Backslash Artist 2024
Xin Liu (1991, b. Xinjiang) is a multidisciplinary artist and engineer, who creates sculptures, digital experiences, and films that feature machinery, genetic material, petroleum, and rocket debris, to explore the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations, and cosmic metabolism.
Artwork in Progress
Xin Liu is developing an installation featuring a dissolving city inside a bioreactor, where plastic-degrading enzymes break down synthetic materials in real-time. This concept is inspired by Geoff Manaugh’s essay Fables of the Permanent and Insatiable.
Liu encountered Geoff's essay while creating a modular bioreactor for a plastic degradation payload MicroPET 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, developed in collaboration with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Weill Cornell Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Seed Health. Liu plans to scale this into a series of installations based on the New York City landscape. These will be developed using enzymes licensed by the NREL, and Liu aims to collaborate with Cornell Tech’s Prof. Thijs Roumen to integrate generative design and digital fabrication methods. The platform approach may also contribute to synthetic biology research.