A Conversation with Princeton Arts Fellow Ani Liu
/By Julia Walton '21
Ani Liu is a research-based artist working at the intersection of art and science. Her work examines the reciprocal relationships between science, technology, and their influence on human subjectivity, culture, and identity.
I spoke to Ani about her creative process, her development as an artist, and her experience working with students as an Arts Fellow at Princeton. Throughout the conversation, Ani stressed that interdisciplinary collaboration is central to her innovative projects. However, for Ani, thinking across disciplines is not only useful for artmaking—it is also a social imperative that stirs questions for the scientists, doctors, coders, and policymakers shaping our society. “I think that everyone studying technical fields needs to take classes in sociology and anthropology in order to be de-colonized,” she said. “Also, I think everyone should have some art and literature training. I want to have kinder, more empathetic humans that make policies and the infrastructure of life.”
Read on to learn more about Ani and her work. This transcript for has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve said elsewhere that when beginning a project, you like to start with a question, such as, “What constitutes the human?” or “What is nature, given that humans can bioengineer?” Tell me about how you settle upon an idea for your projects. Once you have a question, how do you go about making a project from that question?
scents distilled from a human, 2016-2018
I think it was Frank Wilczek, the famous physicist, who showed me this quote, “The beautiful answer asks the beautiful question,”* or something like that. I feel like for a lot of creative processes, finding the right question is so much of the work.
I am someone who carries a sketchbook with me everywhere. I keep a robust database of ideas, too. If I’m reading a paper or poetry and something catches my eye, I put it into my database with a question. It could be something simple and didactic, like “How does oxytocin work?” or “Do other animals make oxytocin?” or “How is synthetic oxytocin different than ours?” Or it could be very emotionally based.
Sometimes what I write is not a question or a totally formed thought. There was a period when I was really interested in smells, and those were my least verbal notes and questions. Caroline Jones, who's an amazing art historian at MIT, has this quote that I like, and she says, “Smell is pre-verbal, and has no capacity to pretend.” I like sensory phenomena that hit you before we can rationalize with our prefrontal cortex. The tough part for me is figuring out how I should formulate that question or idea to record in my sketchbook so I can revisit it.
I do jot a lot of things down both verbally and visually, but the questions that I think are most interesting are the questions that you don't even know how to verbalize yet, the things that you just have a feeling about. I do really believe in a holistic full body intelligence. Sometimes I'm like, maybe I can dance this out or smell it or something, because sometimes I get stuck, and I can't just use one part of my brain. I'm a full-bodied animal. I went to architecture school, and one time when I was stuck with my floor plans, my professor made me walk the whole perimeter of my building in a miniature way in the studio. That was such a transformative moment for me. I was like, oh, instead of looking at AutoCAD and this 3D model in my computer, simply by walking it with my body, I felt like I was processing it in a different way.
Eyeris, 2014
I also make a lot of prototypes. I'm someone who likes to really see my design in the flesh. I know a lot of people who make drawings, and then they go straight to production, or people who just look at renderings or 3D models, and that's enough. But for me, I need to feel it in 3D space. I think there's a magic to the materiality of certain things.
Your work intersects with technology, chemistry, algorithms—so many different fields. It seems that you need to learn new skills on the fly in order to learn how to create your projects. Once you have an idea for a project, how do you go about learning what you need to know in order to pursue it?
When I was growing up, the goal was to be very specialized. I remember my parents telling me that if I was the expert in one thing, then I would never go hungry. As I got older, by the time I got to the MIT Media Lab, they were so about synthesizing across multiple disciplines. It wasn't about being an expert anymore. I think life exists somewhere between those spectrums.
I would say that, as an artist, one of the things I do excel at is in connecting disparate ideas from various disciplines. But there's still the technical questions.
“Sometimes the barrier to entry is our own baggage.”
Maybe this is personal, but I was depressed one year, and for some reason, learning how to code really helped me cope with it. I was learning Python at the time. It felt like the world had an order. And in architecture and design, it felt like I would never finish. The questions were so open-ended that I felt like I was overwhelmed by possibility—and not that computer science is not overwhelming with possibility. But in the small way that I was teaching myself how to code, it felt like I was finding order in my chaos. In my bedroom every morning after my run, I would take a shower, clear my mind, and do this one thing that was very different than everything else I was doing at the time. Because it was private and it wasn't being done in an official academic capacity, it allowed me not to be so self-conscious.
