Yiying Lu: The Failure Interview
Creator of Twitter’s Fail Whale presents her first solo exhibit.
Written by Filed under Arts & Entertainment, Life
Tell me more about your upcoming exhibit.
The show is being sponsored by Australian Web Week, and will consist of two parts. One part is my artwork on canvas. The other is the Augmented Reality (AR) part, created in conjunction with MOB, pioneers in AR technology.
I came up with the concept of having a huge screen in front of viewers, who will get a T-shirt that has a QR code. Viewers will sit in front of the screen, and the [bird] cage on their T-shirt will be detected by a camera, so on the screen, they’ll not only see themselves wearing the T-shirt, there will also be animation—a huge blue bird coming out from the T-shirt. And on the body of the bird—which is in a speech bubble shape—observers will see other people’s tweets. So it’s an interaction between the viewer, his or her screen, and somebody else using Twitter.
What do you hope to get out of the exhibition?
It’s a great chance for me to interact with the public. I don’t often have the opportunity to see my audience face-to-face and get their feedback. But it won’t just be me showing my work and other people passively receiving it. Everyone will have the opportunity to experience the fusion of art, design and Twitter through AR.
Do you have any regrets in terms of your career thus far?
It has been a good experience so far. If I hadn’t put Lifting up a Dreamer on iStockphoto.com none of this would have occurred. At the same time, I’ve learned a lot from the experience. It’s great that Fail Whale has become one of the icons of Web 2.0, but I’ve learned that being a creative, a lot of care needs to be taken in terms of intellectual property.
My only regret is that I have lot of interesting ideas, but due to the global recession, some of my partners have been forced to reduce or cancel some of the projects. And being a young entrepreneur, I need more connections and initial funding in order for my business to sprout and grow. I guess in this climate of economic failure, everyone can use a smiling Fail Whale to make them feel better!
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