In this talk, I’ll focus primarily on making art using fragile technologies, discarded visions of the future yearning for a reason for their continued existence, in an era of rapid change and mass extinction. In particular, I’ll talk about the affordances of the medium of headset-based mixed reality as I see them, following the history of the most recent wave of enthusiasm for stereoscopic spatial computing — from the swell of mid-2010s hype to the low ebb of 2025’s widespread indifference — and present a vision for what I think are some of the most interesting things you can do with these devices. As a case study, I’ll get under the hood of my own piece, Medusa (2021), and talk about how this piece finds tension and resonance with its thematic underpinnings by enthusiastically embracing constraint within a medium where the temptation of excess can be overwhelming. Along the way, I’ll talk about the nature of architecture without physical form, creating interactivity at the scale of an entire audience, the joys of abdicating control, and mechanisms for playing with crowd psychology in real time. I’ll also talk about two other pieces I’ve had the privilege of working on with the content collective Tin Drum: The Life (2019), and Kagami (2023), the latter of which recently showed in Melbourne as part of the 2025 Asia TOPA festival. Both of these pieces are centered around the volumetric capture of human performance, and here I’ll talk about the contrasts between presenting experiences in a free-viewpoint context as opposed to traditional film and recorded media. Interspersed throughout there will be references to insects and vision science, and everything will be woven into a lattice of introspection about the fundamentally human desire for permanence. Eventually, the talk will culminate in a set of motivations for making art in times of chaos and uncontrolled feedback loops, and a discussion of the opportunities that exist to be present within the grand compost of the more-than-human world.
Turning Compost: Exploring Permanence and Fragility Through the Lens of Decaying Techno-Utopianism
Biography:
Yoyo Munk is a scientist and artist currently based in Pittsburgh. A biologist by training, their background spans from insect flight aerodynamics and navigation behavior to the psychophysics of human visual responses to augmented reality displays. In their artistic practice, they explore the affordances of headset-based mixed reality as a medium, creating gallery-scale generative works designed to be explored by large audiences, anchored in efforts to create spaces for staying with the trouble of ongoing mass extinction. This is exemplified in their work Medusa (2021), created in collaboration with architect Sou Fujimoto and produced by the content collective Tin Drum, which takes the form of a generative, evolving architecture without physical form that inhabits real-world architectures and modulates its own behaviour in response to how it is, in turn, inhabited by the collective organism of its audience. They are also the author and project director behind the companion book Medusa, published in 2023 by Hurtwood Press. In other work, they have served as technical director for The Life (2019) and Kagami (2023), both by Tin Drum. Prior to this, they established and led the Quantitative Experience research group for vision science at the augmented reality company Magic Leap. They hold a PhD in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley, and wrote their thesis on the aerodynamics of gliding in wingless canopy ants.