Xin Liu

2025. Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, Aluminum, Acrylic, Stirring and heating system, Aquarium

2025. Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, Aluminum, Acrylic, Stirring and heating system, Aquarium.

The Permanent and Insatiable: The American Flag, 

2025. Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, TLC tank, incubator.

 is an installation series that explores the almost mythic tension in material sciences: Humans continuously create indestructible permanence (like plastic) while engineering bio-organisms to consume exactly those materials.

Each installation in the series constructs miniature cityscapes modeled after urban architecture from post-consumer PET plastic, which is commonly used in bottles and packaging. These structures are submerged in transparent bioreactors, where genetically modified and lab-produced enzymes gradually dissolve the installation. The first work in the series, commissioned by Moody Centre for the Arts, recreates downtown Houston and Rice University’s campus. The second iteration of the series is a faithful replica of Lower Manhattan financial district's architectural landscape. Inside each bioreactor, I imagine a world where metropolitan cities with an excess of manmade materials are confronted by the appetites of natural microbes.

Compressing a degradation process that typically spans centuries into weeks or months, the miniature world is redefined as an environment in relation to humans and our interactions with it: our uncanny desire for immortality and fear of permanence. Aren’t we the most insatiable ones?

In 2018, I initiated and led the research project MicroPET: developing a modular bioreactor for a plastic degradation payload at the International Space Station (ISS). It is an autonomous payload for enzymatic reactions and microbial cultivation with fully programmable serial passaging and sample preservation. The team successfully conducted the payload experiment in the International Space Station in December 2022. The project is recognized as one of The Best Inventions of 2023 in TIME magazine and has been accepted into Nature Partner Journal Microgravity. The research work seeded the conceptual and technical development of The Permanent and Insatiable.


Behind the Scenes

The Permanent and Insatiable - Xin Liu - Backslash 2025

The Permanent and Insatiable

Backslash at Cornell Tech funds artists whose practices are nonlinear, unconventional, unexpected, adventurous, intense, surprising, questionable, and primed for engagement with new technologies – all symptoms of being backslash.

Miao Ying

Behind The Scenes

The project is inspired by AI neural network machine learning, medieval christian indulgences mechanisms, conflicting political ideologies, popular online Chinese S&M romance novels, and the recently emerged “social credit system” in China.

Pilgrimage into Walden Twelve - Miao Ying - Backslash 2021

Pilgrimage into Walden Twelve

Matthew Weinstein

I began my Backslash process by asking a question, “what is anti interactivity, or what is the negative space around interactivity?”

The Living End - Matthew Weinstein - Backslash 2017

The Living End

Kate Gilmore

They Call Us a Storm is a performance made for the Museum of the City of New York, in which 4 female performers carry out certain actions that cause a storm to brew.

They Call us a Storm - Kate Gilmore - Backslash 2018

They Call us a Storm

Jen Liu

What happens if you are liquidated – financially, socially, politically, subject to climate-induced flooding? Under what conditions is it possible to survive?

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea - Jen Liu - Backslash 2024

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea

Devin Kenny

Inspired by a Biblical Hebrew phrase found in the Genesis creation narrative that
describes the condition of the earth immediately before the creation of light, often
interpreted as “without form, and void”, Tohuwabohu is a nonlinear universal media control app for live performances developed in React.js and Electron. 

Tohuwabohu - Devin Kenny - Backslash 2020

Tohuwabohu

The music in Aphasia is a mix of Christian Rock and romantic R&B, to worship ideologies instead of the spiritual. 

Aphasia - Miao Ying - Backslash 2021

Aphasia

Mika Tajima

In New Humans, emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the surface of a black ferrofluid pool.