Vivian's project as Artist in Residence was an artist book of her bio machine art series "The Silkworm Project," working closely with Lisa Onaga and the Art Laboratory, Berlin. The project explores the possibilities of using silkworms to design a series of hybrid biomass machines capable of producing self-organized flat and spatial silk structures. In her work Xu is interested in how far the behavior of insects can serve as a foundation for technological design. She develops cybernetic machines based on both biological and computer-controlled logic. The Silkworm Project is the first of a series titled the Insect Trilogy, which is still under development, in which she examines the behavior of ants, bees, and silkworms in order to take this into account in the design of work machines. The piece was shown in an exhibition alongside "The Silkworm Project" series at Art Laboratory Berlin.
Project
(2019)
