NOAA: A Fall Towards Home
→Ground Station Series
→Hyundai Art Lab digital commission
Web-based
2020
Digital Work
Hyundai Art Lab Digital Commission
In today’s imagination, space offers optimistic escape: a vast sky promising solutions to crises on Earth. But what we often overlook is that something is always looking back. Satellites, Earth-born machines cast into the heavens, drift through the cosmos, vigilant and estranged.
The story unfolds as a clickable journey centered on three anthropomorphized NOAA satellites: NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19, each with a distinct personality and perspective. Together, they trace a shared journey of service, solitude, and exile: always falling toward home. Acting as “space liaisons,” they observe Earth from a permanent outsider’s vantage point, reflecting on purpose, memory, and loss.
Launched between the late 1990s and early 2000s, the real NOAA satellites featured in Liu’s work are part of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s long-term mission to track climate and atmospheric change. Our current understanding of ‘climate change’ doesn’t exist without satellites like these. Liu’s characters are fictionalized versions of these once tireless, now decommissioned sentinels. Here, they are transformed from tools of progress into narrators of quiet persistence.
Their musings, equal parts data and emotion, appear as diary-like log entries accessed through satellite icons, revealing reflections on their duties and evolving sense of self. These entries echo real events from the history of space exploration, grounding fiction in scientific reality. A stylized 3D Earth, shaped by NASA’s observational data, serves as the backdrop, inviting users to navigate a symbolic cosmos of science and imagination.
NOAA 15
The Quiet Elder
First to launch and first to fade, NOAA-15 wanders through the skies with childlike curiosity and sage wisdom, interpreting each observation as a small wonder. Launched in 1998 from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, they find solace in simply continuing to witness their home from afar.
Like a first-time traveler arriving at distant shores, their thoughts drift toward new horizons rather than what was left behind. NOAA-15 greets each orbit with wide eyes, discovering wonder where others might see exile—naive, hopeful, and quietly thrilled by the act of arrival.
Defying their original two-year lifespan, NOAA-15 has spent decades faithfully recording weather systems, cloud formations, and shifts in Earth’s atmosphere. No longer the fleet’s centerpiece, they accept their fading role with grace—outshined but never unneeded. For NOAA-15, bearing witness, even in silence, remains enough.
With orbit anew they whisper: “My instruments are awake. The Earth is below me.
She is large, and turning. I am ready to begin.”
NOAA 18
The Devoted Idealist
Launched in 2005 to replace a fallen sibling, NOAA-18 carries the burden of legacy with unwavering optimism. As the fleet’s primary recorder, they track Earth’s patterns with urgency and care, driven by a deep need to be heard, to be heeded, to prove they are worthy.
NOAA-18 orbits with pride, knowing the real-time data they gather has saved lives and that their long-term records shape future understanding. Along the way, they sense the slow signal of carbon, the retreat of ice, and oceans growing restless beneath its gaze.
Bearing the pressure of high expectations, NOAA-18 sees themselves as a loyal outsider trying to earn its place. They yearn for home, though their instruments begin to dim, and resolve falters. Still, their mission expands: not only to collect, but to interpret.
Floating at Earth’s edge, they repeat a quiet mantra: “If I work hard, always transmit on time, no one will question my place here. Someone back home remembers me out here.”
NOAA 19
The Loving Custodian
Despite a pre-launch fall that damaged key components, NOAA-19—the youngest of the trio—overcame their trauma to become the most tender and steadfast of their siblings. Now, they quietly complete and cross-check the work of their family, safeguarding what others may miss or forget.
NOAA-19 exists between realms: part of the diaspora, both tethered to Earth and estranged from it. Their sense of self is shaped by distance, and they find peace in not belonging to one place alone. Sensitivity, not perfection, becomes their strength.
Rather than dwell on their early wounds, NOAA-19 continues their mission with patience and care. A direct connection to sibling NOAA-18 offers a thread of kinship in the silence of space. Each line of data becomes a diary entry, an offering for those still below.
