Lili Shen, the London-based artist, uses AI, VR and biometric signals to build immersive worlds from heartbeats, sleep rhythms and fragments of the subconscious.
Lili Shen works with the sort of information most people only meet as numbers: a pulse rate, a sleep pattern, a phrase pulled from a dream. In the hands of a doctor, designer or fitness app, these signals usually become evidence for treatment or product rollouts.
In her work, they become atmosphere. The London-based artist, whose background spans interaction design and visual communication, uses AI, data visualisation, VR and sensory installation to ask a deceptively simple question: what happens when the body’s hidden signals are allowed to take up space?
Shen’s answer is neither clinical nor sentimental. She does not use technology to tidy emotion into a chart, but to make feelings harder to ignore. A heartbeat can become a rhythm in a room. A dream can become a place. A fragment of personal data can start to behave like weather.
That shift sits at the centre of her recent work around the Noosphere, a concept associated with a collective layer of human thought and consciousness. For Shen, it is not just an intellectual reference point. It is a working site: a place where private memories, sleep states and emotional residues can be translated into immersive digital environments.
Courtesy of the artist
In Noosphere (2025), dreams are not treated as symbolic puzzles to be solved. They are raw material. Brainwave activity, dream texts and bodily signals are gathered, processed and returned as shifting visual structures. The work does not try to illustrate a dream in any literal sense. It captures something closer to the feeling of waking from one: images arriving too quickly, then slipping away before language can pin them down.
The result is not a screen-based spectacle so much as a state of suspension. Shen’s environments resemble “enterable states.” They invite the viewer to move inside a mood rather than simply look at an image.
Forms blur, fold and reappear. The familiar becomes unstable. The body is present, but not fully in control of what it perceives. That uncertainty becomes sharper in Noosphere II: Collective Veil, where Shen pushes the dream world into a more expansive audiovisual and spatial system. Using AI-driven diffusion streams, TouchDesigner and immersive media, the work translates heartbeats, sleep rhythms and dream phrases into fluid digital structures. The subconscious is no longer framed as a sealed private chamber. It becomes shared territory.
This is where Shen’s idea of “soft architecture” begins to matter. The phrase could easily sound decorative, but in the work, it has weight. These are not buildings in any conventional sense. They are temporary structures made from sensation, memory and data. They appear, shift, thin out and reform. They feel closer to mist, fabric or breath than to walls.
Courtesy of the artist
The space “breathes,” and that detail is crucial. Shen’s environments do not simply move for visual effect. Their motion is tied to bodies, signals and emotional states. Data becomes material, but not in the hard language of dashboards or surveillance systems. It becomes translucent, unstable and oddly intimate.
There is a quiet unease in that transformation. Shen’s work understands the seduction of immersive technology, but it also keeps asking what such systems might cost. When intimate signals become visible, who controls them? When vulnerability is translated into an audiovisual environment, does it become more shareable or more exposed? When dreams can be stored, processed and replayed, do they remain private?
These questions stop the work from becoming a simple celebration of technological possibility. Shen is not making sleek futures for their own sake. Her installations sit closer to the nervous edge of contemporary life, where the self is constantly tracked, optimised and interpreted by devices. Sleep becomes a dataset. Exercise becomes proof of discipline. Anxiety becomes a pattern to be monitored.
Her earlier projects make that concern clear. Works involving sleep and exercise data examine how self-tracking technologies shape behaviour as much as they measure it. They turn fatigue, resilience and digital pressure into sensory experience. The point is not that technology is bad. The point is that it changes the way people relate to their own bodies.
That concern also runs through works such as Behind the Mask and Connecting Door. These projects look at intimacy, exclusion and visibility in mediated environments. They ask who gets recognised by systems, who is left outside them, and what happens to emotional contact when it has to pass through cameras, interfaces and rules.
Across these works, Shen returns to the same charged territory: the place where technology touches private life. She is interested in the moment before data becomes neutral, before it is cleaned up and made useful. Her work stays with the messy part: the tremor, the hesitation, the signal that still carries traces of the person who produced it.
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That is what gives Noosphere II: Collective Veil its force. It imagines collective consciousness not as a grand, utopian network, but as something fragile and partial. A shared mind, in Shen’s world, is not smooth or unified. It is made from fragments: a pulse, a sleep rhythm, a dream sentence, a visual glitch, a memory that refuses to settle.
Courtesy of the artist
The work also resists the coldness often associated with AI art. Shen’s use of generative systems is not about showing off the machine. It is about building conditions in which the machine becomes part of a larger emotional process. AI helps produce the environment, but it does not replace the human subject at its centre. The technology is felt as a membrane, not a master.
Shen’s practice has been shown in the UK and internationally, including Milan, Vienna, Seoul and London, and has been featured in Artist Talk Magazine and AI-Tiba9 Contemporary. That international reach feels apt for an artist working with shared consciousness, networked emotion and the increasingly porous boundary between private and public life.
At its strongest, her work gives form to a condition many people know but struggle to describe: the sense that inner life is no longer entirely internal. Our bodies are measured. Our habits are stored. Our emotions leave traces. Shen takes that reality and refuses to leave it in the hands of platforms, apps and metrics.
Instead, she turns those traces into rooms, veils, pulses and dreamlike fields. Her installations ask whether data can hold tenderness. They ask whether technology can carry memory without flattening it. They ask whether vulnerability can enter a shared system and still remain human.
Shen’s work begins with measurement, but it does not end there. It moves towards something stranger, softer and more alive: an architecture of feeling, built from the signals we usually leave behind.
©2026 Lili Shen
Contributing writer at Art Plugged chronicling contemporary art’s beautiful mess, when he can get there. Now edging behind the camera, making insightful documentaries about artists and the work that haunts them. Survives on openings, opinions, one gallery, one artwork at a time. Considers espresso a meal.