In doing that, I realized I had been internalizing so many stereotypes about women, like that maybe I'm not good at coding or math or technology. When I was doing these things in my bedroom out of my own therapeutic process, I thought, actually, I can do this. I started to make small circuits. I mention it because sometimes the barrier to entry is our own baggage. I had been trained in the humanities and the arts, and I felt like I had no business doing anything engineering related. Then suddenly, a door was opening up.
pulse Sensor, 2015
We also live in this crazy time when there's YouTube tutorials about everything. You can learn anything. I was doing that a lot. I was on a lot of online forums and I watched YouTube tutorials. I really liked this website called Adafruit, and Becky Stern had this series called “Wearable Wednesdays” where she talked about circuits that she sewed onto her clothes. Every Wednesday I would log on and read all about the circuits she was making, and I would try to make them myself. I think that really helped me get a foot in.
But I can't claim to be an expert. As I got older and my practice developed more, I started collaborating more. It's all about relationships, but also a relationship with yourself. For me, the best collaborations happened when both parties were quite humble and OK with admitting what they didn't know, and when we were able to have very naïve conversations.
Given that your work is so focused on interdisciplinary connections and collaboration, in the spaces in which you've worked, have you encountered opportunities to diversify thought about what technology and art are or how they can be combined?
I think that the collaborations can be fruitful in both ways. In 2017, I won the Biological Art and Design Award. It’s based in the Netherlands, and I was paired with three radiologists. I was asking such weird questions that it fed back into their own research. I was learning a lot about how MRIs work. I was like, “What happens if you soaked my body with water? Could you image all of my hair if it was wet?” Because the MRI is so loud, I was like, “Can you program it to play a certain song? Could we try to create an image that's synesthetic? What if we set a different parameter for how to image?”
untitled (Corpus Callosum), 2018
I think that they were genuinely really interested in these questions, because for them, it led to other kinds of research questions. On my end, too, I had a lot of data about my body, and I wanted to do certain things that they found technically interesting. I wanted to 3D print my corpus callosum, and it took a lot of work to make that sculpture, because we had to take that data and make it into a 3D-printable solid, which is not something they have to do often. I think those kinds of questions were always generative on their end.
I was also interested in what you can tell from looking at my body. You know, these were radiologists. These were doctors. I asked, looking at every crevice of my organs, can you tell if I'm in love? Can you tell if I'm having a midlife crisis? These are things that I think Google could tell from the way I search or the way I use the Internet. Here's an entity that knows nothing about my material body, but knows about my digital behaviors, and here are some people who know everything about my material body, but not my digital behavior. Where does the seat of me lie? I was very curious about the recreation of self and identity. They also found those conversations interesting, but that is the heart of what I was interested in. It’s kind of like cooking. Once you prepare the kitchen in a certain way, magic happens.
You've been associated with so many different institutions. You went to Dartmouth as an undergraduate, and later you were associated with MIT and Harvard. What do you think is different about Princeton versus other institutions?
Princeton students are very cerebral. I find that the curriculum is very theoretical and slightly less hands-on than some of the other places I've been. It was a goal of mine to introduce lots of hands-on skills.
“It’s kind of like cooking. Once you prepare the kitchen in a certain way, magic happens.”
Princeton students are also incredibly bright, very tenacious, and clever in all kinds of interesting ways. But one of my goals was to create a space in my class where students could be explorative and put their mental health first, because I think there's so much pressure on grades. It takes vulnerability and space and time to create the things that you care about. I also try to break down the power imbalance between professor and student. I've been experimenting with curriculums that allow students to teach themselves and to teach each other horizontally. Honestly, each class is an experiment and is alive. Just like each garden is different, I approach each one differently.
Tell me about some of the projects you worked on with students during your fellowship at Princeton.
I've been working with an amazing group of students: John Ahloy from the Math Department, Ryan Thorpe from Mechanical Engineering, and then very briefly Anoushka Mariwala, an Architecture student. They all brought such different things to the table.