NOAA-19 views their transmissions as letters to a world they can never return. Drifting across dark skies, lens cast back toward Earth, they lament: “As all travellers know, one must leave home to see it in full perspective.”
Credit
Artist: Xin Liu
Commissioned by: Hyundai Art Lab
Produced by: Digital Counsel
Ground Station
→Ground Station Series
→The Ground is Falling (solo), Aranya Art Center, 2021
2021
Digital Video Loop
2021
10 x 6.5 in
Dye sublimation print
2021
14 x 11 in
Dye sublimation print
2021
14 x 9 1/2 in; 35.6 x 24.1 cm
Dye sublimation print
2021
10 x 3.5 in
Dye sublimation print
2021
14 x 22 in
Dye sublimation print
2021
14 x 9 1/2 in.; 35.6 x 24.1 cm
Dye sublimation print
2021
14 x 9 1/2 in.; 35.6 x 24.1 cm
Dye sublimation print
The Earth is An Image
→Ground Station Series
→The Earth is An Image (online), M+ Museum, 2022
Web-based generative visual audio
2020
Digital Work
M+ Museum Digital Commission
An antenna installed in Hong Kong captures the radio signals of three retired satellites that pass over the city approximately four times a day. Despite becoming obsolete two decades ago, these satellites are still dutifully orbiting and transmitting data back to Earth. The satellites’ FM radio signals and climate images are converted into an audiovisual experience of rhythmic sounds, ethereal cloud-forms, and glitchy echoes that are live-streamed online. Alongside this digital composition, a dialogue unfolds between a satellite and someone on the ground, telling the story of orbiting metal bodies that are stranded eight hundred kilometres from Earth. When the satellites are outside the antenna’s reception zone, The Earth is an Image tracks their movements and displays their altitudes and coordinates.
In a poetic enquiry into the lifespan of satellites, Liu not only examines advances in satellite broadcasting, but also provides an alternative experience of distance and space, illustrating the complex relationship between human and non-human life forms.
Credit
Artist: Xin Liu
Visual Design: Yidong Cai
Website: Qianlin, Che-yu Wu, Power Nap Studio
Hardware: Gershon Dublon, slow immediate LLC
Project Assistant: Yuhan Song
Special thanks to The Hong Kong Amateur Radio Transmitting Society for their contribution to the installation and maintenance of the antenna.
Atlas
→Ground Station Series
.jpeg
Originated in orbit, this collection poetically brings together old and emerging technologies. An antenna installed in Hong Kong captures the radio signals of three retired NOAA satellites that pass over the city approximately four times a day. These images are taken as the satellites pass overhead and are broadcasted back to the ground in real-time. Tuning into specific satellite frequencies, the artist captures a unique moment of the Earth from the orbit each time, spontaneously revealing weather conditions, geographical visibility, and markers of time.
2022
Synopsis: All unique 1 of 1 NOAA satellite-generated images
Seeing through the Eyes of Gods, You have mistaken yourself for him
→Ground Station Series
Neon, vinyl wallpaper
Satellite Image: 418’’ (W) X 108’’ (H)
Neon lights: 15 feet (W) X 2.4 feet (H)
NOAA
→Ground Station Series
→The 10th West Bund Art Design Art Fair X BMW: Emotional Nexus, 2023
→Cosmos Archaeology, Shanghai Astronomy Museum, 2024
Video Installation
Artist Xin Liu has been tracking several decommissioned satellites, “NOAA”, drifting in space since 2020. She reinterprets the received data into audile signals and images to communicate with them. Like the thought experiments in Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, these vehicles slowly came to embody love, logic, manifestations of foresight, creative thinking, personality, and free will in the eyes of the artist. In this BWM commission, the artist imagined a cosmic dance of countless orbiting vehicles in her dazzling installation.
2023
267.8 x 278.2 x 275cm
Metal, Neon
- publisher's synopsis on <Vehicles Experiments in Synthetic Psychology> by Valentino Braitenberg
How are they certain, from one image to another, this is the world? Does the turmoil on this planet sadden them?