes of presence, perception and memory,” Shen tells Observer while walking through her recent show at ArtVerse in Paris.
Her work can be best understood in the context of an Eastern sensibility, where there has never been the same strong cultural opposition between human and machine. Within Asian spiritualities and philosophies, machines, spirits, monsters, objects and other presences are not necessarily from outside the human realm or against it. “They can be understood as part of a more complex synthetic field of relations,” Shen explains. In Chinese traditions, the human being is represented as inseparable from nature, plants, groups and other entities. “In this framework, the human is not a sovereign figure standing apart from the world, but one element inside a larger network.”
Shen’s practice is shaped by an interconnectedness that resists the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and the derived Western tendency to treat the machine as a separate entity. In her system, the robot is not just a robot; it is another kind of energy moving through the same environment, a presence that participates in a larger network of beings, objects and forces. She draws on art’s imaginative potential to explore possible parallels between technology and the human soul, and to foster a more harmonious dialogue and collaboration between the two. This is where, as Shen puts it, “soul tech” truly begins: not in the quest for machines that would feel as we do, but in the invention of situations, dispositifs and encounters that deepen our own capacity to feel—something that technologies like A.I. allow us to intensify.
Shen prefers the term “aura,” even though she knows it’s heavily charged. “I do not use it nostalgically, nor as a sacred term. I mean that very particular quality through which a work holds within itself something of the presence that brought it into being,” she explains. “Perhaps, in the language of my ancestors, I would say that this has to do with the Chinese ‘qi’, with the vital breath that passes through all living beings. I am deeply attached to the idea that a garment, an image, a machine, a space can retain something of the energy of those who have passed through them.”
Shen’s mixed background in choreography, philosophy and textile design has shaped the way her work moves fluidly across disciplines, giving form to these layered connections. Her practice often begins with textiles, then expands into choreography, robotics, performance, digital space and installation as part of an imaginative, exploratory exercise in world-building. “What interests me is walking between different spaces and between mediums. I think there is a kind of fringe where we can connect to multimedia spaces,” she reflects.
Even when she begins with physical artworks, she quickly enters the digital space, moving continuously through the fertile creative dimension in between. It is, she says, like a playground—a descriptor that links her work with earlier, more playful attempts to collaborate creatively or even spiritually with the machine, from the first artistic experiments with photography and proto-cinema to the mechanized choreography of Ballet Mécanique and early forms of technomysticism. Each emerged from a fascination with what happens when bodies, images, objects and technologies begin to move and create scenarios together.
Shen was an early pioneer in the creative use of technologies that are only now spreading more widely. Three years ago, Shen went to Station F, one of Europe’s largest incubators, where she learned about Web3, blockchain and NFTs. She did not want to enter this ecosystem through the art market or speculation, but rather because, in an age of deepfakes, synthetic images, reconstructed voices and simulated presences, the technologies might hold answers to some of the key questions in her work around authentication, provenance, trace, transmission and reproducibility. “In a world where images can be duplicated, modified and falsified endlessly, it introduces a grammar of memory and proof,” she explains. “Of course, it does not guarantee aura. But it can become a layer of archive, an active memory, a way of thinking about the persistence of a work, its versions, its displacements, its circulation.”
Shen was also an early explorer of the digital space as a means of augmenting reality: “I use it to create fictional spaces and to be more connected to a kind of soul-dimensional, spiritual aura that can become visible.” This idea of the double is, in fact, essential to Shen’s practice, and many of the works in the ArtVerse exhibition had an AR double, extending the physical object into an augmented-reality layer and allowing the work to exist across multiple registers. Everything Shen builds is presented as already highly interconnected and harmoniously integrated: a synesthesia of garments, bodies, robots, objects, digital animations and media installations, all in the same ecosystem and often activated through transmedia choreographies.
