How It’s Made: Benthos the Synthetic Suns by Kelly Xi | School of the Art Institute of Chicago

One of the featured neon works in *Benthos of the Synthetic Suns* by Kelly Xi. Photo by Eugene Tang

One of the featured neon works in *Benthos of the Synthetic Suns* by Kelly Xi. Photo by Eugene Tang

by Amari Keller

Kelly Xi (MFA 2023) uses light and glass to cultivate community with life-supporting microorganisms, creating habitats for bacteria, fungi, and algae within her neon sculptures.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago student and digital practitioner Kelly Xi describes her work as “an embodied turn from the screen.” Xi’s hometown of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, is the world’s largest rare earth metal supplier and the power behind a mass of illuminated screens, electric engines, and plenty of other technologies. By using blown-glass tubes emitting neon and UV light to support decomposers, the artist provides a space for reevaluation. Here, light as a medium encourages photosynthesis, which illuminates the contrast between the life-sustaining properties of light to the bleak nature of LED-lit screens.

With a moth-like attraction to the colorful sculptures crafted by Xi—similar to our gravitation toward digital devices—we’re invited to examine the life, as opposed to ecological grief, that thrives with technology as a tool. Through observation and curiosity, Xi’s practice inspires conversation about our use of digital media. Xi looped us into the discussion by breaking down her process and intention. This is how Benthos of the Synthetic Suns was made.

A close-up of the neon wires and tubes used to make the piece. Image courtesy of Kelly Xi

What was the inspiration behind this piece?

Cycles of renewal enabled by decomposition were my guiding principle. I seek to open up underworlds of livability, and my research engages intimately with the emissive materiality of digitization to ask which ways art can metabolize the screen. Through embodied storytelling, I aim to advocate for direct alliances with the organisms that support our ability to live.

In my neon practice working with light as a tactile medium, I electrify glass light sculptures by filling recycled scrap glass with noble gas. Under current, the sculptures ionize the gas atoms and emit light. I harness the ultraviolet wavelengths to encourage the activity of microorganisms such as diatom algae and cyanobacteria metabolizing in waterways and soil.

From the beginning, human societies have innovated interspecies collaborations: fermentation, agroforestry, habitat stewardship, rewilding, and waste revalorization. As lifelong artistic researchers working in step with our desire for liberated futures divergent from capitalism, we must glean tactics to enrich life beyond the human. I will always believe humans can choose to act as a keystone species and not as an individualist species.

Some of the fungi growing in the neon tubes in the *Benthos of the Synthetic Suns* exhibit.

Some of the fungi growing in the neon tubes in the *Benthos of the Synthetic Suns* exhibit.

Can you walk us through the development of this project?

For the last two years, I have been collecting food waste, which I lacto-ferment for storage and feed to compost microorganisms and invertebrates which grow in 3D-printed fiber-ceramic habitats. The porous structure regulates moisture and air exchange, ensuring an aerobic environment optimal for decomposers.

I wanted to learn the life-supporting potential of luminosity through neon. The widespread and dependent use of screens to the demise of landscapes and landfills demanded a counter-pathway. My practice became that reconciliation.

I noticed that argon and krypton under a current could output some wavelengths in the ultraviolet range in addition to visible colors—useful for photosynthesis. The glass tubes we blow and seal are equally good as a vessel for liquid substrate in which to culture freshwater algae or lactic acid bacteria to inoculate soil. My thesis mimics the saturation of screens and online-ness, while repurposing lucent wavelengths to grow moss and algae. The installation becomes a biomorphic swim through a screen-error teleplay scored with the sounds of pollinators, wind, killdeer, and marsh frogs. It’s ultimately an eco-futurist metaphor for social and geopolitical dimensions of technology use.

“From the beginning, human societies have innovated interspecies collaborations: fermentation, agroforestry, habitat stewardship, rewilding, and waste revalorization.”

What is your relationship to curiosity during your creative process?

A foundation in research practice shaped my artistic methodology and curiosity. Humanities writings offer crucial context and social grounding to understand the implications for how emerging technologies are deployed.

The seasonality of Great Lakes Plains ecosystems has brought me no end in wonder at the rich biodiversity adapted to cycles of renewal. While habitats are dormant over winter, I can find regrounding in a new book—the latest for me being James Bridle’s Ways of Being, which is about what AI can learn from planetary intelligence.

Several neon sculptures, earthen sculptures, and words on a wall.

The full, zoomed-out installation of Benthos of the Synthetic Suns by Kelly Xi. Photo by Eugene Tang

How do you hope your community engages with this piece?

I hope the extended community that visits the work is tickled to seek more-than-human collaborators in ways that enrich their own lives. I hope to provide takeaway resources for mutual continued discovery. I hope together we can reconsider food systems and technological relationships with deepened political consciousness. ■