John and I developed a video game that addresses systemic racism. It’s called Shapes and Ladders. When I first started talking to John, he mentioned that he had made a video game in the past. That really caught my eye, because it was the peak of the pandemic, roughly April or May of last year, and as a form of escapism I started to play Animal Crossing. I was thinking a lot about escaping to a different world. Then, of course, the Black Lives Matter protests happened in June, and I started to think that maybe this escape shouldn't be an escape. Maybe it can be more than that.
SHAPes and ladders, 2020-2021: installation view
So I started to design a video game that John helped me build. I did a lot of the research and the design, but he would give me a lot of feedback about video game mechanics. I haven't really played a video game all my life except for Animal Crossing, because I grew up in a strict household, but the conversations between him were so great because he's used to playing cutting edge games, and I was designing something that was meant to have a lot of friction, because life has a lot of friction. I wanted to metaphorically express the tragedy and the difficulty of navigating through life in different kinds of bodies. Sometimes he would say, this attribute of the game makes it unpleasant to play, and then I would push back and say, it's not about having a smooth interface.
For instance, Level 3 explores systemic sexism. After being sexually assaulted, your field of vision narrows, which makes it difficult for you to continue the game. It was something that we talked about a lot. How playable should we make it? He was like, you know, the chances of you finishing the game after your field of vision narrows this much is very slim. But in speaking to my own experiences with PTSD, it feels like that when you're in the middle of it, like it's almost impossible to finish out a day, or certain things will trigger you.
It was such a deep collaboration because these conversations were helpful for me. We had such different backgrounds and perspectives.
SHAPes and ladders, 2020-2021: Level design
With Ryan, we worked on a project called AI Toys. While I was at Princeton, I gave birth to a daughter. She's 18 months now. Among many things, being a mom made me critical of how gendered our objects are. Very well-meaning people keep giving us super pink things.
There's a great artist that I was inspired by. She takes portraits of kids in their rooms surrounded by their own things. She doesn't just put blue things into the room, but in taking these portraits, you see how crazy gendered the colors are. I just love this series.**
So AI Toys is a series that I started to do with Ryan. We scraped toys from Amazon and Target that had been tagged as “girls’ toys.” We took the silhouettes straight from the website and pixel sorted them, so you can see the majority of girls’ toys are pink and the majority of boys’ toys are blue and gray and red. Then we created a machine-learning algorithm, based on the titles and the descriptions of the toys, that invented new titles and toys to try to get at the zeitgeist of what makes the toy “boy” or “girl.”
I think it’s so funny, because it picks up the sassiness of marketing. It holds up a mirror to our society. The girls’ toys are predominantly domestic things. This one is great, because it says, “I Can Change Anything!”—because girls’ empowerment—but then it adds “Kitchen” to it. Lots of llamas, lots of princess castles and tents. And then the boys toys are very weapons-based—lots of Pokémon, robotics. I personally do not know how to work with machine learning the way Ryan does, but it was a directed collaboration where we looked at the data together, and I created the graphics. I feel really grateful for this collaboration.
AI toys, 2020-ongoing
Were the students used to thinking about their technical skills in relation to art or social engagement?
When I was first interviewing them, both John and Ryan had no experience working with artists, and I think that they were both wonderfully open-minded in terms of being game for new explorations. I think certainly both had to learn a lot. For instance, I did send Ryan a bunch of gender theory-related papers. It makes me happy to think that he might someday become an engineer that has had this experience. I hope all our engineers have diverse humanities-based explorations before they go out into the world.
It seems that, recently, there’s been a push to rethink how technical fields are taught. For example, medical schools are becoming interested in students who are humanities majors, the idea being that the person who becomes a doctor has a more nuanced view of the world that they can apply to their practice. Do you think the teaching of technical fields needs to be re-imagined?
I think that everyone studying technical fields needs to take classes in sociology and anthropology in order to be de-colonized. Also, the history of gender relations in science is deeply problematic. So much of obstetrics and gynecology, when it was modernized, was taken over by men who never had birthing experiences. That continues to this day. You can see it in the literature. In texts about sperm and eggs, it should be objective information, but it's very gendered. The language will say, “the heroic journey of the sperm to the egg.” Scientists write papers using language. People with their own biases and cultural contexts are the people conducting science, so it will be gendered or have racial undertones. And I think that's why it's so important for anyone to take classes and have education in these ideas just to get some context and to break down the problematic structures that have already been in place. I see this a lot in science, especially when I read papers about female bodies.
