10 Questions with Lili (Nuo) Shen
Lili (Nuo) Shen - Portrait
Lili Shen is a London-based artist working at the intersection of interaction design, data visualisation, and embodied experience. Her practice centres on the body, both physical and emotional, as shaped by technology. Exploring themes of sleep, digital tracking, and exercise in immersive environments, Shen transforms physiological data into visual and sonic narratives. Working with tools such as VR, Max/MSP, and sensor-driven installations, she examines the human cost of efficiency, privacy, and well-being. Recent and ongoing projects include VR Exercise Game, Connecting Door / Digital Tracking, Sleep Data Visualization, and Behind the Mask.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Lili Shen’s work asks how technologies designed to help us understand ourselves, such as biometric sensors, tracking apps, or exercise games, also reshape our habits, feelings, and agency. Her practice unfolds along two threads: the physical and the mental.
On the physical side, VR Exercise Game transforms lockdown anxiety into a light-exercise VR experience; Sleep Data Visualization sonifies ECG and GSR signals through Max/MSP, offering a visceral warning about sleep deprivation and digital fatigue.
On the mental side, Connecting Door / Digital Tracking overlays contact-tracing logic and legal language in spatial installations to reveal exclusion and inequality. Behind the Mask stages wearable emotion-masks that explore complex dynamics in intimacy and identity.
Rather than rejecting technology, Shen visualises how our quantified selves might speak, rendering silent emotions, bodily rhythms, and invisible exclusions both perceptible and shareable.
Rhythms of Sleep, Data Visualization Red Series, 1920x1080 px, 2024 © Lili (Nuo) Shen
INTERVIEW
Let's start from the basics. Could you tell us about your journey into art and design, and what first drew you to art making?
My journey into art began not from a specific moment, but from a constant curiosity about how humans perceive and interact with the world. As a child, I was always fascinated by how memories, feelings, and sensations linger in the body long after the moment has passed. This intuitive awareness led me to explore art not just as a visual form, but as a tool for decoding emotions and recording the invisible.
Later in my academic path, I studied interaction design, where I began integrating technology with sensory and bodily experiences. This intersection between human emotion, the digital interface, and invisible signals such as sleep, movement, and dreams became the core of my practice. My first major project explored how anxiety during lockdown could be transformed into a VR exercise game, this helped me see the power of immersive media to transform not just space, but inner states.
For me, art is not just about expression; it's a way to test perception, design new realities, and make the intangible visible.
How did your academic background influence the way you approach technology as both a creative tool and a critical subject?
My academic background bridges design, interaction, and critical theory, which has deeply influenced how I engage with technology. During my postgraduate studies in London, I was exposed to a diverse range of perspectives, human-centred design, speculative design, and critical data visualisation, all of which encouraged me to see technology not just as a tool but as a system with social, emotional, and political consequences.
I became particularly interested in how data-driven tools such as biometric sensors and AI influence our perception of the self. Rather than adopting a purely technical or celebratory stance toward emerging tech, my education trained me to ask: What is this technology doing to us emotionally? Who gets excluded from it? What biases are hidden in its design?
This critical lens manifests in works like Sleep Data Visualizations, where biometric data becomes a form of poetic resistance, or Behind the Mask, where I interrogate how interfaces and mediated communication distort intimacy. My academic training has helped me move beyond surface-level interactivity into emotionally resonant and ethically aware design.
Rhythms of Sleep, Data Visualization Blue Series, 1920x1080 px, 2025 © Lili (Nuo) Shen
Rhythms of Sleep, Data Visualization Green Series, 1920x1080 px, 2025 © Lili (Nuo) Shen
You work with VR, Max/MSP, and sensor-driven installations. What excites you most about experimenting with these technologies, and how do you decide which tools best fit each project?
What excites me most about experimenting with immersive and sensor-based technologies is their ability to extend the human sensory system, not just simulating reality, but questioning it.
For instance, in Sleep Data Visualizations, I used GSR (galvanic skin response) and ECG sensors to sonify physiological data, turning hidden stress and fatigue into a tangible audiovisual experience. Max/MSP became the bridge between internal signals and external perception, translating micro-emotions into soundscapes that people can feel, not just see. It's not the "tool" itself that excites me, but the way it amplifies the invisible.
Similarly, in my VR work, such as VR Exercise Game, I used Unity with embodied interfaces to turn anxiety during lockdown into light physical movement. Here, VR wasn't just immersive; it became a healing interface. What I found powerful was not technological novelty, but emotional necessity: how can this medium hold, translate, or reframe a fragile state?
When choosing technologies, I always start from the emotional and thematic core. I ask: What needs to be felt? What tension needs to be made visible? If the body is central, sensors and biofeedback might be used; if intimacy and spatial distortion are key, I turn to VR and spatialised sound. The tools follow the question, not the other way around.
Your practice often centers on the body and its relationship with technology. What does the body represent for you within your artistic research?
