Kuai Shen is an ant lover. In cooperation with ants, he creates audiovisual installations and performances which explore the concept of invertebrate aesthetics. Under the rubric of tactical ant media he forges a transdisciplinary research that amplifies multispecies relationships and generates dynamic techno-ecologies, problematising the entanglement between nonhuman subjectivity and scientific objectivity.
He has published his research about ant stridulation in Biologically-Inspired Computing for the Arts from the University of Colorado, in the Leonardo MIT Journal for the Siggraph, as well as in the Acoustic Space Journal published in the context of the 5th Renew Media Art Histories conference. His antworks appear in William Myers' book entitled, Bio Art: Altered Realities, and he has recently published an article on transversality as an artistic process to amplify invertebrate aesthetics for the 27th issue of the Journal of Society and Animals.
In 2016 he won the Bridge Art and Science Stipend from the Intermedia Department at Michigan State University (USA) for his work with the antibiotic microbiome of leaf-cutter ants. In 2014 he obtained the Cynetart Förderpreis der Sächsischen Kunstministerin (Germany) for Playing with ants & other insects. In 2013 he was awarded with the Edith- Russ-Haus Medienkunstpreis (Germany) and received a honorary mention from the Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) for 0h!m1gas: biomimetic stridulation environment. He is currently working on his practice-based PhD under mentorship of Dr. Eben Kirksey in Deakin University, Australia.
