Artist and computer scientist
Mingde “MT” Zeng
Mingde “MT” Zeng is a Chinese-Canadian artist and computer scientist based in Toronto. Working across photography, computational media, installation, sound, moving image, and writing, he explores how images, technologies, and social situations shape perception, behavior, and meaning. Moving between observation and construction, his projects develop through sequences and systems that allow their underlying tensions to unfold. Drawing on both artistic and computational practice, MT approaches AI as material, collaborator, agent, and cultural condition. He examines how people encounter machines that increasingly see, interpret, respond, and act, and how these encounters reorganize perception, judgment, and agency. Through images, voices, arguments, and interactive systems, his work brings embodied human experience into contact with computational ways of understanding the world.
Artworks
Ariadne
2026 · Interactive game with a live LLM companion
MT enters a maze with four real stars and no exit, guided by an AI whose confidence remains intact as its reliability declines.
Semanticization of Photography
2026 · Published Paper
Photographic images are pre-labeled, embedded, and summarized within platform circulation and multimodal AI pipelines.
Phone Eats First
2025 · Photographs and text
AI Art Is (Not) Art
2025 · Generative multi-agent installation
Are You Sure?
2025 · LED lightbox and polyphonic stereo sound
The Honest Photographer
2024 · Archival pigment print, projection, printed matter, table and sound
The Way We Played
2024 · Archival pigment prints, CRT video and sound
Dream Together
2023 · Archival pigment prints on aluminium composite panels
America: Polarizingly United
2023 · Archival pigment prints on aluminium composite panels
Open-source projects
Python · 3,474 GitHub stars
Extensible framework that revolutionizes the graphical capabilities of Emacs.
Emacs Lisp · 921 GitHub stars
AI Pair Programming in Emacs with Aider.
Emacs Lisp · 730 GitHub stars
Full-featured GNU Emacs configuration distribution.
Python · 475 GitHub stars
Open-source agent harness that turns your AI agent into your personal DNA expert.
Python · 438 GitHub stars
Future of Agentic Development in Emacs.