10 Questions with Wei-Fang Chang

Wei-Fang Chang is a video designer and creative technologist from Taiwan, based in Los Angeles. With extensive experience in projection design, motion graphics, and interactive programming, particularly in live experiences, she shapes her visual language through video design in theatre, dance, and interactive installations, exploring meditative imagery of nature and the uncanny perception of the screen-based self.

Wei-Fang has contributed as a designer, animator, and programmer for theatre and multimedia productions across the U.S. and Taiwan, with works presented at venues including CalArts, LA Dance Project, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, REDCAT, Taipei Performing Arts Center, and National Taichung Theater. She freelances as a TouchDesigner developer, has presented a talk at the DATLAB TouchDesigner Meetup in New York, and has developed for installation projects with Nightlight Labs, a Los Angeles-based interactive media company.

Fascinated by work that engages audiences, Wei-Fang creates immersive video environments that alter the perception of time in live performance. Cancer Space, an interactive theatre piece, explores the psychosomatic space of a cancer-afflicted body. Her projections invite audiences to touch and trigger film fragments, and connect them to their "inner cancer" without dialogue. In Heading into Night, a clown theatre performance, her video design for a scene "Amazing Race" expands physical space into a fragmented landscape of fleeting memories, immersing the performer in a collage of past moments. In Materiality of Surrender, a dance performance in a parking lot, she transformed a car into an organic machine with TV monitors as internal organs. Live cameras snake through performers' mouths, across their skin, and through their eyes, blurring the line between mechanical probing and sensuality.

Her video installations explore the uncanny divide between the screen-based and physical body. In LOOK AT ME, a two-channel video installation, misaligned monitors and cameras prevent viewers from making direct eye contact with their own digital image, creating a sense of displacement, an "outsideness" where one's reflection feels unfamiliar, disrupting self-perception. AR t, a poetic AR piece, transforms freewriting(?) on "ART" into a dynamic search process, pulling YouTube videos as definitions become queries. As viewers wave a hand before the phone, titles morph into a fragmented, code-like article, mirroring the fleeting consumption of meaningless digital content.

Wei-Fang holds a BS in Interaction Design from Taipei University of Technology and has earned an MFA in Theatre Design from California Institute of the Arts, specialising in Interactive Media for Performance.

www.wei-fang.com | @w._.mp4

MATERIALITY OF SURRENDER, Video Design, 2024 © Wei-Fang Chang

INTERVIEW

You have a fascinating background that bridges design, technology, and performance. Could you tell us how your journey began and what first drew you to the intersection of visual design and live experience?

Since I was a kid, I got used to the sense of liveness through music. I played euphonium in a concert band for about eight years, and that experience taught me what it means for time to constantly move, to feel rhythm not just as beats but as something that connects people in the same space. Later, when I studied interaction design at university, my focus was on motion design. At the same time, I was still drawn to live performances, and that feeling of liveness was always beyond language. I was not satisfied with only exporting a video as the video itself, when doing motion graphics, and started to seek what the system is behind a live event as a video designer.
I became curious about how moving images could exist within time-based performance, how visuals could stay alive. My first opportunity came when a student theatre group in Taipei invited me to design a video for their production. Seeing my visuals go out of my screen and expand in a spatial container in a theatre was the moment I truly felt that spark. The image began to speak for itself, sometimes even in unexpected ways, and that experience completely drew me in.

DREAM, theater video design, 2023 © Wei-Fang Chang

Having studied Interaction Design in Taipei and later Theatre Design at CalArts, how have these two different educational contexts shaped your current artistic language?

One is a tech university, and the other is a weird art school. My training in these two opposite educational systems shaped how I see technology as an expressive medium rather than just a tool, and art as a tool for expression. My design education in Taipei was highly technical, grounding me in function, precision, and system logic. CalArts, on the other hand, was wild and free, constantly pushing me to unlearn structure and embrace ambiguity. I’m grateful to have expanded both my left and right hands: one grounded in technical rigour, the other reaching toward artistic intuition.
Being a video designer and creative technologist places me right between these two worlds. My current practice exists between these realms, where technology becomes an expressive material, and poetic ideas are translated into interactive systems. People often debate whether art and design are the same or different, and I’ve found myself living in that in-between space.

Much of your work merges projection, motion graphics, and interactive programming, as you mention in your statement. What led you to explore these media as your primary tools for expression?

I’m drawn to how machines or systems can participate and even have a sense of agency in the creative process. The unexpected noise or behaviour a system produces often becomes the aura we seek in live performance. That sense of unpredictability and liveness keeps me exploring ways to build systems that feel alive, where technology doesn’t just execute but responds. Video and projection are not merely backdrops but containers for this liveness, a visual form through which presence can emerge, as another layer of information, or even as a character that speaks to the audience. During rehearsals, I try to sense the rhythm of the room, to breathe with the movement on stage. Feeling comes first, and then the image follows, finding its own place within the space.

LOOKUP, video installation, 2025 © Wei-Fang Chang

Your projects often unfold within live performances where the audience becomes part of the experience. How do you approach designing for interactivity and live events?