“Consuming art has always made me humbler and able to live more lightly and gently in the world. ”
Computer vision and cutting-edge technology are also super racialized. The datasets that we use to train our machine learning are super biased. In a lot of language models, the AI algorithms are more likely to call a nurse a “she” and a doctor a “he.” Where did we get that from? It's not neutral. This makes it important for students to have diverse training, not just in their technical field. These technologies exist in the fabric of life.
Also, I think everyone should have some art and literature training because I just want to have kinder, more empathetic humans that make policies and the infrastructure of life. And for me, consuming art has always made me humbler and able to live more lightly and gently in the world.
You mentioned that your parents steered you toward STEM, but your undergraduate degree was in Fine Arts. What was the moment or time period when you realized that you wanted to combine science and art?
To give you some context, I grew up in New York City in Chinatown to first-generation immigrants. The idea of becoming an artist was totally foreign to me. My mother cleaned hotel rooms. My dad worked in a kitchen. The idea of art was very classist and bourgeois. They grew up in the Cultural Revolution, and for them, it was deeply problematic that anyone would want to be an artist.
I don't know why this happened, but for one reason or another, I always did want to be an artist. When I went to Dartmouth, I thought that architecture would be a good fit for me, because then I could be creative, and it would be practical. And architecture happened to be in the visual arts department. I'm glad that it was in that department, because I could take a lot of arts classes while not angering my parents.
the empathy machine, 2013-2014
When was finishing up my architecture degree, as I mentioned, I was starting to teach myself how to code in my room. I guess it was a magical year. It was 2013, and Oculus Rift had just come out, so I had tried augmented reality for the first time at the library. We could rent out Google Glass and I rented it out. I took the bus and everyone gawked at me. I realized these technologies deeply impact how we experience spaces. So I wrote my thesis on the impact of wearable technologies on the perception of space and on socializing.
Also, Tinder had just come out, and people were like, is Tinder going to replace the bar or the club? That period was all about the social upheaval of tech, and I think that was the turning moment for me. I started to read a lot more media theory for the first time. I was reading Marshall McLuhan for the first time, and I was reading Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology. As a person who was trained in architecture, I started to become critical of the tools that I used to make architecture. I realized that a lot of buildings look similar because we're all using the same tools to make the buildings, and I started to realize that it becomes even more apparent when we look at iPhones and our tech. We're all trained to swipe in a certain way. I started to look at the way these media were shaping us. And I think that was a turning moment for me. I realized I was equipped with the skills to make art about this.
But it was scary for sure. When I graduated, instead of going into an architecture firm and getting licensed, instead, I went into teaching. I was lucky enough to start a small research group at Harvard and do research, and it went from there.
You mentioned a couple of thinkers that you were reading at that time. What are your biggest inspirations?
Let’s see. Karen Barad, a philosopher who talks a lot about physics and materiality. I read a lot in terms of things that influence my work directly, like epistemology, and history of science, and science philosophy. For a while, I was really interested in physics in terms of the metaphors for understanding the world. It really blew my mind when I learned about quantum entanglement. For me, as an artist, it makes so much sense, because I’m able to hold opposite things in my head at the same time. Opposite things can be true at the same time. Multiple ways of being can exist at the same time. For me, that’s a mode of thinking that leads to more empathy and kindness. It's interesting for me to learn about it in a technical way.
“Opposite things can be true at the same time. Multiple ways of being can exist at the same time.”
Microbiology has also influenced me a lot. Now I think of myself not as one organism, but lots of organisms. How can you not be ecologically minded when you realize you are part of so many species? If these species die, I die. I think it obliterates the ego a little bit. I was brought up by Chinese parents, but I internalized very Western ideals. It's lots of, “I, I, I,” but now I think it's, “we, we, we.”
I’m influenced by lots of feminist theories. I think Donna Haraway is great. She writes so well in terms of kinship with not just each other but other species.
You also mentioned that you became a mother during the pandemic. Has that affected your relationship to your art making?
I was hesitant about becoming a mother for a long time for the same reasons that lots of women are. Birth rates in the US are declining because it's hard to have a career and be a mother at the same time. There was part of me that felt there was an unfair burden on women to be the carriers. I have a very supportive family, and I feel lucky. My partner is super supportive. But at the end of the day, it's me who's pregnant for 40-plus weeks, and it's me that's lactating and nursing and recovering and taking maternity leave if it's available. In my 20s, I couldn't imagine it.
