Animagine

Animagine is a speculative video installation that stages two fictional commercials for an imagined biotech company in the year 2036. The company, also named Animagine, advertises a future where animals are transformed into animal–cyborg hybrids, promoted as companions, helpers, and emotional supports.

The commercials adopt the glossy, persuasive tone of corporate advertising: one presents the “Anima” device that enhances an animal’s mental capacity, sensitivity, and empathy, even offering digital consciousness that can be uploaded to the cloud; another pushes the vision further, showing cyborg mosquitoes engineered to inject medicine, birds enhanced to sing or speak through AI, and cats designed to read human emotions and provide tailored care. Each hybrid comes with a self-sustaining ecological unit, recycling waste into food and energy.

While the ads promise stronger bonds between humans and animals, the project deliberately unsettles: it asks what is lost when animal agency and autonomy are reprogrammed, when identity and memory become transferable data, and when life itself is recast as a customizable service.

Created in 2023 by Leah Bian, Animagine was first exhibited at NYU Shanghai as a capstone project, and later showcased at the 2024 HarvardXR conference. Built with 3D modeling, animation, and AI-based audio tools, the work uses a speculative corporate fiction to provoke reflection on technology, ethics, and our shared future with nonhuman life.