statement.
My research engages intimately with the emissive materiality of digitization, to ask in which ways can art metabolize the screen?
Cycles of renewal enabled by decomposition as a guiding principle, I seek to open up underworlds of livability. What vitalities –what will we smell, sense, and taste from institutional litter, that can invigorate us towards collective ways of being? Through microbial fermentations, metabolisms, the photic and olfactory, I provide lures for audiences to seek better relationships with more-than-human agents that support our ability to live.
My practice aims to evolve a mutual understanding, that microbial and organism diversity is key to the health of ecosystems including humans, that landfills are not a life sentence, and soil respiration makes land livable.
But these efforts to implicate people in webs of relation become emptied, if we neglect to confront the massive disparities in class that give rise to the exploitative practices fundamental to capitalism. If the fact that all life is linked is removed, ecological and class struggles can be neatly elided by those who seek to stratify profitable hierarchies. Ecological and class struggles are entwined.
```
Kelly Xi is an artist and researcher who critically leverages the tools of machine learning, game engines, digital ceramics, and neon to embed audiences in material-relational visions for livable futures. Her work engages intimately with the emissive materiality of digitization to cultivate an embodied stake in mutual survival via the gut, "waste", and wavelength.
Her hometown of Baotou, Inner Mongolia–the world’s largest supplier of rare earth metals powering illuminant technologies, mobile devices, and electric engines–is the site of the Baogang Tailings Dam, a radioactive cesspool visible from space, operated by the Bayan Obo mine. In 2021, her biodesign work on the mycelial biopolymer PermaPak won the Barilla Prize for Regenerative Living Ecosystems and was published in Issues of Science and Technology.
Education
MFA Studio, Art & Technology Studies, SAIC, 2023
BS Biology and Visual Art, Union College, Schenectady, NY, 2017
Select Exhibitions
2023
Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria
Lighting the Metaphysical, Chicago, IL
Wastelands, Chicago, IL
SPACORE, Co-Prosperity, Chicago, IL
Benthos of the Synthetic Suns, SAIC Galleries, Chicago, IL
2022
SPACORE, MdW Fair, Chicago, IL
Pan Tilt Zoom, The Wrong Biennale, international & online
2021
Cassiopeia’s Perspective, SAIC Galleries, Chicago, IL
Where We Emerge, Ars Electronica Chicago Garden, Chicago, IL
2020
Reality used to be a friend of mine, Selenas Mountain, Queens, NY
ExFest, NewArt.City, international & online
2019
Moldable, injectable, extrudable, Dinner.tn, Queens, NY
Wash Your Corners, Ross + Kramer, New York, NY (media designer, 3D animated installation for Dominique Fung)
Home Body, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, New York, NY (production designer)
2018
Paradice Palase Anniversary, Brooklyn, NY
Art404 at Google HQ, New York, NY
Publications & Press
Amari Keller, ‘How It’s Made: Benthos of the Synthetic Suns by Kelly Xi’, SAIC News, 2023
Erin DeMuth Judd, ‘Art and Science: A natural match’, Union College Magazine, Art at the Intersections, 2023
Annette LePique, ‘Serenity, NOW’, Chicago Reader, 2023
Joan Roach, ‘MdW Art Fair at Mana Contemporary’, Sixty Inches from Center, 2022
‘Can Fungus Fix Our Plastic Problem?’, Issues in Science and Technology, 2021
‘It’s 2071, Are We Still Human?’, Biodesigned Magazine, Interspecies Issue 08, 2021
Peyton Sauer, ‘Students Create Plastic Packaging Alternative for a Sustainable Future’, SAIC News, 2021
Awards
Barilla Prize for Regenerative Living Ecosystems, Biodesign Challenge, 2021
Together Art Grant, SAIC, 2022
Full Tuition Scholarship, The Alternative Art School and Metabolic Studio, 2023
Dean’s Scholarship & Incentive Scholarship, SAIC
Presidential Scholarship, Union College
Teaching & Leadership
Lecturer, Art and Technology Studies Department and Low-Residency MFA Program, SAIC, 2023-
Exoskeletons for Photic Current: Hot Glass Workshop, Art & Technology Department, SAIC, Fall 2022
Learning and Mending Series facilitator, Metabolic Studio, Spring 2023
Graduate Teaching Assistant:
Brave N3w_B0d1es, Fall 2023
Computer Vision & Machine Learning, Spring 2022
Neon Techniques, Summer 2022
Synthetic Futures Biodesign, Spring 2021
Art and Technology Practices, Fall/Spring 2020, 2021
Contemporary Practices Fall/Spring 2020, 2021
Digital Potters Cooperative, founding member, 2022-present
Chicago Neon Community Cooperative, Development writer, 2022-present
Neon Technician, SAIC Department of Art & Technology, 2022-present
Dinner.TN, artist-run project space co-founder, 2019-2020
ABSTRKT, production designer & media designer, 2019-2020