New York multimedia artist He Ren (aka Anna Ren) brought her interactive projection installation Place Untitled to the first East ON Fest in Downtown Easton, Pennsylvania, on September 18–19, 2026, carrying a real-time system developed through ACM TEI ’26 and the CAA Annual Conference into public space.
Invited by the East ON Foundation as One of 21 Artists, Groups, and Studios, Anna Ren Turned a Downtown Wall into a Live Archive of Everyone Who Passed It
The interactive projection installation Place Untitled, by New York-based multimedia artist He Ren (aka Anna Ren), drew more than 2,000 visitors over two nights at the first edition of East ON Fest, a light and projection festival in Downtown Easton, Pennsylvania, held September 18–19, 2026. Ren was invited by the East ON Foundation to present the work as one of 21 local, regional, and international artists, groups, and studios.
Easton marked the first time Ren adapted Place Untitled from a performance into a public installation. The performance was presented in the Art and Performance Track of ACM TEI ’26 at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and at the CAA 114th Annual Conference, and its full art paper will premiere in the academic program of ISEA 2026 in November. Bringing the work onto a city street meant rebuilding it so that the audience no longer watches it but supplies all of its content.
Walking along a street in Downtown Easton, passersby found their own silhouettes projected onto a wall. Each glowing outline settled over the traces of everyone who had stood there before, so a person who stopped became part of the image and stayed in it after they left. As the night went on, the wall grew denser: a crowd made of people who were never there at the same moment.
Ren designed and built the system herself. A depth camera tracks bodies passing in front of the projection, and her TouchDesigner pipeline extracts each silhouette and returns it to the wall, where it accumulates alongside earlier visitors. The same data records every engagement, so the piece works as a data-driven archive of the street as well as an image of it. Combining body tracking, projection, and archiving in a civic setting, the installation shows that a performance system built for a stage can operate in public space for an audience that never planned to see art.
The work uses time as its material and asks what a place keeps of the people who pass through it. Ren draws on Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, treating place as something the people in it keep producing rather than as fixed architecture.
“In a performance, I decide how the body moves,” Ren said. “On a street, whoever walks by determines the work, and they stay in it after they leave. I wanted to see what a place remembers when nobody is performing for it.” The Lafayette, Lafayette College’s student newspaper, quoted Ren in its September 18 preview of the festival, where she described East ON Fest as a “public setting to showcase” her work.
East ON Fest is the flagship event of the East ON Foundation, a newly launched 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by Andrea Rincon (President) and Duvan Ayala (Vice President), who has produced art projections in Philadelphia and New York City for more than a decade. The festival turned the Church Street and Bank Street corridor into a walkable gallery of light, with architectural projections and interactive work on building facades and inside First United Church of Christ and the Easton Public Market. It grew out of PORTAL, a 2025 preview produced with the Greater Easton Development Partnership, and its first edition was supported by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, with Panasonic as technology partner and Hindle Power as supporting sponsor. Lehigh Valley Public Media previewed the festival in December 2025.
Place Untitled extends a record of international recognition. Ren’s CGI film In-Between won the V Certamen para Estudiantes de Arte Digital (SMTH), which brought it to screens at 13 venues across multiple cities in Spain. It was also shown on the large media wall of AURORA Video Art Night at the AT&T Discovery District in Dallas, selected by Denver Digerati, and named a semifinalist at the Cannes Indie Shorts Awards. The Guinea Pig Eligibility Test, created with Maggie Yuhanxiao Ma, was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival Expanded Conference in Linz, Austria, with its paper published in the ACM Digital Library; its two-person exhibition at THE BLANC in New York was extended after online coverage of the work drew more than 1 million likes and 5 million views in a single day.
Ren holds a BFA in Interactive Media Arts from New York University Tisch School of the Arts and works across CGI, projection, installation, and performance. Her work returns to belonging, memory, and displacement. In Easton, those themes took a direct form: a place shaped by everyone who passed through it, and a record in which no one stood alone in the frame.
