XI.

My work seeks better relationships with the living world—more-than-human agents that support our ability to live. 

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Light being electromagnetic, I'm interested in the mineral material conditions of the screen, which I investigate through the intimacy of making neon from scrap glass; I aim to communicate an embodied stake through a choreography of breath, motion, and thwarted desire lines of current to attain lucent vividity.—What are ways art can metabolize the screen?

 

To reevaluate what and what land we consider waste hinges on making legible the connection between the colonial foreclosure of mining, encapsulated in the screen, and livable futurity inoculated by decomposer habitats. So, Make soil, a living chimera, out of the runoff of the photic world. 

 

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 empty exercise, if we neglect to confront the massive disparities in class that give rise to the exploitative and extractive practices fundamental to capitalism. What will we socially decide about the existence of a billionaire class positioned to threaten collective survival for their short term gain?

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Kelly Xi is an artist, writer, and designer 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. Her research interests wade the petro-porous condition we share with extrahuman life and culture an embodied stake in mutual survival via the gut, "waste", and wavelength.

 

Kelly Xi is a transplant of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, the world’s largest supplier of rare earth metals powering illuminant technologies, screens, mobile devices, turbines, and electric engines. Her hometown 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.