We had the pleasure of virtually meeting Victoria Fu, a digital and video artist based in California. Throughout the conversation, Fu described her techniques, installation process, and her perspective on viewership and how media is presented. Fu’s work focuses on how to disrupt a digital narrative in a physical space, and how the “screen” is a key factor to the interpretation of her media. By using stock videos that are familiar to a general audience in choppy, illegible manner, she further complicates the idea of a narrative and how that his displayed in a physical space.
Fu has invested a lot of time and research into what it means to be a viewer and a user, and how th physical context of a viewing space can change the occupation of the person watching the media projected. In a theater, the person is just simply a viewer, but on a desktop or mobile device, the viewer is now also a user, and it is a much more interactive space. Fu has taken this relationship of user and viewer to a new level and has now expanded the 2D digital world into a more interactive space in her installations by projecting her media onto one or more platforms, or across an entire room. She mentioned that some viewers in her shows tend to stay in one place and do not walk around the room and view her images from different vantage points, which is very interesting. That either means that viewers are conditioned to be respectful of the screen, or are scared to step “beyond their boundary”.
I really appreciate the way that Fu thinks about the screen; why should that be a limiting factor for the way we interact with digital media? Why should that be the only platform available, and why can we spread an image across multiple dimensions? The idea of trompe l’eoil is now taken to a new level, where its not only a hyper realistic window into one world, but by projecting an image onto multiple plans, it’s a window into multiple worlds, showing a glimpse of the vastness of the virtual world. The screen is no longer an endpoint for Fu’s work, but it’s merely a jumping point onto another plane within physical space to expand her media creations.
