Orbiting Empathy: Speculative Encounters with Technological Others. A talk with Sougwen Chung and Xin Liu, moderated by Noam Segal.

In our continuing series, The Algorithmic State, the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York is pleased to present an online conversation between the world-renowned artists Xin Liu and Sougwen Chung, who will explore the charged terrain where technology becomes other, collaborator, and narrator. The conversation is organized and moderated by Noam Segal, the LG Electronics Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 

Liu’s practice—situated at the intersection of art, engineering, and cosmic perspective—attunes audiences to the often-unacknowledged agencies embedded within technological systems, reframing decommissioned satellites drifting through orbit as diasporic entities whose transmissions trace questions of belonging, detachment, and homecoming beyond Earth’s boundaries. Through her recent works, she collapses distance and identity, reimagining space not as a distant frontier but as an intimate, affective geography shaped by memory, labor, and loss.

Chung’s work binds machine and self through embodied co-creation, where robotic drawing systems operate as agents that mirror, extend, and unsettle human gesture. Their long-term collaborations with robotics and neural networks challenge assumptions of authorship and control, speculating on relationships in which machines do not merely execute commands but participate in processes of learning, responsiveness, and care. Through iterative feedback between body and algorithm, Chung asks what it means to cultivate machinic empathy as a shared, evolving practice.

Together, Liu and Chung articulate a speculative narrative of co-becoming—one that shifts technological otherness from something alien and external into an embodied interlocutor. Guided by Segal, the conversation asks: Can machines reshape how we experience intimacy and distance? Can technological robotic systems carry affect, memory, or desire? In tracing these questions, the artists propose that meaning emerges not through mastery of technology, but through reciprocity, vulnerability, and imaginative alignment across human and machinic worlds.

Xin Liu is a London-based artist and engineer whose work examines the entropic afterlives of technological ambition—from satellites and rockets to biotech and code—through a research practice she terms “Cosmic Metabolism.” She has exhibited internationally and holds research and curatorial roles across art, science, and space institutions.

Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher recognized as a pioneer of human–machine collaboration. Working across drawing, installation, performance, and robotics, their practice explores co-creation between human gesture and intelligent systems. Chung’s “Drawing Operations Unit” series is internationally exhibited, with work held by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. 

RSVP here.