nom nom

Xin Liu’s nom nom explores life and intelligence not as properties of individual beings, but as conditions that arise wherever matter interacts.

The work 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 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.

nom nom was originally commissioned by LAS Art Foundation in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab, and developed during a six-month LAS Online Artist Residency 2025-2026. The residency set out to support two artists, Xin Liu and Eunjo Lee, in exploring digital world building and the simulation of living systems. It gave them specialised access to AI tools and technical advisory and engineering support from Google Arts & Culture Lab, alongside continuous support from the LAS curatorial team. Through in-depth processes of research and experimentation, both artists imaginatively probed the technologies that increasingly shape the environments we move through. You can find Eunjo Lee’s online commission In Your Eyes, Before My Own here.

“With nom nom, I want to explore an image of intelligence that is not concentrated in one monumental massive model, but distributed across millions of tiny neural networks that react only to their surroundings. I believe this offers another image of life and consciousness. Can we challenge the moral hierarchy of life and non-life? And perhaps another image of AI itself: not as a singular mind above the world, but as a living ecology of fragments?”
– Xin Liu