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.

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.

Xin Liu - Backslash Artist 2024

Xin Liu

Noah Feehan's working process resembles the scientific method, if you squint at it. But where the scientific method doggedly pursues a universal truth, his works flourish along stranger paths. Moving as needed across disciplines and media, he creates working products that are desirable but unsellable; sculptures that are immanent but largely invisible; and performances that address no audience.


When working in video, Feehan minimizes edits and post-production effects, instead using the form as forensic documentation of carefully-crafted situations, sculptures, or performances - proof the thing happened, and how it was when it did what it did. Addressing the viewer as a colleague, a peer and not a punter, affords him a rich mix of candor, rigor, and humor that he can't access otherwise.


In sculpture and installation, he strikes a careful balance between the thing-in-the-room and the historical, technical, and economic context that brought it there - the goal is to create an experience that rewards deep engagement, developing in the beholder's memory long after they've left the room.

For Backslash, Feehan is exploring the technical and social state-of-the-art in autonomous flight. He will be making video works involving custom telemetry firmware and carefully-crafted "first-person view" drone missions that seduce the viewer, addressing them directly and implicating them in the artmaking process. The main work involves special modifications to the open-source flight control software, facilitating an unhinged, heedless performance mode: a perpetual "swoon routine" in which the devices fully lose control and freefall, recovering at the last possible moment before destruction.

Feehan's working process resembles the scientific method, if you squint at it. But where the scientific method doggedly pursues a universal truth, his works flourish along stranger paths. Moving as needed across disciplines and media, he creates working products that are desirable but unsellable; sculptures that are immanent but largely invisible; and performances that address no audience.

Noah Feehan - Backslash Artist 2024

Noah Feehan

Chando Ao was born in Fengdu, China, a city that was submerged when the Three Gorges Dam was constructed when he was 13. He later moved to Chongqing, China, Sydney, Australia, Boston, and New York. This immigrant experience greatly influenced his perception of the world and his art practice: When language becomes a barrier, seek alternative ways to express; when must leave your hometown, carry it with you always.

Ao's practice navigates between two extremes: his solo endeavors in paintings and a complex, open system, often involving extensive collaborations with the external world through robots, software, unique materials, and everyday goods. This system is designed to engage visitors—inviting them to touch, embrace, climb, and even juggle with the work. These two modes of creation mirror his dual states as an individual: introspectively sensing himself and outwardly conveying a concise, fundamental sensory experience without the aid of language or text.

During the early stages of the pandemic, Ao began researching how autonomous driving might shift people’s perception of physical distance, time, and space. At that time, he collaborated with MOS on a research paper titled “New Living.” The paper explored how physical spaces no longer hold the same gravitational weight they once did. Activities such as working, shopping, and communicating can now happen almost anywhere, at any time. A commute to work, for instance, can happen in seconds rather than minutes or hours. In this context, urbanism exists simultaneously in the “cloud” (without friction) and physically (with friction). Our urban gravity has become a relational force, accelerating and decelerating, diminished within the “cloud.” The project was paused until last year when Ao discovered a technique capable of delivering the frictionless movement he had been envisioning. He decided to move forward with the project, but realized he needed input from someone deeply involved in the research of autonomous driving to help him understand the nuanced shifts in human perception once it becomes widely adopted. This is why he chose to collaborate with Wendy Ju’s team, to gain insight into the more human and perceptual aspects of their research. With this deeper understanding, he aims to create a romantic and subtle animation featuring frictionless movement, which will serve as the foundation for a new installation piece

Chando Ao was born in Fengdu, China, a city that was submerged when the Three Gorges Dam was constructed when he was 13. He later moved to Chongqing, China, Sydney, Australia, Boston, and New York. This immigrant experience greatly influenced his perception of the world and his art practice: When language becomes a barrier, seek alternative ways to express; when must leave your hometown, carry it with you always.

Chando Ao - Backslash Artist 2024

Chando Ao

Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha's work questions and exposes the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the seeming absences that define systems of labor, ecology and relations.

Mimi Ọnụọha's work questions and exposes the contradictory logics of technological progress.

Mimi Ọnụọha - Backslash Fellow 2023

Mimi Ọnụọha

Liu's video, choreographic performance, paintings, and sculpture, starts with research-based fictions. From existing socioeconomic and political conditions, she builds fabricated narratives that speak to and consolidate contested accounts of the past and present. It is important to her to avoid abstractions, and make abstract but vital concepts - such as global economic infrastructure - emotionally available and intimate to the senses. Labor politics combined with histories of East-West colonization, radicalized by environmental catastrophe, is a continuing theme throughout her works.

