Xinyue Liu is an aspiring anthropologist exploring the interface of Art/Technology. Her passion lies in interpreting and evaluating the cultural representation of technological objects and human-machine entanglement in the light of STS and linguistic anthropology. She holds a B.A. in English from Fudan University (2024), where she developed a strong interest in posthumanism and how speculative fiction fills up the vacuum as modern mythology in the contemporary disenchanted world.
At Notre Dame, Xinyue will focus her research on the Anthropology of Artificial Intelligence. She aspires to propose a semiotic reading of the algorithmic culture as both a symbolic system representing social reality and a mediation interweaving human and non-human actors into the social network. Her research examines the human-machine interaction in artistic practices and AI application in the creative industry.
Based on her preliminary fieldwork in several China-based AI gaming start-ups, she focuses her scope on experimental storytelling in collaboration with human-artists and Generative AI, examining how AI challenges and complicates the conventional notion of agency and creativity. On the individual scale, her research attempts to accommodate creativity into the contemporary technological context, seeking a more compatible mode of human-machine collaboration from a humanistic perspective. On a societal scale, she focuses on how technological development drives forward the innovative transformation of creative industry, shapes social imaginaries for cosmopolitanism, and conjures up possibilities for global collaboration. Through her research, she hopes to shed light on how its application mediates the formation of the tech start-up featuring transnationalism and hybridity, therefore "un-black-boxing" AI technology.
Xinyue is a Notre Dame Presidential Fellow.