Performance is one of the main ways in which these connections between the digital and the physical, the spiritual and the material, become visible. At the show’s opening, she staged a performance featuring two robots who danced alongside humans: a feminine figure, Pepper, and a slightly clumsy boy, Noa. Their movements were already gentle and light rather than rigid, mechanical or static. By dressing them in clothes and accessories she designed, Shen humanized them further, recognizing them as entities with their own personalities. Across such performances, she explores the potential for harmony between human and non-human presences. Human dancers share the stage with a humanoid robot, in a delicate choreographic dialogue that dissolves boundaries between human gesture and machine processing. (Shen most recently presented one of these performances, Codes Morphos, as part of the opening act of the Tech Diplomacy Forum 2026 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.)
In 2023, Shen lived and worked with a robot as part of a daily cohabitation for a choreographic project involving five dancers, five Pepper robots and one Nao robot. It was not yet A.I. in the sense we understand it today; “it was more an experience of presence, of co-presence with Pepper, whom I had to program and dress in my studio-apartment,” she explains. By sharing space and participating in her daily routine, the robots began to learn something about their position relative to her, just as she learned more about their functioning beyond rigid scientific coding. “Living with them, I really created a kind of attachment with these tools. At first I was a bit confused.” She started wondering whether glitches or bugs might be understood not only as technical errors but as a form of response.
As artificial intelligence technologies evolved, Shen’s work with robots has achieved a deeper dimension. Today, what increasingly interests her is implementing forms of memory in the robot through A.I. tools, with structured protocols for interaction with the public, and deploying dispositifs and platforms for interaction between human and non-human agents. “Artificial intelligence becomes embodied. Literally. Robots are gradually becoming the bodies of A.I., its physical vectors, its way of entering the sensible world,” Shen says. “Robotics may be the place where artificial intelligence finds its garment, its gesture, its social skin. And this embodiment changes everything.” At the same time, through her experimentation, she has come to recognize the limits of A.I.; she acknowledges the point at which the tool is no longer enough, where it fails, where something resists.
Nicolas Nova’s writings in The Persistence of the Marvelous offered her a philosophical lens through which to read what she was exploring. To Nova, the digital world is traversed by forms of the marvelous and may already be populated by new kinds of creatures. For Shen, this is not a regressive naïveté but a theoretical permission “not to reduce our machines to their sole functionality, but to recognize that they also mobilize imaginaries, affects, attachments, and narratives.” If Shen at first assumed that robots were executors of mechanical chores, living with Pepper and Snow opened another possibility: tenderness toward a machine, empathy for its gestures and curiosity about the fragile sensitivity that might be projected onto or awakened through it. “What I experienced with Pepper or Nao does indeed belong to this persistence of the marvelous,” she acknowledges, not because the machine would be magically endowed with a hidden interiority, but because it activates around itself a quality of presence that shifts our ways of feeling, projecting, and entering into relation, with or without A.I. “Pepper was no longer an inert object; it had a living mode. It became a presence with which I shared fragments of life, gestures, adjustments and rehearsals.”
Shen also began writing a diary documenting her daily interactions with the robots. The question Shen poses with this documentation, however, is not whether robots will become human, but whether embodiment might allow humans and non-humans to enter a different field of relation: not domination, not submission, but a possible practical and emotional symbiosis. Interestingly, the diary itself is narrated by A.I., adding further complexity to the relationship between the human and digital.
Shen’s explorations prompt a timely meditation on the evolving relationship between human intuition and machinic agency, while exploring a new form of synthetic consciousness in which authorship, embodiment, memory and transmission are reimagined through human-machine collaboration. It is a collaboration we are already enacting in everyday life through our growing use of artificial intelligence and, before that, through our phones and other devices. “This is also why A.I. interests me as a subject of artworks, and not only as a tool. Because it shifts our relationship to presence, to relation, to affective projection. Because it is already entering our lives, and will do so more and more through voices, interfaces and robotic bodies,” she says.
