Kexin Wang
Research Affiliate in the HCI Engineering Group at MIT CSAIL. I work on bio-art, artificial life, human-computer interaction, and digital fabrication, mostly with lasers, living organisms, and 3D printers.
Living systems
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Research system
Biocompiler
A CNC laser projects an optimization problem into a petri dish as moving light barriers. Physarum polycephalum grows a solution, and computer vision extracts the network to compare against a symbolic solver.
NeurIPS 2026, under review
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Bio-art · Product
Mycelian
A desktop machine that draws with light on an agar plate. Mucor is photophobic, so it grows away from the laser lines and into the shape you drew, over one to two days.
funguylab.com ↗ SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
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Research · Artificial life
Participatory Evolution
An interactive ecosystem where text acts on the simulation's parameters rather than selecting its output. Participants tune agent behavior across generations by describing what they want to see.
ACM DL ↗ SIGGRAPH Asia 2025
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Installation · Artificial life
Born, Not Made
Language-model agents deliberate over whether to bring forth new life. Children inherit what their mothers experienced rather than what they concluded, and the proliferation happens in soft robotics and fluid dynamics instead of data copying.
NeurIPS 2026 Artwork, under review
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Research · Biohybrid
PlantwormSim
Pneumatic soft actuators buried in a 6×6 grid of soil, running cellular automata rules that take input from a living plant's electrical signals. The agents aerate and loosen the soil around the roots.
Manuscript under review
Material & structure
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Research · Fabrication
Ori-TENG
Origami tessellations printed flat on a multimaterial printer, then folded. Compressing the folds generates charge, so the structure senses its own deformation and harvests power from it.
ACM DL ↗ UIST 2025
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Research · Materials
Electrostatic Flocking
Fibers deposited onto 3D-printed surfaces in controlled zones. The printed geometry determines where fibers land and how they orient, tested here across three fiber colors.
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Research · Sensing
Carbon Fiber Flocking Sensor
Conductive carbon fibers flocked onto a flexible printed substrate. The fiber bed carries current, and its resistance shifts as the surface is pressed or bent, so the material senses its own deformation. Mapped with conductivity measurements and thermal imaging.
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Fashion · Material
Gravity Tessellation
Over 1,000 wool felt squares and equilateral triangles, hand-stitched into a flat sheet that folds around the body under its own weight. Surface flocked by hand.
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Architectural robotics
Dynamic Living
A digitally knitted tensegrity structure with pneumatic actuators, which changes shape as the ambient temperature changes. Sited outdoors, scanned with lidar.
China Academy of Art, 2022
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Fashion · Material
Paper Lantern
Xuan paper treated until it behaves like leather, then cut and constructed the way a traditional paper lantern is. The surface tones follow shan shui washes.
Tools for thinking
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Software · Platform
!nteractivesPub
An authoring tool for papers with embedded video, demos, and interactive figures. A field deployment and two user studies; 8.7× faster than Overleaf on interactive documents.
interactives.pub ↗ CHI 2026
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Company · AI engine
Cultigen
An LLM pipeline that turns one source document into a lesson, a working interactive, and a kit spec. Generated interactives run in headless Chrome and regenerate if they throw.
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PatentLensFTO & infringement
Company · AI platform
PatentLens
Freedom-to-Operate search for hardware and pharma teams. Claims are parsed, embedded, and retrieved against a product spec, and every hit links back to the claim text it matched.
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Wearable · HCI
ChromaCalm
AR glasses with segmented electrochromic lenses. Regions of the lens darken selectively to cut peripheral distraction while reading, tested for effects on working memory.
Brown & RISD, 2024
Papers
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Biocompiler: Compiling Spatial Network Optimization Problems into Living Solvers with a Digital Fabrication System
NeurIPS 2026, Creative AI Track Under review
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Born, Not Made: Embodied Artificial Life and Intra-active Agency in Machine Reproduction
NeurIPS 2026, Creative AI Track, Artwork Under review
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!nteractivesPub: Redistributing Author and Reader Effort through Interactive Academic Authoring
CHI 2026 Extended Abstracts, Barcelona *Equal contribution
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Participatory Evolution of Artificial Life Systems via Semantic Feedback
SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers, Hong Kong *Equal contribution · Project lead
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UIST 2025 Adjunct, Busan Honorable Mention
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Exploring Fungal Morphology Simulation and Dynamic Light Containment from a Graphics Generation Perspective
SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Art Papers, Tokyo
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Designing Embodied Artificial Life as Ecological Participation Agents
Manuscript Under review
About
In about a year I taught myself out of fashion design and into engineering, from a first research job at Tsinghua to Brown, RISD, and MIT. None of it came from a normal path. It came from getting my hands on the real thing, early.
My work sits where biology, computation, and fabrication overlap. A lot of it involves pointing a laser at something alive and seeing what it does: guiding fungal growth into a drawn shape, or handing a slime mold an optimization problem and reading its answer out of the resulting network.
I'm also a core organizer and exhibiting artist of the MIT Tech Art Hackathon at the MIT Media Lab (2026–2027), and an editor at the !nteractives research platform.
Contact
- Emailkexinw@mit.edu
- Labartineerade.com ↗
- Kitsfunguylab.com ↗
- Companycultigen.ai ↗
- GitHubgithub.com/kexinwang1 ↗