Behind the Masks
Behind the Masks is an interactive installation that invites the audience into a fragmented emotional theater. Using webcam-tracked gestures, participants summon, switch, or destroy digital masks—each representing tensions embedded within love, friendship, or family. These masks appear in real-time on screen, overlaying the user's face as they navigate relational dynamics.
Each mask pair embodies a contradiction: protection and pain, sacrifice and dependence, obedience and control, flattery and resentment. The closer one gets to the “truth” of the emotion, the more fragile or distorted the relationship becomes. The gesture-based interaction creates a feedback loop between the viewer's body and the emotional logic of the mask: to summon is to reveal, to switch is to reframe, to destroy is to confront.
The installation stages how intimacy and identity are continuously shaped by invisibly performed roles. Emotional labor is externalized as visual overlays; subconscious tensions are turned into symbols. The user is both performer and observer in a subtle choreography of power, longing, and vulnerability.
In the context of Transient Info, this work materializes the fleeting architecture of emotional communication. The masks do not archive truth—they mask, distort, and evaporate. Intimacy here is not preserved but acted out, layer by layer, in an ephemeral interface. Meaning is generated not through narrative closure, but through interruption and distortion.
Ultimately, Behind the Masks offers an allegorical lens on how emotional performance circulates in digital space—how we frame, repeat, and sometimes rupture the masks we wear for others, and for ourselves.
Short Bio
Lili Shen is a London-based artist working at the intersection of interaction design, data visualization, and embodied experience. Her practice explores how technology reshapes the body—both physical and emotional—through themes of sleep, dream research, and digital tracking. Using VR, Max/MSP, TouchDesigner, and AI, she transforms physiological and semantic signals into immersive audiovisual narratives.
Her recent works extend toward the subconscious and the Noosphere—the collective layer of human thought—by redefining dreams as intermediaries between reality and virtuality. She holds an MA in Interaction Design Communication from the London College of Communication, UAL.
Her work was exhibited at LCC London, selected as a finalist in the Art Collide Fall Open Theme Competition, and will be featured in upcoming issues of Al-Tiba9 Contemporary and Arts Talk Magazine.
Website: https://nuoshen.webflow.io
Email: nuoshenns@gmail.com
Email: nuoshenns@gmail.com