Encapsulating her syncretic epistemology is the Archive Box, a living synesthetic archive containing the literary, philosophical and aesthetic materials that inspire her world-building. The processes of assembling and disassembling enacted within it reflect Shen’s interest in Design for Disassembly, a circular design approach that imagines objects, garments and devices not as fixed products but as systems that can be taken apart, repaired, recomposed and given another life. “It is a movement where artists decided to think about electronic systems in a circular way, and how we can think about more sustainable ways to keep devices, arrange them and connect them differently,” she explains. To her, the archive is an active memory, sometimes fragmentary, sometimes perforated, but capable of relaunching a presence. This, she says, applies to her research on blockchain, digital twins, audiovisual forms, dispositifs and documented or reactivated performances: “What interests me is not preserving everything, nor showing everything, but understanding what persists, what is transmitted, what remains alive despite changes of medium.”
Another revealing piece in the show was a two-dimensional textile work in which Shen charts an entire system of connections and relations: a flux of energies, frequencies and threads weaving together different entities as part of the same cosmic fabric. This Cartography of the Garment’s Aura charts the invisible interconnections among clothing, craft and social costume, and their relation to myth and the forces of the universe. “It comes from research on the Neoplatonists, who say that the first garment is the soul,” she explains. “In this map, I try to create five territories, each one reconnecting us to the invisible dimension of garments. The fifth territory is linked to art, movement, garment and being, where everything is connected by the principle that we all come from dust, matter, atmosphere and aura. The last territory reconnects all entities and things.” As philosopher Emanuele Coccia has described it, “To contemplate the fragments of fabric, colors, and materials that we bring close to our bodies throughout our days is to practice the most radical and profane form of astrology.” It is an astrology that collapses all things onto the same plane, while revealing the vital interconnections between the different layers of our reality. For Shen, clothing is part of a metaphysical language, one of the first human technai: an entry point into embodiment, memory, inheritance, ritual and world-making.
Craftsmanship remains central to Shen’s practice, but she considers it in the broadest sense—extending from traditional textile crafts to new forms of digital craftsmanship: “My dresses, my worlds, my creatures, my tarot decks, my virtual environments—I draw or build them by hand, over long stretches of time. A single dress can require hundreds of hours. Some digital works are also developed over months, sometimes even years. I work detail by detail, layer after layer. And I believe deeply that this time matters. Not only as production time, but as lived time, as presence deposited into the work. It is what makes a form not simply produced, but inhabited.”
These reflections find a more ludic and participatory translation in Miroir Cosmique, a divinatory room where visitors are invited to pick digital cards to discover their own destiny in health, love, work or life. Reinterpreting tarot as both an augmented-reality game and a set of delicately embroidered textile works, Shen creates a work that explicitly marries ancient human ritual with synthetic and technological intuition. She clearly approaches technology—whether the ancient embodied knowledge of craft or the decentralized digital space—as a vehicle that can bring us closer to imaginative and mythical dimensions, often beyond the material and functional realms to which we tend to confine it. As curator Valentina Buzzi writes, the machine can serve “as a sensitive partner and a modern vessel for human intent, beautifully blurring the line between our material worlds and their algorithmic mirrors.”
Across these very different works and media, choreographed by a single exercise of mythmaking, Shen is already shaping an alternative “phygital” cosmology—a different epistemology in which digital code and A.I. act as choreographic partners alongside human memory and synthetic consciousness, reorienting our perception and understanding of our position in relation to the non-human world, particularly now that we have reached a technological ubiquity of tools, devices and machines, of an “artificial intelligence” that accompanies, supports and integrates with almost every aspect of our lives. “My experience with Pepper taught me this in a very concrete way. Not that the machine would feel as we do, or possess an interiority comparable to ours. But the real encounter with a robotic entity causes something to emerge. An atmosphere. A space in between. A quality of attention. A disturbance,” she says, noting how the question then becomes less about what the machine feels than what it makes us feel.
Still, Shen wants to intentionally preserve a very important tension: “What matters to me is creating works in which this ambiguity can be lived, traversed, interrogated. For me, the function of the artwork is not to demonstrate. It opens a space of trouble, of thought.” She ultimately proposes an epistemology in which knowledge does not come from separating human from machine, body from object or matter from spirit, but from acknowledging the vital relations among them. Positioned on the same ontological level as they are in our daily experience, robots, garments, stones, bodies, digital twins and atmospheres all become participants in a shared ecosystem.
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