LAS Art Foundation, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, commissioned two new artworks following a six-month online artist residency: In Your Eyes, Before My Own by Eunjo Lee and nom nom by Xin Liu .

The residency set out to support artists in exploring digital world building and the simulation of living systems. It gave the artists specialised access to AI tools and technical advisory and engineering support by Google Arts & Culture Lab, alongside continuous support from the LAS curatorial team.

Together, In Your Eyes, Before My Own and nom nom explore simulated and imagined living systems that collapse supposed distinction. Through in-depth processes of research and experimentation, both artists imaginatively probe the technologies that increasingly shape the environments we move through.

The artworks will be presented on las-art.foundation and Google Arts & Culture from 18:00 on 29 September 2026 on and launched with a free artists’ talk in Berlin, moderated by Barbara Cueto.

The event location will be announced soon. Register now to be among the first to receive all event details.

Xin Liu’s nom nom (2026) is a navigable simulation composed of millions of interacting particles that form an evolving world. It was developed by the artist to explore distributed intelligence and the continuous transformation of matter. In the work, no single particle possesses knowledge of the whole. Each change in state is based only on interactions with its immediate neighbours, triggering them to grow, collapse, compete or recover. From these local exchanges, landscape-like structures emerge. The simulation is driven by Neural Cellular Automata (NCA). These are small neural networks that model the ability of biological cells to self-organise and form complex organisms from a single entity.

nom nom explores life and intelligence not as properties of individual beings, but as conditions that arise wherever matter interacts. The work marks the beginning of the artist’s engagement with simulated living systems (Artificial Life), a field of research that is increasingly informing the next generation of AI.

Eunjo Lee’s In Your Eyes, Before My Own (2026) is a 20-minute video work meticulously composed by the artist, which explores human and non-human consciousness and the interconnectivity of matter.

Following a narrator’s dream-like journey towards self-knowledge, the video moves through three worlds each representing a different layer of consciousness. Its characters and objects were minutely modelled using a range of digital tools through a process Lee refers to as “techno-alchemy.” According to the artist, each element of the work possesses its own cognition and agency.

The work draws inspiration from psychology as well as ancient philosophy. Referencing theories on the evolution of consciousness and language as well as non-dualist Buddhist thought, the artist questions the distinctions between the individual and the whole and imagines a shared origin between consciousness and matter.