“Secret Mirrors” Presented to a Full House in New York: Anna Ren Reshapes the Poetry Site Through Real-Time Audiovisual Systems, Establishing Her Strength as a Top Multimedia Artist
The live audiovisual poetry work “Secret Mirrors,” created in collaboration between New York multimedia artist He Ren (aka Anna Ren) and poet and performer Catherine Chen, was presented by Heat Lightning in SoHo, New York, on May 30, 2026. As a ticketed live performance, the event attracted more than 70 audience members, including press and publishing professionals, and the space was full.
This presentation not only confirmed the success of “Secret Mirrors” as a cross-practice between New York new media performance and the poetry scene, but also further highlighted Anna Ren’s top ability in integrating real-time imagery, interactive systems, projection design, CG animation, and live performance.
“Secret Mirrors” is a live system jointly composed of language, body, sound, image, and machine. During the performance, when the audience entered the space, cyborg silhouettes moved through the gallery: faceless, searching, crossing, and separating; the poet’s body moved through the same environment. As the poem proceeded, the originally readable text gradually disintegrated into ASCII characters and glitch images, and the body and language were encoded, cut apart, delayed, and played back in a machine-like way.
Ren constructed a complete real-time audiovisual system for the work. She combined pre-rendered CG animation with TouchDesigner real-time shaders, and carried out projection mapping through MadMapper, allowing the images to respond, deform, and accumulate on site as the poetry was read. Text deleted from the poem reappeared in the space, while the poet’s earlier voice returned through delay, forming a dislocation between the visual and the sonic: the deleted language returned as image, and the spoken language returned as echo. At the end of the performance, the projection entered a blue interface similar to a system error and continued to accumulate until the screen was pressed white by information, pushing the core question of “what happens after a body is input into a machine” to its limit.
The presentation by Heat Lightning further constituted the live authority of “Secret Mirrors.” Heat Lightning is a New York performance series founded in 2025 by poets Zoë Bodzas and Michy Woodward, focusing on pairing poets with visual artists and performance spaces across media, with work settings ranging from galleries and record stores to listening rooms. As an important collaborative project in its May 30 SoHo gallery edition, “Secret Mirrors” connected poetry, new media art, and New York’s live performance ecology. Catherine Chen’s poetry collection “Beautiful Machine Woman Language” was published by Noemi Press in 2023, and the work’s experience comes from their work as an Amazon Echo data transcriptionist, while Ren’s visual system transformed this textual experience into a live experience about the datafication of the body, the processing of memory, and the saving and mishearing of voice.
Audience feedback showed that Ren’s visual system provided the poetry reading with a deep structure beyond background projection. The image was not decoration, but a second live site that advanced the narrative together with the verses: it made the dislocation of text visible in spatial form, allowing the audience to enter the work simultaneously through vision, hearing, and bodily perception. The full attendance of more than 70 ticketed audience members, the participation of press and publishing professionals, and the positive live feedback toward the real-time visual system together proved that “Secret Mirrors” was not only a successful event presentation, but also a high-quality case worthy of record within New York’s cross-media performance scene.
Through “Secret Mirrors,” Anna Ren clearly demonstrated her core competitiveness as a top multimedia artist: she can not only produce images, but also build systems; she can not only handle visual form, but also integrate technology, space, text, body, and sound into a live whole with dramatic structure. In the field of contemporary multimedia art, the truly scarce ability is not mastering a certain software or medium, but establishing a unified artistic language among real-time computation, CG, projection, bodily performance, and conceptual narration. “Secret Mirrors” is precisely a concentrated proof of this ability.
Ren’s industry position is also not built on a single project. She graduated from the Interactive Media Arts program at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, has long been trained in real-time and CG workflows such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, and TouchDesigner, and has connected visual design, animation, interactive installation, expanded cinema, dance, and live performance into a personal creative method. Her work “Place Untitled” was selected for the ACM TEI’26 Art and Performance Track and was presented at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago as a performance combining live visuals, dance, and real-time systems; its related expanded abstract and art paper also entered important platforms in the fields of electronic/interactive art and human-computer interaction, including TEI and ISEA.
“The Guinea Pig Eligibility Test,” which she collaborated on with Maggie Yuhanxiao Ma, was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival Expanded Conference in Linz, Austria, its related paper was published in the ACM Library, and in the two-person exhibition at THE BLANC in New York, the exhibition period was extended because related online dissemination received more than 1 million likes and 5 million views in a single day. Her CG animation “In Between” also entered the semifinalist round of the Cannes Indie Shorts Award, received an award from SMTH International Content 5th Edition, and was screened at 13 venues across multiple cities in Spain and on the large media wall of AURORA Video Art Night / AT&T Discovery District in Dallas.
These experiences together point to a clear fact: Anna Ren is not “trying to cross boundaries” among different media, but is using multimedia systems to establish her own artistic method. Her practice has both international platform recognition and public dissemination ability; it can enter academic and art-institution contexts, and can also generate direct perceptual effects before live audiences. The reason “Secret Mirrors” is important is precisely that it compresses this ability into a high-density live site — the fragility of poetry, the presence of the body, the processing logic of the machine, the real-time generation of images, and the delayed return of sound were integrated by Ren into a complete and critical audiovisual system.
Today, as new media art continuously expands toward real-time, immersive, AI, and machine perception, “Secret Mirrors” proves Anna Ren’s leading position among multimedia artists of the same generation. Her work does not simply chase technological trends, but uses technology to question the human condition: when memory is filtered by systems, when the body is translated into information, when voice becomes data that can be delayed, played back, and misread, how does art redefine “presence”? It is precisely on this question that Ren demonstrates the originality, technical integration ability, and conceptual depth that a top creator should possess.
By David Chen.
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