Conrad Cheung

Conrad Cheung is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media at the University of Florida, where they are also Affiliate Faculty in Sustainability Studies. They were previously Head of Sculpture at the University of Virginia. In collaboration with civic agencies, designers, scientists, and local communities, they develop counter-systems — civic assemblies, nonhuman architectures, spatial protocols, parafictional organizations and actors — for collective improvisation, multispecies cohabitation, and other forms of participation existing orders cannot accommodate.

Ongoing projects include One Million Counterextinctions — a multi-year civic collaboration with Alachua County government developing emergency systems for nonhuman species facing climate collapse — and a public work with the Hippodrome Theatre that converts its neoclassical facade in the center of downtown Gainesville into thermochromic surfaces that reveal and conceal children’s drawings with the movement of sunlight, accompanied by musical performance. Cheung’s work often operates through collaborative platforms, including the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III) and the art collective nonhumanities.

Their first book, Making Unseizable, on the design of collective forms that can resist institutional capture under hostile governance, is forthcoming from MIT Press. Their writing has also been published by Asia Art Archive (“Libidinal Loop, Rotten Image: A Theory of Brainrot,” 2025), where they are co-editor, with Paul Fermin, of a forthcoming series, and further essays are forthcoming in Social Text and in Broadcast at Pioneer Works.