Liu's video, choreographic performance, paintings, and sculpture, starts with research-based fictions.

Jen Liu - Backslash Artist 2022

Jen Liu

Christie Neptune is interested in the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive urban space. Through the formal praxes of portraiture, moving image, sculpture, and performance, she explores how the body, as material, articulates frameworks of globality, identity, and place. Critically aware of self, she employs varying degrees of subjectivity to shift axes of language and power within representational practice. Utilizing the values and semiotics of black culture, industrial and domestic objects, and the material properties of film, she foregrounds phenomenological blackness, the intricate and wide-ranging dimensions of black life.

Neptune's Blackslash work is currently in progress.

Christie Neptune is interested in the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive urban space.

Christie Neptune - Backslash Artist 2021

Christie Neptune

Devin Kenny uses music, performance, video, writing, fashion design, and almost any other means possible to explore and complicate ideas on contemporary culture. Kenny’s work often exists online, as websites, blogs, video posts, and audio files. Employing the tropes of social media–driven youth culture to reach a base audience, the work is free to convey broad ideas while subversively inserting political and philosophical theory. There is a hyperawareness in Kenny’s work that belies his sincerity in making it, an ironic stance that separates what he makes from the pop culture that it mimics. Kenny uses the Internet as source material and venue, consuming and processing cultural production to reveal it anew to his audience.

Devin Kenny uses music, performance, video, writing, fashion design, and almost any other means possible to explore and complicate ideas on contemporary culture.

Devin Kenny - Backslash Artist 2020

Devin Kenny

Ying's work explores the online worlds and creative interventions of netizens in the ‘Chinternet’ (Chinese Internet) along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and contemporary consciousness created by the intersections of real and virtual life. Miao lives between Shanghai and New York, but she says that in actual fact she resides ‘on the internet and behind the Great Firewall’. She describes her relationship with the tightly controlled Chinese internet as a form of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.

Ying's work explores the online worlds and creative interventions of netizens in the ‘Chinternet’ (Chinese Internet) along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and contemporary consciousness created by the intersections of real and virtual life.

Miao Ying - Backslash Artist 2019

Miao Ying

At the heart of Mika Tajima’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans performance, sculpture, painting, and new media installation is a profound inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy in built and virtual spaces.

Tracing modernist architecture and design from the Industrial Revolution to the sharing economy, Tajima draws on philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea of a social space—by which living things make their appearance to probe the visibility of performance, control, and freedom—to investigate how different digital and aesthetic technologies manifest as sensorial and psychic experiences.

Mika Tajima - Backslash Artist 2018

Mika Tajima

Kate Gilmore is an American artist working in video, sculpture, photography, and performance. Gilmore's work engages with ideas of femininity through her own physicality and critiques of gender and sex.

Backslash Artist Kate Gilmore is an American artist working in video, sculpture, photography, and performance.

Kate Gilmore - Backslash Artist 2017

Kate Gilmore

By addressing enhancements, both internal (the peaks and valleys of our emotional and physical lives), and external (technology, purchased pleasure, and the manipulation of nature), Matthew Weinstein engages in a phenomenological approach to rendering lived experience. In Weinstein’s work, representations of skeletons, sunsets, vintage Halloween masks, animated fish, and lens flares form an aesthetic socio-political cabaret whose elements he assembles and reassembles to evoke the idea that our social, political and natural environment is a medium in which we are embedded, like an idea or emotion in a work of art. Through his use of traditional art media as well as high tech media, such as hyper realistic computer animation, NFT’s and interactivity, Weinstein defines a broad, open, and inclusive aesthetic world. Weinstein brings each medium to the same standard of technical refinement, so each piece stands alone, outside of its original context.

By addressing enhancements, both internal (the peaks and valleys of our emotional and physical lives), and external (technology, purchased pleasure, and the manipulation of nature), Matthew Weinstein engages in a phenomenological approach to rendering lived experience.

Artists

Xin Liu

Xin Liu

Noah Feehan

Noah Feehan

Chando Ao

Chando Ao

Mimi Ọnụọha

Mimi Ọnụọha

Jen Liu

Jen Liu

Christie Neptune

Christie Neptune

Devin Kenny

Devin Kenny

Miao Ying

Miao Ying

Mika Tajima

Mika Tajima

Kate Gilmore

Kate Gilmore

Matthew Weinstein

Matthew Weinstein