Self Emergent

Self Emergent is an interactive digital art installation 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.