“Artists are humans, and humans are curious creatures who instinctively solve problems,” says Vietnamese media artist and creative technologist Trung Bảo. “Art is the output of our problem-solving process.”

His projects sound unlikely at first. A gem shaped by a person’s voice. An installation where strangers sing with the sun to make it warm again. What connects them is not the form but the intent behind: generative systems, custom code and thousands of individually wired LEDs, all in service of something a person actually feels.

Taking up beatboxing when he was 12, Trung Bảo soon proved himself to be one of Vietnam’s finest, and then the world’s too. Most beatboxers are solo artists, and so he spent years doing everything himself – shooting, recording, sound editing and more. At the same time, he studied graphic design in college, dabbling in multiple art forms.

This eventually culminated in Trung Bảo’s acquaintance and then collaboration with the Grammy Award–winning beatboxer Harry Yeff. Using early generative technology, their Voice Gems project translated recordings of human voices into 3D crystalline models and has been exhibited at the likes of the V&A Museum in London and the World Economic Forum in Davos. From there, Trung Bảo began creating more stunning exhibitions, now with his own media art studio Fustic.

“My biggest challenge is maintaining my identity and signature as I move between different worlds and disciplines. Each world has its own language, and I try to learn from it with an open mind without losing my own perspective. The most exciting combinations and juxtapositions often emerge from that process of translation,” says Trung Bảo.

Often translating abstract ideas into physical presentations, Trung Bảo spends a lot of time figuring out the three big C’s: concept, context and content. He uses visual platforms such as Pinterest and Are.na to look for relevant references, while also consulting AI assistants for deeper discussions and investigations into potential approaches.

Supported by the EU Delegation in Vietnam, We Are Made of Sun is one of Fustic’s latest projects, and the first one with completely bespoke code. Meant to explore humanity’s connection with nature, it encourages the audience to interact with a dense array of LED lights representing the sun. Tiny but powerful, the firmware controlled 100 LED strands and 3,000 LED points, listened for external input through six sound sensors and generated its own background sounds.

For this project, Trung Bảo relied on Claude for the foundation and interface of the firmware. Using the app on his phone, Trung Bảo can easily relay prompts to the Mac client so he can code on the go. Ask him where the human part of his project ends and the machine’s begins, and Trung Bảo rejects the premise. “There’s no handover point. I always observed and identified the problems that popped up, so that I could figure out the next steps and give further direction to the AI.”

Using AI also helped Trung Bảo with the physical aspects of the project. “We created a digital mock-up with adjustable parameters so we could test the glass and understand how light travel through the material before it was physically produced.” Getting that sort of technical assistance proved to be of immense value: “I got to focus more on the project’s creative and artistic direction, which aligned with my practice of building concepts driven by audience experiences.”

Want to develop a strong concept and execute it to your vision? Borrow a few moves from Trung Bảo’s AI-assisted working process.

Stick to your own vision. When Trung Bảo browses Pinterest and Are.na, he’s careful with the risk of going down the rabbit hole of seeing more of what others have done and straying from the original idea. He advises: “Before looking outward, I try to understand what and why I actually want to express, what feelings and experiences I want to bring to the world. Inspiration becomes much more useful once you filter them through lived experiences.”

Use AI to organise, not originate. “I often found AI-generated ideas to be generic, because they are averages of what was made before. They become more useful once I gave them my own raw material: scattered thoughts, notes, half-formed directions. AI is very good at organizing what I’m already thinking and turning a messy idea into a structure, or showing me that separate thoughts are actually one idea.”

Refine your ideas. “I brief AI the way I would brief a collaborator: the project, the audience, the constraints, my perspective, my conviction, what I’ve tried, what I believe and what I’m unsure about. The more of my own thinking I put in, the more AI can critique something specific instead of floating in the abstract.”

Do not stop with the first answers. “I ask AI to be both critical of me and of itself. Its greatest value is not necessarily in producing faster answers, but in helping me arrive at more difficult questions through a much faster cycle of reflection. And because AI loves to flatter, it can lead you back to your comfort zone. Push it to be critical and ready to argue, right from the start.”

Conversation out of contrasts: “Sometimes, I intentionally pin to my board images that were never meant to be together side by side, to imagine how they can have a conversation with each other. A new direction often appears in that juxtaposition.”

The media art installation CONVERGENCE was created by Fustic Studio as part of the exhibition We Are Made of SUN, presented under the Plug in to Evolution campaign with the support of the Delegation of the European Union to Vietnam.