Experience two artists’ perspectives on philosophy, science, and AI

How can artists use technology to deepen our understanding of life, matter, and consciousness? That’s the question two artists sought to answer during the Online Artist Residency with LAS Art Foundation in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.

The residency set out to support artists in exploring digital world building and the simulation of living systems, with the two artists selected for their exceptional technical skill and artistic imagination.

Artists Xin Liu and Eunjo Lee used Google AI tools to create “nom nom” (Xin Liu) and “In Your Eyes, Before My Own” (Eunjo Lee) — two artworks exploring frontier AI research.

“nom nom” by Xin Liu

In “nom nom,” Xin explores how collective intelligence naturally arises when millions of small particles interact. To craft the project, she drew on research into artificial life and emergent computation by Googler researchers Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Alexander Mordvintsev, and the concept of Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) — models where millions of particles form, compete, and dissolve into a living ecology. See for yourself in this video that guides you through the experience.

“I want to explore an image of intelligence distributed across millions of tiny neural networks that react only to their surroundings — not as a singular mind above the world, but as a living ecology of fragments,” Xin says.

Xin Liu, nom nom (2026). Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.

Eunjo’s “techno-alchemy” process bridges ancient philosophy, linguistics, and modern psychology. She sees technology as a medium that reveals the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of our physical and digital existence.

For this project, Eunjo converted hand-drawn sketches into 3D assets using Nano Banana and Veo. She then layered motion-captured choreography onto characters and mapped Korean Hangul phonetics over the 3D environment to create a linguistic system that reflected the landscape’s geometry.

“This commission opened up a vast alchemical laboratory,” Eunjo says. “As the [Buddhist] philosophy of Indra's net posits that all entities reflect one another to form a colossal web, this concept manifests today through the neural network.”

Eunjo Lee, In Your Eyes, Before My Own (2026). Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.