Self Emergent (2025) is an interactive digital art installation by Emily Xie featuring a live vision-AI system that captures a viewer's silhouette in real time. The viewer's body acts as both paintbrush and canvas: gestures are fed through an algorithm that transforms the figure into a constantly shifting pattern projected back onto the screen.

The work reflects Xie's fascination with shape, collage, pattern, and the human form, exploring what happens when a single silhouette is repeated and restyled—asking the viewer to encounter their own body as something familiar made strange, an effect heightened by figures that lag behind in time. Built during a residency at the Toledo Museum of Art, the piece runs on a live-render framework the artist developed herself using JavaScript and shaders, with TensorFlow to extract the silhouette from the camera feed.

Art Blocks Collection: Curated

Heritage Art Blocks Collection: Curated series 6

Memories of Qilin is inspired by traditional East Asian art. It channels the sense of movement and fluidity found in classical Chinese brushwork, while drawing from the colors, patterns, and forms of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The series explores elements of folklore, evoking the mythological imagery of dragons, phoenixes, flowers, and mountains. The title references a fabled chimerical beast found throughout East Asian mythology (while the qilin is its Chinese name, it is also known in Korea as the girin and Japan as the kirin) that represents prosperity and luck. Viewers are invited to interpret elusive forms that verge on representation. As with the stories passed on through generations, each piece is imagined, organic, and ever-in-flux.

Off Script is a generative system that explores sensoriality through the subject of collage, using visual language that references various 20th-century modern art movements that similarly emphasized medium and material through distilled expressions of shape, color, and composition. At its core, the series uses a custom masking algorithm to cut out shapes from algorithmically produced papers, which are then arranged throughout the canvas.

Much like the practice of collage itself, Off Script elicits a deeply sensorial experience. Generative textures induce a sense of tactility, while askew jagged shapes evoke the punctuated off-beat sounds of jazz. With its synesthetic qualities, the series challenges its own medium, creating a dialogue between the immateriality of digital representation and the corporality of the physical realm.