Susie Fu

Statement

As a Chinese-American new media Artist-Engineer based in New York, Susie Fu uses her dual identities in opposition and collaboration in her working process. Fu shows great interest in observing humanness on the extreme ends of the scale: intimately individual, and collectively uniform. Many of her artwork explores the subjective self through manufactured mirages and performances; while employs non-human automation to reflect and summarize the collective.

“I look at myself through others.
I look at uniqueness through sameness.
I look at humans through machines.
I look at machines through humans.”

GlogauAIR Project

I would like to develop a project tentatively called “Room of Realities”. It will be a performance piece where the viewers are performing for themselves. In this room, I’d like to create a place where viewers (i.e. performers) go in one at a time and experience a reality that is not quite right. The room, like an IKEA showcase room, feels like it could be their home.

In this space of safety and comfort, they experience a slightly alternated world. There are art pieces on the walls that look strangely personalized. There is a TV playing a news clip—is it real? There are mirrors that show the performer in an altered way. There is a typewriter and it seems to be writing about the performer. The longer the performer stays in the room, the more they will feel less at home.

The room will be automated by algorithms. It will be designed by a human but run on its own. The materials the room generates will be of its own creation.

I am interested in this project because I want to observe people in performance, in how they see themselves, and in a seemingly natural environment. In an exaggerated version of the world, the room parodies the nature of surveillance that we experience through the data we give to machines. What happens when data is used for us, and what happens when it is used against us? And what happens when we perform for data? I am especially interested in developing this project at GlogauAIR because I am excited to see how the piece can respond to the close community of artists that live and breathe next to the piece in development and the algorithms in training.

CV Summary

EDUCATION

• Formal:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. USA – B.S. Computer Science – 2012
• Other:
  • School for Poetic Computation, New York, NY. USA – 2018
    • Gray Area Foundation for the Arts Immersive, San Francisco, CA. USA – 2017

EXHIBITIONS

• 2019 – WiDS Conference Art Gallery “Artist and Machine” (Duo), Stanford, CA. USA
• 2018 – School for Poetic Computation, “Student Showcase” (Group), New York, NY. USA
• 2018 – Pixel Cave, “Self Portraits” (Solo), San Francisco, CA. USA
• 2017 – Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, “Immersive Showcase” (Group), San Francisco, CA. USA