The spectator is integral to the completion of the work. The essence of installation art lies in participation, in creating an open-ended invitation for the viewer to enter the piece. Audience agency is not something I impose but something the form itself calls for, turning spectatorship into a kind of collaboration. In many of my video installations, I use live cameras that depend on the viewer’s presence. Without the audience, there is no subject to capture, no image to form, and ultimately no work to exist. What interests me is that delicate space where the audience and the system co-create the experience, where presence itself becomes the material of the piece.

The themes of perception, the digital self, and the relationship between body and screen recur throughout your work. What continues to draw you to these ideas, and how have they evolved in your recent projects?

What draws me to this idea is realising that in a video meeting, I can never truly see my own eyes. I can see my face, but my gaze never meets itself. That subtle distance created when a live camera is used as a mirror became the starting point of my curiosity. In my installation works, I use cameras as mirrors to capture the viewer’s portrait, deliberately positioning the monitors and cameras to create a logical conflict, an outsideness that reveals the uncanny gap between a screen-based body and a physical body.
Spectators see themselves through the eyes of another viewer, and I am fascinated by the idea that this “other viewer” is oneself, the way the screen-based self exists within the context of video. This disconnect creates a split subject, a distance between how one experiences the self and how the self is mediated on screen. I am drawn to this in-between state, where the image is both familiar and strange. The viewer’s discomfort when faced with their not-quite-right reflection becomes a way to question perception and the reliability of vision.

Pieces like Cancer Space and Materiality of Surrender invite a deep emotional and physical engagement from the audience. What role does empathy or discomfort play in your creative process?

Discomfort for me is a way to bring awareness. It creates a distance that allows people to see themselves differently. Empathy happens when that distance starts to dissolve, when the audience recognises something familiar within that strangeness. I’m interested in that delicate balance between the two, where feeling uneasy can also lead to connection.
For example, in *Materiality of Surrender* (2024), I hid a snake-like inspection camera inside a pile of cable costumes, and the dancer eventually swallowed it. The live image from inside the mouth revealed the inner membranes of the body, visceral and unsettling. One audience member even screamed when the image appeared. That moment captured what I seek in my work, where discomfort heightens awareness and empathy emerges from the intensity of feeling.

Danton’s Death, theater video design, 2025 © Wei-Fang Chang

Your installation LOOK AT ME and AR t both examine the mediated image and digital fragmentation. How do you see technology shaping, or distorting, self-perception in today’s society?

I’m drawn to the hidden language within our interactions with technology, the subtle patterns our bodies and eyes unconsciously repeat through screens and cameras. These gestures quietly sculpt how we understand and imagine ourselves today.
I often think of technology as forming a new kind of pattern language. Every small interaction, such as scrolling, swiping, or glancing at a reflection on a screen, becomes a recurring rhythm shared by almost everyone. In my works *LOOK AT ME* and *AR t*, I treat these micro-behaviours as fragments of that language. They reveal how technology shapes our perception not by force but through repetition and familiarity, teaching our bodies and minds to move, look, and even feel in sync with machines.

Collaboration seems central to your practice, especially across disciplines like dance and theatre. How do you navigate the balance between technological structure and performative spontaneity in these collaborations?

Being a video designer means working with a different kind of body. A dancer or actor has their spirit and body united in one presence, but as a video designer, my body extends through screens, cameras, and systems. The work is technically demanding, yet I find that spontaneity comes from confidence in the tools themselves. Once you understand the limits of the technology, you also understand how to bend them, and that is where spontaneity begins. In collaboration, I try tocreate a system that is stable enough for performers to trust, but open enough to respond to their energy in liveness.

Heading Into Night, theater video design, 2024 © Wei-Fang Chang

Could you share more about your current or upcoming projects? Are there specific ideas or technologies you’re eager to experiment with next?

Recently, I worked on a large-scale video installation, *Solar XI*, at MoCA Taipei, a collaboration with LuxuryLogico that reimagines their long-term project *Solar*, which has been travelling the world since 2010, collecting light fixtures from different cities. For this new version, we transformed 301 recycled tablet screens into an artificial sun, exploring how people today are constantly exposed to information.
For this project, I designed all the video content for 301 individual tablets and built a rendering system that connects them into one synchronised flow of visuals, a sun made of 380 million pixels. The video begins with a natural, fiery volcanic sun that gradually breaks into glitches, symbols, icons, scrolling images, and fragments from social media and AI-generated visuals. Eventually, it dissolves into white text on a black background, prompts and code that reflect the invisible architecture of our digital world. It becomes a metaphor for how we transform under the same sun, yet experience it through different vessels, the real one, the one on screens, in pixels, on social media, and within AI algorithms.
I am always eager to find new containers for video to express itself, whether through installation, gesture, screen, camera, or a single block of colour. I am especially interested in moments when video moves out of its intangible form into physical space, as in installations or on stage, where it can coexist with the body and the environment.

Lastly, looking ahead, where do you see yourself and your artistic practice in the next five years? What goals drive you forward?

I want to keep working with people I connect with, where collaboration feels warm and real. Every day is part of my practice, and the everyday becomes the foundation of art. I hope to keep taking on projects from around the world, learning through different contexts and communities. I want to stay alive to the moment, to keep being surprised, and to let art remind me what it means to feel.

Artist’s Talk

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