Artist Statement

New media offer enormous possibilities for documenting cultural experiences and interpretations. The use of technology in service of cultural heritage can be challenging, especially when the artefact involves a physical site such as Chinatown, with intangible sensory features of spatial interactions and emotional experiences. The use of new media applications can focus and engagingly convey the immense richness and diversity of the emerging historical record within an intimately coherent and viscerally arresting narrative. In capturing the plurality of transitory moments that constitute the life and times of Chinatown, rather than re-construct/reproduce/ re-present the cultural heritage in linear fashion, the work-in-progress project, ComposingYou_Chinatown, adopts an experimental approach that integrates art practice and interactive media. Utilizing locative media and public projection, the all encompassing experiential interaction generates perceptual insights into -and reflections of- past memories, while offering opportunities to experience the present, and to envision the future. An artist talk will discuss the strategies and theoretic concerns in exploring cultural heritage through the use of interactive media, an attempt to advocate the value of aesthetic art experience through which visual/sound qualities allow our sensory processing systems to adapt and emerge with new vision that could generate harmony and peace with the current states of Chinatown.

• Judy Jheung, Judy Jheung Studio, Canada. Judy Jheung is a Vancouver, Canada, based interdisciplinary artist. Her participatory/interactive media installations explore global issues in context of urban movements. She holds a BFA degree from University of Calgary and an MFA from Pratt Institute, New York. Between 2012-14, Jheung conducted PhD research studies on interactive “art games” at Simon Fraser University, SIAT.