The SETI Institute's Artists in Residence Program (SETI AIR) is pleased to announce the arrival of three exciting new artists and a new member of the AIR Advisory Committee. Jordan Holmes, aka Dxtr Spits, Xin Liu, and Alfred Darlington, aka Daedelus, become the most recent creatives to engage with the scientists at the SETI Institute. Highly esteemed Art Advisor Dorka Keehn is joining the SETI AIR Program’s advisory committee. SETI AIR operates in partnership with the Lucas Artists Program at Montalvo Arts Center.

“As we approach 2020 and the ten-year anniversary of SETI AIR, it is thrilling to welcome such diverse talent,” said Charles Lindsay, SETI AIR Program Director. “Our horizons appear limitless with many truly inspiring developments in the works.”

The SETI Institute is an international leader in the movement to integrate the arts and sciences. SETI AIR facilitates an exchange of ideas between artists and scientists so that these disciplines may inspire each other to catalyze new modes of comprehension. SETI AIR expands upon the SETI Institute’s mission to explore, understand, and explain the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe, and the artists bring fresh eyes and bright minds to difficult concepts, becoming creative ambassadors for the SETI Institute.

Here are the new SETI AIR artists:

Jordan Holmes
Jordan “Dxtr Spits” Holmes grew up in Prince George's County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. His curious mind led him to become a jack of all trades as a scientist/engineer, musician, spoken word artist, and entrepreneur. Holmes relocated to Chicago in 2014 after graduating from Virginia Tech, where he got his degree as a Materials Science Engineer and met his mentor Dr. Nikki Giovanni. He began the pursuit of his music career as "Dxtr Spits,” a witty, impactful, and energized lyricist. In 2017, Holmes founded "ONLi Packs,” an apparel and backpack brand that utilizes art from local artists using a periodic table logo to bridge the arts and sciences. He prioritizes community reinvestment and creates community support initiatives utilizing his company brands to bring meaningful conversations to light and to give back. Holmes looks to grow his works to a global platform while living by his motto, "Live life like and an experiment; you can't control what happens to you, but you can control the product you become.”
 

Xin Liu
Xin Liu (b. Xinjiang/China) is an artist and engineer, whose works range from performances, apparatus and installations, to scientific experiments and academic papers. 

In her practice, Xin creates experiences and artifacts to measure and modify the distance and tension between personal, social, and technological spaces. They are moments of re-organization, creating ripples in the fabric of subjectivities, common experiences, and beliefs. 

Xin is currently the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab, a member of New INC at the New Museum (NYC), and a resident in the Queens Museum Artist Studio program. She is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies: the Van Lier Fellowship from Museum of Arts and Design, Huayu Youth Award Finalist, Watermill Center International Summer Program, and Pioneer Works Tech Residency. Her projects have received awards in SXSW, FastCoDesign, Core77, and her academic publications have been nominated for best papers in ACM conferences. She has shown her work internationally at events and venues including Ars Electronica, Boston MFA, Sundance Film Festival, The Walker Art Center, OCAT Shanghai, ISEA, and Music Tech Festival Berlin. As a researcher, Xin has worked in institutions including Microsoft Research NYC & Asia and Google ATAP. Xin co-founded slow immediate, together with Gershon Dublon, an art and technology studio based in New York. slow immediate is the inaugural winner of a residency in the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab competition initiated by Ars Electronica in 2019.
 

Alfred Darlington
Under the alias Daedelus, Alfred Darlington has been active in electronic music for the past 20 years, releasing over 20 LPs, countless EPs, remixes, and additional productions on labels such as Ninja Tune, Brainfeeder, and Anticon. He has collaborated with a variety of artists, including DJ Shadow, Diplo, Kimbra, Saul Williams, Death Cab for Cutie, and Flying Lotus. As a performer, Alfred has played over 1,000 live shows on six continents, at venues ranging from underground events like the seminal Low End Theory to festival mainstages such as Coachella.

Alfred received a degree in music from USC, where he studied jazz double-bass. As of 2019, he is an assistant professor for the Berklee College of Music in Boston as a founding faculty member of their new EDI (Electronic Digital Instrument) program.

Daedelus has been at the forefront of many performance techniques, from working with early prototypical Monome to current exploration of modular systems into DJ metaphors plus A/V shows that are robotic, volumetric, and performed.
 

Dorka Keehn
An award-winning artist and filmmaker, Dorka Keehn is the Principal of Keehn On Art, an art advisory that specializes in public art. In 2011, she was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission, where she chairs the Visual Arts Committee that commission’s all artwork pertaining to the city’s Public Art Program. Additionally, she is the co-founder of Sites Unseen, a project that brings arts programming to neglected alleys in downtown San Francisco. Dorka also led the fundraising effort for The Bay Lights, the $12M 25,000 LED light installation by artist Leo Villareal for the Bay Bridge.

To learn more about the SETI AIR program and the artists, please click here.

View/download full press release here: https://en.calameo.com/read/0048123631cc007ae0080