Tianyi Sun explores the re-creation of embodied experience and its inevitable failure. Through sculpture, painting, time-based media, poetry, and software, she composes responsive environments where materials perform authenticity while quietly betraying it, examining how memory, time, and knowledge are preserved, fabricated, or rendered incomplete within systems shaped by technology, culture, and value.


Drawing from absence and states of diaspora, Sun traces the digital systems, archival structures, and cultural traditions that form concurrent networks of power: frameworks that not only extract and control but also aestheticize, console, or restore. Material copies and reconstructions merge with digital archives and performances to construct a parameter of questions: What are the boundaries between data, narrative, document, and history? How is value constructed when authenticity is performed? And how does the body endure, oscillating between simulation and sensation, absence and memory, deterioration and repair? Failure, in this context, is not reduced to loss but emerges as a structure to re-enter history from the side: simulated, precarious, yet still longed for.

Tianyi Sun - Backslash Artist 2025

Tianyi Sun 

Niko Koppel is a visual journalist and multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, and emerging technologies. Koppel’s recent practice centers on using 3D capture tools to digitally preserve overlooked cultural heritage and endangered histories—documenting artifacts and environments before they disappear, so they may be valued in the present and experienced by future generations.

With over a decade as a journalist at the New York Times, Koppel brings investigative rigor into more conceptual frameworks. His projects often take the form of interactive installations that merge narrative and documentary into experimental, sensory experiences. One such work reconstructed survivors’ encounters with police-involved shootings through leaked NYPD evidence files, transforming raw data into an immersive environment of memory and competing testimony.

Blending art, journalism, and technology, Koppel aims to preserve hidden stories—from the human consequences of climate change to abuses of power—provoking new ways of witnessing and understanding, both analytically and emotionally.

For Backslash, Koppel plans to create an immersive Mixed Reality (MR) installation that captures an unraveling of America.

Imagine walking the Las Vegas Strip, not as it is today, but as a fossilized, apocalyptic version of itself, akin to the ruins of Pompeii. A plaster statue of David lies toppled and a Waymo rusts amid towering trees draped in fashion knockoffs and discarded Air Jordans.

Through holographic three-dimensional artifacts integrated into a physical environment, viewers will navigate the uncharted consequences of political disarray, climate change, and social unrest, offering a visceral reflection of our turbulent present and uncertain future.

A time capsule of contemporary America and its psyche, each three-dimensional still life included, was created entirely by natural disasters and social forces captured from the scenes of hurricanes, wildfires, protests, and the forgotten corners of our country.

The archive includes dozens of objects including burned cop cars and reclaimed Confederate monuments in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, a Cyber truck vandalized on election day outside Trump Tower, and the scorched remains of McMansions destroyed in the Los Angeles fires.

These surreal and poetic scenes will be woven throughout the experience, inviting viewers to explore, as if on an archeological dig, both the decadence and fragility of our civilization. Each modern day fossil can be inspected and explored in detail at scale, immersively curated into a viewer’s surrounding environment through a wearable MR headset.

Working alongside Cornell faculty and students, Koppel will develop the artwork while exploring interactivity and user experience within the headset. Over the course of the year, the project may even evolve in real time, responding to emergent news events and capturing new artifacts to expand the archive as history unfolds. More than a static collection, it is a living, responsive document shaped by the news cycle and social consciousness. Through this effort, students and faculty will directly engage with the first draft of history, transforming unforeseen events into digital heirlooms.

Niko Koppel - Backslash Artist 2025

Niko Koppel

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a researcher, filmmaker, artist and activist or as he puts it a ‘Private Ear’. Abu Hamdan has over a decade of experience investigating audio and a doctorate from the University of London on the role of sound in legal investigations and political discourse. In 2023 he founded Earshot, the world’s first not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the study of audio for human rights and environmental advocacy. His work has been presented in the form of forensic reports, lectures and live performances, films, publications, and exhibitions all over the world.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan - Backslash Fellow 2024

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

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 - 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

Jen 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

Miao 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

Tianyi Sun

Tianyi Sun

Niko Koppel

Niko Koppel

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

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