In an age where imagistic effects continue to challenge and expand the boundaries of human imagination, interactive visual environments have assumed a distinct role in reshaping how we perceive and conceive of reality itself. Artists such as Refik Anadol and Ryoji Ikeda have boldly reimagined how generative realities can hold the organic texture of human sensibility in tension with the machinery precision of algorithms, bridging the computed and the felt in refreshing and moving ways. Now, amid the rapid accel;eration of generative AI in image processing and video rendering, a new generation of artists face a common, urgent inquiry: not merely how to leverage the most innovative methods applicable, but how these technical advancements can manifest a distinctively personal artistic vision.
Yameng Li is one such artist who ponders that elastic tension between technical fluency and intellectual sensitivity, and one who has made that tension the animating force of her practice. Working primarily in interactive visual environments, she bridges the tangible architectures of stage design with an enigmatic experience that reclaims the agency of sensation and intuition.
Yameng Li (Maya) is a curator and new media artist working between Shanghai and New York. Through installation, curatorial projects, and experimental video, she transforms abstract crises of consciousness into immersive visual systems. Operating at the intersection of critical AI studies and experimental media, her work investigates algorithmic subjectivity, obsolescence, and post-human selfhood. Central to her practice is the concept of “substitution consciousness”—the rupture that occurs when one realizes they can be replaced. Through what she terms “substitution aesthetics,” Maya renders replaceability as an experiential structure that reshapes how presence and value are understood and generated in the digital age.
Her recent work in 心esthesia demonstrates both the range of her artistic vision and the precision of her technical capabilities. As the visual designer, Li’s primary task was to craft the dreamy world the performance inhabits: a visual environment that responds to real-time actions, morphing and shifting as performers interact with sensor-embedded props on stage.
As a new media artist, Yameng Li continues to cultivate visual systems and landscapes that reframe uncertainty as generative forces while recalibrating the equilibrium between sight and thought, between what is seen and what can be interpreted.
1. What was your role in 心esthesia, and what was your main contribution?
I joined as the visual designer, and my main task was building a visual system that could function in real time within a white box space set up specifically for projection.
I designed the base visual layer that runs continuously throughout the performance, alongside several scene-specific visuals tied to key moments in the script. The visual world centers on an abstract, dreamlike room. Instead of directly distorting a familiar space, I constructed an environment suspended in a productive ambiguity, familiar enough to evoke reality, yet subtly estranged and disfigured by a visceral illogic which mirrors the alternative belief in a dream. I also inserted anchor elements drawn from domestic life, such as wooden bedframes, full-length mirrors, and swaying curtains, conjuring a textural nostalgia associated with a homelessness.
As I worked more closely with the technical team, we introduced particle flows, geometric forms, and noise textures into specific scenes. Because every element of the performance exists in relation, meaning that performer gesture, physical props, and visual background are tied together in a continuous feedback loop, I also leveraged my skills in motion graphics to build this real-time interactivity. I constructed the visual layers in TouchDesigner and connected it to an array of interactive devices including Playtronica, Touchme, and MUGIC sensors.
The timeline was around two weeks, and a lot of it happened late at night — we were all fitting this around other commitments. There was one effect we’d planned that I ended up talking the team out of pursuing. The idea was genuinely interesting, but we didn’t have the time to execute it properly, and I felt it was better to do fewer things well than to rush something that wouldn’t land.
2. How did your visual language serve the atmosphere of the script?
When I first encountered the performance’s concept, what I kept coming back to wasn’t “dream” as an image — it was the inherent instability of perception: the feeling that you’re looking at reality, yet something is slightly wrong about it. That shaped how I approached the visual system. Rather than illustrating the dream literally, I wanted the visuals to behave like a dream — responsive, slightly off-rhythm, never fully settled.
One thing that made this project particularly interesting was that the script was developed in close dialogue with Deaf performers. As I learned more about how deaf communities experience and describe their dreams, that understanding fed back into my artistic divisions. I revised the visuals to depart from a linear visual logic and introduced intentional glitches to represent the sensorial pauses and fissures native to the perceptual experience of the deaf community.
In this project, my visual sensibility allowed me to smoothly transition from having full control over a final image to designing something that would change in real time depending on how a performer moved. That experience was genuinely new territory for me, and it came out more rewarding than I expected.
3. What was your collaborative experience with the rest of the crew?
It was fast and iterative. The director had seen my work and reached out specifically because of my visual style, which meant I was given a lot of creative latitude — but that also meant I had to translate my instincts into something that could actually work with their existing process and timeline.
Much of the practical collaboration happened through testing. We’d try a gesture, see how the visual responded, and then adjust — the sensitivity of a trigger, the timing, the scale of the reaction. Sometimes, things that appeared right on screen felt completely “wrong” once a performer was actually moving in the space. I had to visit the venue and reconfigure how we were mounting the projector at one point, recalibrate how certain actions were being tracked, because the initial sensitivity wasn’t matching how the performers naturally moved.
For scenes where a character is cutting roses and the script is grappling with the broader idea of confronting pain, I didn’t want to add more visual elements. I wanted the background itself to shift: for the rhythm to change, the density to drop or surge. The performers’ movements could alter the pacing of what was on screen, which meant those metaphorical moments could resonate differently depending on how the performer moved through them. It was a highly collaborative process, and a lot of the meaning in the final visuals came from conversations that happened late at night, after reading another draft of the script and revisiting the scenes with the crew.
Writer:
Cynthia Chen is a writer based in New York City, originally from Shanghai. Her writings can be found in The Margins, The Common, Epiphany, Impulse Magazine, Cultbytes, mercuryfirs, grotto journal, No, Dear, and elsewhere. Her work has also been supported by the Community of Writers, Beijing Poetry Festival, and Accent Sisters. Her chapbook Believing YoYo is out from Tilted House Press.