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On the High Line, Xin Liu Imagines the Lonely Afterlife of a Decommissioned Satellite

Despite its sentimental and poetic tone, "NOAA: A Fall Towards Home" is ultimately an exploration of the growing tension between technological ambition and human vulnerability.

What happens if, for a moment, we adopt the perspective of a satellite orbiting overhead, kilometers away, looking down at our planet from above? It is certainly getting much more crowded up there than it once was. Technological advancement, some of it increasingly inscrutable to ordinary people, has opened an entirely new politics of power and dominion, extending the Anthropocene’s technological hegemony into spaces that are not necessarily human but that we have made ours: the sky and outer space. London-based artist Xin Liu engages with these themes in her latest commission for New York’s High Line, inviting us to empathize with the worldview of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite.

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Co-produced with Onassis ONX, NOAA: A Fall Towards Home reimagines NOAA-15 as a sentient being. Through intimate, diary-like entries, Liu gives voice to the satellite as it narrates, with childlike naïveté and curiosity, its journey from Earth-born machine to permanent celestial wanderer. Once tasked with documenting and reporting on our planet from afar, it is abruptly decommissioned and left to wander among tons of astronautic debris, floating through space and contemplating the disillusionment of the failing technological utopia to which it contributed.

Launched in 1998 from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base as part of NOAA’s Polar Operational Environmental Satellites constellation, NOAA-15 spent decades faithfully recording weather systems, cloud formations and shifts in Earth’s atmosphere—and, by extension, natural disasters. On June 16, 2025, NOAA officially ceased data delivery from NOAA-15, which was formally decommissioned in August of that year, along with other satellites in the model series, as the newer Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) took over the low-Earth-orbit weather-observation mission with more advanced instruments and faster data delivery. While this was an end-of-life decision for an aging satellite system—one that already raises questions about the impact of technological obsolescence in outer space—it came at a precarious moment for environmental science and research. In recent months, amid a broader Trump administration effort to shrink NOAA’s research and satellite infrastructure, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research has been floated for the chopping block as contracts for next-generation satellite programs have been canceled.

After the performance that activated the installation, Xin Liu described this High Line commission as a work born of a desire to shift perspective—not only from Earth to space, but from human certainty to the mediated systems through which we now experience the world. Liu has always worked at the intersection of art, technology and science, using that space to raise broader questions about these tools and their implications for the environment. Originally trained as an engineer, she studied Measurement, Control Technology and Instrumentation at Tsinghua before earning an MFA from RISD and an MS from the MIT Media Lab. “I think there are so many aspects of human experience that can expand beyond our daily life,” Liu told Observer, noting how this desire to........

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