Artist & Researcher
Atlanta, GA
Xinyi Yang
Artist & Researcher based in Atlanta.
I work across mechanics, robotics, architecture, and fabrication to explore how intelligence and agency can be embedded in matter itself.
My projects investigate gravity, resonance, transformation, and the expressive potential of physical systems.
Education
Xinyi Yang is an artist and researcher working across mechanics, robotics, architecture, and fabrication.
She received a Master in Design Studies (M.Des.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, with cross-registration at MITMedia Lab and CSAIL.
She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Robotics at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Her work has been presented through Harvard GSD, MIT Media Lab initiatives and published in venues including Nature Communications, Advanced Intelligent Systems, and Physical Review Applied.
Statement
Xinyi Yang’s practice asks how intelligence, memory, and agency might exist in matter itself.
Working with mechanisms, resonance, gravity, folding, and transformation, she creates structures that sense, release, adapt, or perform without relying on conventional digital control. Her installations and prototypes often operate in the threshold between object and behavior, where physical systems appear to decide, negotiate, or respond.
She is interested in material as an active participant rather than a passive medium: something that stores logic, carries tension, resists command, and reveals hidden forms of intelligence.
Across sculpture, engineering, and speculative design, her work proposes futures in which technology thinks not only through code, but through form.