It's funny, probably because of all the hormones and chemicals that were coursing through my body, but a flip switched for me and suddenly I really wanted this. Then I had to negotiate with my body, with the medical system, with politics. It was scary. But it's changed my work for the better, because now, I'm a lot more aware of policy in a way that I wasn't before. You become entangled with social welfare programs, because your kid has to have healthcare, has to go to school. Now I am a lot more aware of who my City Council people are and what their views on education are.
Consumerist Pregnancy Reports(TM), 2019
Childcare is also such an enormous invisible labor that lots of people perform. I think these are all things that fold back into my work. When I was pregnant the first time, I was really interested in the science of it. Like all the biochemical things and the biopolitical things that were happening to me.
There's a lot of things to explore, and to tell you the truth, I'm still processing. I think that sometimes, your work tells you things that you don't know about yourself when you look at it. I haven't had enough time and distance yet to look back on it and tell you coherently what it is about. I’m still in the middle of it.
Speaking of bureaucracies and structures, your work must be so entangled with grants and fellowships, too. What is your strategy for navigating the business side of being an artist?
Especially in the beginning, I was very regimented about spending almost two full days a week just writing grants and finding grants to write. I think it helps to have a network you trust to review how you write, because sometimes you have to package your work in a certain way to be fundable. That was a learning process.
“You have to apply for things all the time and then lose all the time, and it’s OK. You should not devalue your work or yourself.”
Now, I have to block out a few days a week just for artmaking, because there are so many administrative things I do now. I block out roughly one day a week for grant writing.
To this day I lose tons of things. I think you have to become really thick-skinned. You have to apply for things all the time and then lose all the time, and it's OK. You should not devalue your work or yourself. It requires lot of luck and tenacity.
I try to use grant writing as generative tool for my practice, too. It's a good practice to be able to verbalize your work. And I do try to use it as an opportunity to formulate new work. It’s a time where I take out my Post-It notes and try to consolidate them into a potentially fundable project.
Honestly, I'm not going to lie. It's a grind. You're always trying to get the work funded and made, but I feel grateful for being able to do what I do, because I've worked so many manual labor jobs in my life. Everyone has bad days, but I try to remind myself that I’m living the dream.
What advice would you give to someone who hopes to pursue a creative career, whether that intersects with science or otherwise? What advice would you give to someone who has ambitious ideas but doesn't know how to execute them, technically or otherwise?
The barrier to entry thing was big for so much of my life. Especially with biology or chemistry, it feels like you need a very expensive laboratory. But there's a lot of DIY biology these days. There's a lot of citizen science: again, YouTube and blogs, low-tech ways to do high-tech things. I think that's very accessible. I would say, don't let the scariness of something that seems foreign to you put you off.
Hopefully the classes I teach allow people to feel like art and science can exist together. I was talking to Christina Agapakis, who's an amazing biologist and artist. She was saying that when she was an undergrad, she wanted to do this art-science thing, but there was no space for her to do it. Of course, eventually she did, and it's amazing. But hopefully classes like mine give people a space to feel like this is something that's worth something and can be pursued.
Botany of Desire, 2016
I think all creative practices require a lot of tenacity, because it's not like the world opens up cushy funding for you. I think it's important to believe in the work that you make, despite the lack of validation that you might have in the beginning. That’s something I try to remind myself. You don't need someone to give you a stamp of approval to make the things that you want to make. You see time and time again in art history that certain amazing artists were totally scorned in their time.
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this book about creativity a while ago. She talked about how for the longest time, she was a bartender, and she did odd jobs, because she didn't want her art to have the burden of paying for her livelihood. She separated it. That's something I believe in, too. I don't make the most commercial work. I don’t make paintings that you could hang in your house and buy at a gallery. Some of them smell bad, some of them smell great to me, some of them are totally ephemeral, and some of them are living and they die.
There's a lot of pressure to make a living and to have healthcare. For me, taking care of that in a different way, like via teaching, and then protecting my art practice as something that doesn't have to perform financially, helped me. It's very different for different people, but I don't think I could have made some of these projects if I was in the back of my mind thinking, “How will I sell the maximum quantity of this work?”