a chinese woman with short hair wearing a virtual reality headset looking at her hands through the sensors
Dan Xu

I am a researcher, creative technologist and new media artist from China and based in the Netherlands. Among many things, I am particularly interested in the creative possibilities of computational media and how they shape and mediate our embodied and social realities. I like to take and combine insights and approaches from different disciplines to explore questions and phenomena that trigger my curiosity. Besides research, I often make things with sound, text and code.

Since 2026, I have been working as a post doc researcher at the Visual Methodologies Collective in Amsterdam, where I mainly experiment with alternative ways of interacting and engaging with small AI models.

In 2025, I defended my PhD at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science. My thesis focuses on developing a relational model for describing and generating interactive art.

In 2024, together with some friends, we were awarded the Processing Foundation Fellowship for our collective project Screen-to-Soundscape. In this project, we have been exploring how AI and spatial audio technologies could potentially transform online experiences for blind and visually impaired individuals.

From 2018 to 2020, I worked as a Digital Transformation Designer at Digital Society School. In this period, I led and contributed to a wide array of digital transformation design research projects, under the overarching theme of Digital to Physical, in co-creation with multidisciplinary teams and various industry partners. These projects include: leveraging Internet of Things technologies to engage community members and foster meaningful connections, creating inclusive audience experiences for the visually impaired using audio-haptic technologies, exploring digital transformation opportunities for forensic mental healthcare practices.

CV

Publications

Instagram

Email
© Dan Xu 2026. All rights reserved.