Why artist and engineer Xin Liu sent her wisdom tooth into outer space

Artist and engineer Xin Liu put herself on the market for her “Residing Distance” mission — actually. The New York- and Beijing-based artist packed up her knowledge tooth and despatched it into outer area in a customized machine constructed from robotics supplies. The tooth launched from Van Horn, Texas, in Might 2019 aboard an early iteration of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. In zero gravity, the machine and the tooth floated round, freely, contained in the rocket.

Wait, what?

It’s all within the identify of artwork. The tooth is a part of the sculptural set up “Artificial Wilderness,” on view at Culver Metropolis’s Honor Fraser Gallery by Dec. 18. The three-artist present, which incorporates L.A.-based Nancy Baker Cahill and New York-based LaJuné McMillian, blends digital media with extra conventional artwork kinds. It toggles between augmented actuality, efficiency, immersive drawings, and video and digital images, amongst different areas. The exhibit occupies a hybrid area, each analog and digital, meant to replicate the “new terrain,” as exhibition curator Jesse Damiani places it, that’s the 2020s — a tumultuous and unsure interval marked by trauma, pronounced bewilderment and speedy change.

Liu — who’s arts curator of the MIT Media Lab Area Exploration Initiative and an advisor to the Artwork + Know-how Lab on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork — used the launch of her tooth as a springboard for different works in “Artificial Wilderness.” There’s additionally a two-channel video documenting the making of her tooth sculpture; a digital {photograph} of the sculpture’s disassembled elements, forming what appears like a scientific cross-section; and a greater than 1,000-page, accordion-style e-book, made from rice paper, that includes Liu’s sequenced X chromosome from her DNA information.

The work explores geographic and phenomenological boundaries — between the self and the opposite, between Earth and outer area — and it asks “what it means to have a part of me leaving, so distant, and the best way to give delivery to a different being?” as Liu explains on this edited dialog.

Why launch your tooth into area — and what’s the bigger “Residing Distance” mission about?

“Residing Distance” is each a private fantasy and a severe area mission. A knowledge tooth is shipped to outer area and again all the way down to Earth once more. Carried by the crystalline robotic sculpture, the tooth turns into a new child entity in outer area.

The fabric and the feel of the tooth appear to be an ideal match to me. It’s primarily a bone (fairly laborious, like ceramic) but in addition visually so fragile. It’s a part of my physique but in addition a separate piece itself.

Did you take away your tooth for the piece otherwise you already had it? And the way did you prepare for its journey into area?

I had it already on the time. I had an impacted tooth and needed to have it pulled out.

I used to be and am nonetheless working with MIT Media Lab Area Exploration Initiative. The initiative has varied mission alternatives that college students and researchers can apply for. I utilized for this suborbital launch alternative to check my spider-mimicking locomotion method — one thing I incorporate into efficiency — in precise outer area. The chance I acquired was for technical innovation, not for my creative imaginative and prescient. I had simply graduated from MIT then, and there was no means a younger artist like me would have had such help for an artwork mission.

How is the piece a continuation of your earlier efficiency work associated to area exploration?

In 2017 I did a efficiency work, “Orbit Weaver,” in a zero-gravity flight in Florida with an organization referred to as zero-G. I used to be performing like a spider lady shifting round and making an attempt to attach with the environment utilizing threads. In that efficiency, I really feel that I used to be in a simulated outer area, and on this one, it was reversed: I created a simulated me, an avatar of myself, and carried out in the actual outer area.

How does the work, conceptually, discover the concept of boundaries, passage and ceremony?

In some ways, the space created geographically or bodily is a metaphor and is mirrored within the emotional and non secular expertise. I believe that the will to depart and the future to return echoes with my private journey. I used to be born in Xinjiang, China, and moved to Beijing once I was 18 and I moved to the U.S. in 2013. Hopefully it speaks to the shared historical past and expertise of many individuals.

The motion of sending a tooth to outer area could be very a lot a ceremony and a efficiency for me. It’s not a fiction, it’s an act that I’m conducting as I’m fascinated with the questions talked about above.

Xin Liu’s “Residing Distance Exploded,” a digital {photograph} of the sculpture’s elements.

(Xin Liu / Make Room L.A.)

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Are you able to inform us about different works within the present?

The images of the sculpture is to point out how its elements are designed, the small print inside. It’s a very elaborate electromechanical system. The e-book is the X chromosome of my DNA. I printed out the entire X chromosome sequence on Japanese rice paper. Then I handmade (folding, reducing, gluing) this accordion e-book of mine. These two works are very a lot related as they each ask the query about what we’re made from and what we are going to grow to be.

DNA is the supply code of all creatures on Earth. However as we set sights on outer area, this natural physique isn’t probably the most appropriate of kinds anymore. Our physique isn’t made for the intense environments on the market. So, as we’re eager for the departure, leaving Earth, aren’t we additionally abandoning ourselves, our physique? Maybe the humanity that lastly leaves Earth isn’t human anymore. How will we really feel about that? Is there a degree the place we will return?