Wednesday, March 15, 11:00 AM Lambton Studio A
You Make Me Shy (2016)
Yiru Chen
FREE Admission
You Make Me Shy
"Tell me and I forgot. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand”
---OLD CHINESE PROVERB
The old Chinese proverb nicely summarizes the aim of my art practice — making interactivity. In most of my works, I explore the relationships between people and technology through interactive sound and video. My audience is not a target group, they become an element of my work; or in other words, without the audiences’ involvement my work isn’t complete. You Make Me Shy is a video installation that explores the issues related to human curiosity with more of a focus on how my work can challenge the viewer. For this piece, I created an interactive video installation which presented videos in a 3 by 3 arrangement of faces on the wall. For the middle one in the arrangement, I gave a personality by personifying shyness in the interactive installation. If the work is left alone, the person’s internal characteristics (outgoing, optimistic) are revealed. However, if someone comes close to it and interrupts this personal comfort zone, the work immediately retracts into its shyness personality and hides itself within the conformity of its surrounding video wall.
You Make Me Shy is part of Video Video a presentation of recent audio/video, installation and performance works by University of Windsor graduate and undergraduate students.
More Video Video works will be presented on Thursday, March 16, 3:00 PM at Lambton Studio A
Yiru Chen was born in Shenzhen, China. She is currently working towards her MFA in Film and Media at the University of Windsor. Yiru is a new media artist mainly working with video mapping and interactive techniques to create video installation. Currently, she is interested in how to engage audiences in such a manner that they become co-creators and gain an understanding or personal connection through interacting with a piece of art.
-- photos by Yiru Chen