Member Spotlight: Leilei Xia

JLS Gangwisch
Leilei, would you tell us who you are?

Leilei Xia
My name is LeiLei Xia, I’m an animator, video maker, and tactile artist. I also often appear as a workshop leader and workshop experience designer. I make sort of all kinds of new media artworks in that sense.

Gangwisch, JLS
What does that term new media mean to you?

Leilei Xia
I tend to feel close to some kind of ephemerality. I don’t really like things. I don’t want to consume or own physical things that appear in some of my works. I like things that fuse both there and not there, a little bit like like some kind of Chinese philosophy.

I feel like new media is a type of media that can achieve that. I don’t have to have to have the thing in my room, I can have it sort of both here but also other places, and then it could be deformed in a lot of formats. I feel like that’s really cool about it.

Personally, I’m always very interested in problem-solving, using some kind of new technology and then making some new effects out of it. I often really like sort of exploring
if things can jam together and then make expression for something that can all actually fit with some kind of content. That’s really satisfying for me.

Gangwisch, JLS
What brought you to the work you’re doing now? Could tell us a little bit about your biography? What led you to work with new media?

Leilei Xia
I started with drawing when I was very little. I started studying painting and sketching when I was in primary school. I really liked doing illustration. I wanted to be a character animator, I was like, my dream is going to Disney, but then going to undergrad actually changed me quite drastically. I got interested in experimental animation, but then after doing it for a while I felt like experimental animation also has some kind of tropes in there that feel like classical experimental animation, but it’s very contradictory.

So and then I felt like I wanted to explore some new kinds of formats. Maybe animation can be touched? Or when it’s projected, what does it look like? Where can these contradictory formats bring me? Then I got into some performance, performance blended with screen-based media transformed into different formats.

Before I got to grad school I self -taught coding and 3D stuff, and in grad school I started doing all kinds of mixture of these technologies that I studied.

New Media is a very complex term to me. I don’t really know whether it’s very different from traditional media in a sense because I feel it’s still important to tell a story that is very sincere and important to me. I feel very aware that when I, if I label myself as new media, that that might be dangerous; that if I feel satisfied with some kind of technology, I forget to tell something that’s really like important or difficult. On one hand I feel attached to it, but on the other hand, I feel aware of sort of the danger of this word as well.

Gangwisch, JLS
I how did you find the new media caucus? What does receiving the 2024 Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award mean to you?

Leilei Xia 5:29
My teacher actually recommended it to to me. I feel really lucky to get the award. On one hand it really solved my big logistical need, but also I feel really happy to be accepted in this community.

Even though I’m in a sort of in the program of new media program already, I wasn’t sure whether I would be accepted or belong to this kind of community. It’s really nice that I feel like I can get to know more people in this world and then feel connected to them and to belong.

Gangwisch, JLS
What are you working on currently? What projects would you like to share with us?

Leilei Xia
I’m working on several new projects. Next week I’m going to Indonesia for an independent scientific magazine that I belong to. We are making a sort of magazine about linguistics, sort of trying to play a linguistics games in Indonesia that try to just learn language without dictionaries or Googling because Indonesia has tons of languages. It’s based on this video game called Chants of Sennar.

I’m also sort of learn trying to learn the dialect of my hometown. I try to phrase it in a kind of funny way, like the reason why I try to learn that dialect is that I’m afraid that AI voice will spam my parents. I think at the end of the projects I will use all the materials that I get to train a an AI model that can speak my dialect. I just find that funny, but I really want to have some kind of common language with my family as well.

Gangwisch, JLS
Where can people see your work?

Leilei Xia
http://www.leileixia.com/
https://www.instagram.com/lilyxia99/