Jury Captain for Core77 Design Concept Awards

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I am pleased to announce that I am serving as the Jury Captain in for the Core77 Design Concept Awards this year.   

The design concept category includes all conceptual or proposal designs, whether self-initiated or created for a client or educational institution, which have been fully developed, but not yet brought to market or made available for pre-order. Due to the conceptual nature of the category, effective writing and visuals are critical, and entries should be fully described and illustrated to clarify the intent as much as possible.

I deeply encourage everyone to apply!  http://designawards.core77.com/

Teaching Workshop "Between Matter, Time, & Energy" at Syracuse University

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Workshop Objectives:

Students will take a form they have developed in the studio and transform it into a living object.  Often forms are conceived and created in the vacuum of software and deployed through the precise mechanical arms of machining.  The world that these designs are deployed into are never so simple- the living, entropic forces that disobediently mold, stain, and contaminate are inherent in the fabric of any site.   Layering growth, decay, (and thereby time) into the formal dimension, we will investigate the operation of co-creation within different processes.  This exercise will be a launching point into taking into account a building as a temporal, living entity.

Febrauary 2018

Rhapsody in Zero G: Reimagining research for life in space

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I had the pleasure of participating in the inaugural Zero Gravity flight of the Space Initiative at MIT Media Lab.  My research was a speculative design object for the emotional strains of future space travel.  You can read the full article here: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/rhapsody-in-zero-g/

"The projects aboard the flight all represent potentially groundbreaking research; they’ll go on to become peer-reviewed research, models for further iterations, and/or design challenges for others to explore. But the meta goal of this flight speaks to something beyond specific projects and results: it speaks to the broader implications of humanity’s efforts in and around space... Ani Liu created Smells for Space, a project playing with how scent might help spacefarers stay connected to places and people on Earth."

Featured in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine

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https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/perception-extension

https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/perception-extension

"She blends art with science, technology and politics to explore what it means to be human in an increasingly virtual world. “I bring very disparate ideas together to reveal aspects about how technology frames our reality,” says Liu"

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Laboratory of Longings: Solo Show at Boston Society of Arts

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Discover the unexpected with Ani Liu, an artist working at the intersection of science and art who uses playful experimentation, intuition and speculative biology to explore being fully human in a technologically-mediated world. Featuring a selectio…

Discover the unexpected with Ani Liu, an artist working at the intersection of science and art who uses playful experimentation, intuition and speculative biology to explore being fully human in a technologically-mediated world. Featuring a selection of projects from Liu's time at the MIT Media Lab, curated by Ethan Vogt, this immersive exhibition and performance art event fuses scientific experimentation with sensory expression.

Hacking Manufacturing: research on the factory floor

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I spent a month in factories in China on a research grant called Hacking Manufacturing from MIT Media Lab.  You can read about my experience here: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/hacking-manufacturing-research-on-the-factory-floor/

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In August 2017, a group of Media Lab students went to Shenzhen, where they spend a month there in two factories. This is a documentary about what they experienced, made and learned.

Article on PC Magazine now Live

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"In a world full of new science and technology, it's increasingly difficult for society to contemplate what it's doing to itself before it's already doing it. This trend will only accelerate, though, so today's artists should consider it their duty to utilize STEM in their work."

https://www.pcmag.com/article/354453/this-artist-used-tech-to-control-sperm-with-her-mind

https://www.pcmag.com/article/354453/this-artist-used-tech-to-control-sperm-with-her-mind

Keynote Speaker at Campus Party Brasilia

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I will be giving a talk about my work as a keynote speaker in Brasilia, Brazil June 16th!  Come visit and say hi if you are in the area!  

Update: Images from the Talk!

I must admit this is the biggest selfie line that has ever assembled for me after a talk.  Thank you for all the warmth and energy Brasilia!

I must admit this is the biggest selfie line that has ever assembled for me after a talk.  Thank you for all the warmth and energy Brasilia!

1st Place for Schnitzer Art Prize in the Visual Arts

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From Arts at MIT:

"The Schnitzer Prize was established in 1996 through an endowment from Harold and Arlene Schnitzer of Portland, Oregon. Harold Schnitzer, a real estate investor, graduated from MIT in 1944 with a degree in metallurgy. The prizes—a first prize of $5000, second prize of $3000, third prize of $2000 and honorable mentions of $1000—are awarded to undergraduate and graduate students for excellence in a body of artistic work. This year’s recipients represent the diverse academic backgrounds of contemporary artists, as well as the distinctive creative culture of MIT, where science, technology and art inform each other.

An exhibition of selected works by the Schnitzer Prize winners—Ani Liu, Angel Chen, Jessica Rinland, Anne Graziano and Edwina Portocarrero—will be on view in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, opening June 2, 2017.

Ani Liu

Ani Liu, the first-prize winner, is an interdisciplinary artist and graduate student in the Media Lab in the Design Fiction group. In her research-based art, she explores the cultural implications of emerging technologies. Her work includes architectural installations, wearable prosthetics, augmented reality and synthetic biology.   

Her evocative biological design objects include: “Kisses from the Future,” a petri dish of micro-organisms cultured from a kiss; “Forget Me Not,” a plant that is engineered to emit a person’s odor, reversing the perfumer’s art of applying floral fragrances to people; and “The Botany of Desire: Experiments in Interspecies Interfaces,” which tests the limits of interspecies empathy. Ani’s expansive portfolio also includes digital and analog works that investigate everything from networked reality to falling in love.  

For her thesis work, she controls the movement of sperm with her mind. She describes the work as a “biopolitical feminist art piece” and says it allows her both “to push the limits of what I was able to accomplish technologically, in terms of the engineering” and “to question who gets control over bodily rights, and what kind of metaphorical acts can empower and make us question the status quo.”