Mixanthropy

mixanthropy.com
Created by Yiou Wang and Meichun Cai. 2023
Mixanthropy is an imaginary shapeshifting journey about the body in transition, visual, and behavioral. The term, mixanthropy, encapsulates a deity’s potential to glide between versatile body forms. Explored through media art incorporating motion capture, retargeting, metamorphosis, and machine learning, it is a future bio-mythology with the idea of animal-human shapeshifting while in motion.
Transitioning between animal and human states, we create animal-human hybridity through body transformations based on anatomical isomorphism with mimetic skin textures echoing different environments with dataset of AI-generated latent space walk. The hybrid mixanthrope morphs into other bodies with mocap retargeted on human and nonhuman bodies. We synchronize motion, as an externalization of the intrinsic psyche, with 3D body deformation and metamorphoses into humanoids, chimeras, and otherworldly beings.
The mixanthrope encompasses multiple identities. It is not one object, one organism, but a mechanism of a mind that cannot be categorized but only rests in fluidity. As an observer, we see them change in time. But every metamorphic figure is an identity of the mind itself, manifested differently in different time periods. The mixanthrope incessantly reuptakes and renews different properties and exhibits different figures as shades of the mind.