For me, the body is both a sensor and a signal transmitter. It is the first interface between human perception and the external world, a biological gateway to the virtual and the emotional. My artistic exploration regards the body not as a passive object but as a dynamic system constantly adapting to technological extensions. Whether through VR-induced motion, GSR data from sleep monitoring, or emotional duality in Behind the Mask, the body becomes a readable canvas where anxieties, desires, and systemic feedback loops emerge.
By integrating physical and digital responses, I examine how technological systems subtly rewire our behaviours and internal states. The body becomes a testing ground for contemporary conditions: overstimulation, digital fatigue, and algorithmic surveillance. Through these works, I hope to highlight the body's potential for resistance, vulnerability, and adaptation.
Rhythms of Sleep Series Labels, 1920x1080 px, 2025 © Lili (Nuo) Shen
In works like Sleep Data Visualization, you translate sleep deprivation and digital fatigue into sonic and visual forms. What inspired you to engage with this theme, and what do you hope audiences take away from it?
The inspiration emerged during an intense period of hybrid work, where constant screen exposure and erratic sleep led me to question how digital culture is reshaping our biological rhythms. Using GSR and ECG data collected during my sleep, I transformed these imperceptible signals into a sonic and visual environment in Max/MSP. The result is a subtle yet immersive experience that mirrors what it feels like to live under chronic fatigue, slowed perception, muffled sounds, anddelayed emotional response.
I want audiences to physically experience what digital exhaustion feels like, not just intellectually understand it. By translating these abstract rhythms into a multisensory artwork, I hope to re-sensitise people to their own bodily rhythms and reclaim sleep as a site of resistance, rather than neglect.
Your VR Exercise Game was developed during lockdown, transforming anxiety into light exercise. How do you see the role of play and interactivity in addressing difficult emotions?
VR Exercise Game was born out of isolation. During lockdown, physical and emotional stagnation converged. I wanted to create a space where movement became a form of self-dialogue. The game's mechanics, simple upper body gestures, avatar movement, and voice feedback are designed not to compete but to soothe. The act of "play" in this context is not about achievement, but recovery.
Interactivity, in this sense, becomes therapeutic. It invites users to reconnect with their bodies and regulate emotions without the pressure of performance. I see playful interactivity as a gentle form of care, especially in times of collective trauma.
Behind the Masks Interaction, 3D digital interactive installation, 2025 © Lili (Nuo) Shen
Behind the Masks, Mask Design Sheet, 2025 © Lili (Nuo) Shen
Projects like Behind the Mask explore how technology mediates intimacy and identity. Could you share what led you to create this work and what questions it raises for you?
Behind the Mask was inspired by the paradoxical nature of mediated intimacy, how we become hyper-connected yet emotionally fragmented. The installation presents six emotion masks, each representing a duality (e.g., care/control, love/envy). Through facial detection and real-time response, the mask mirrors the viewer's expressions while subtly distorting them.
This project arose from my own experiences navigating digital relationships, simultaneously transparent and performative. It asks: How do we present ourselves in filtered spaces? When does intimacy become surveillance? The work doesn't seek to answer, but to surface these tensions for reflection.
Your work doesn't reject technology but reveals how it reshapes habits, feelings, and agency. How do you strike a balance between critique and appreciation in your practice?
I believe technology is not inherently good or bad; it's a mirror and a magnifier. My works embrace their potential while scrutinising their consequences. The balance comes from empathy: I don't demonise digital tools but contextualise their impact on human behavior.
By designing systems that make the invisible visible (e.g., biometric signals, mediated emotions), I aim to create aesthetic and critical distance. Art can be both an act of witnessing and questioning, allowing technology to speak through us, but not for us.
Beyond Isolation, VR Gameplay Yoga, 2021 © Lili (Nuo) Shen
When people encounter your installations or VR works, what kind of experience or reflection do you hope they walk away with?
I hope they feel something, not just think. Whether it's the slowed tempo of Rhythms of Sleep or the intimate dissonance in Behind the Mask, I want audiences to temporarily inhabit altered states of perception. My goal is not to explain data but to re-humanise it.
If someone walks away more attuned to their breath, more aware of how they're being seen or recorded, or simply moved by an unexpected memory, then the work has done its job.
Lastly, what projects or questions are you currently exploring, and where do you see your practice developing in the coming years?
Lately, I've been researching dreams as hybrid interfaces, where subconscious perception meets speculative technology. I ask whether dreams are echoes of memory or premonitions of the future. In this inquiry, I use VR and biosensors to create immersive systems that blend real-time signals with generated imagery and sound, turning unconscious fragments into visual and sonic experiences.
Looking ahead, I want to expand this into a multi-phase project exploring "dream recording" as both fiction and near-future possibility. Through sensory interfaces and AI, I hope to map the blurred terrain between memory, desire, and imagination, and question how far we are from designing our own realities.
Artist’s Talk
Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a curated promotional platform that offers artists the opportunity to articulate their vision and engage with our diverse international readership through insightful, published dialogues. Conducted by Mohamed Benhadj, founder and curator of Al-Tiba9, these interviews spotlight the artists’ creative journeys and introduce their work to the global contemporary art scene.
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