Member Spotlight: Ruby Que

Olivia Sherman
Who are you and where are you located?

Ruby Que
My name is Ruby Que. I use they/them pronouns. I'm a video artist, primarily working in installation and performance. I'm based in Chicago.

Olivia Sherman
What brought you to Chicago?

Ruby Que
Grad school, actually.

Olivia Sherman
Where did you go to school?

Ruby Que
I want SAIC for film and video.

Olivia Sherman
What brought you to the New Media Caucus?

Ruby Que
I don't remember. I think I've just been following the Instagram page for a while. Because I work in new media, it just showed up on my page and then I became curious. So I've been following for a while.

Olivia Sherman
What were the factors that led to the development of your style and use of new media?

Ruby Que
I would say that I'm less “new media” compared to a lot of the artists who were in my grad school program. I was a projectionist when I was in college, and I actually have an undergrad degree in computer literature, so I was studying a lot of media theories, but mostly it relates to film and traditional cinema. When I went to grad school, my department was called Film, Video, and New Media. I was very much the film person in my cohort. I work a lot with 16mm film, both shooting it and performing with it. So, I would say I've always worked in media, but digital media is something that I really picked up, especially with projection and installation and mapping. Things I picked up in grad school, mostly.

Olivia Sherman
Do you want to talk a little bit more about the projects you submitted, the process behind them or what they mean to you?

Ruby Que
Yeah, totally. I think when I was asked to submit the single channel videos, I felt a little lost because I mostly work in installation. I typically only make work for that context, and I'm not used to just showing a single channel work.
One of the films, Whatever Hour You Woke There Was a Door Shutting, was shot on a single row of expired 16 millimeter film in a single location called the Poor Farm and it's a residency in Wisconsin.
And the Poor Farm is a space where poor people were sent into indentured servitude. Now the space has been turned into an artist residency, but still, when you're there, you can feel that there's really heavy energy- there's literally a jail cell in the basement. There are a lot of chains around and it's very rural. And when I was there, I started paying attention to the doors and windows and these portal-y spaces.
I was thinking about how the people that lived there in indentured servitude were unable to leave, they were stuck. And then I had always been interested in the concept of hauntings and ghosts.
I'm really influenced by this text by Eve Tuck and C. Ree called A Glossary of Haunting. Thinking about the ghost, it is at once free because it can move through walls and do things without being seen, but it is also stuck because a lot of times ghosts stay because they have unfinished wishes and they're bound to a place. And when I was at Poor Farm, I started documenting these openings.
All the effects were done in camera. I was just thinking about the door as almost a seductive force that a ghost would not be able to traverse.
The title comes from a Virginia Woolf short story called A Haunted House. It's about a couple who goes from room to room every night looking for something that they've lost and well, spoiler alert what they've lost and are now looking for in perpetuity is love, and “whatever hour you woke, there was a door shutting” was the first line of that short story.
The other video I submitted was a super cut of a bunch of hands.
It came from this series of movies from the 80s and 90s, Hong Kong and Taiwan. They all have the word love in the title. So I was thinking a lot about how these movies shaped my understanding of love and intimacy as I was growing up and thinking about the hand as a part of ourselves that is very communicative, but not the face. It's what the hand could convey.
It's like this very popular saying- that “love is a touch and yet not a touch.” It's all these moments where the hands nearly touch, or intimacy that's conveyed through the distancing of a towel, or a watch, or passing through something and when a movie has the word love in the title, does it actually communicate love? And what does love look like?
And I'm isolating only the hands and this video is mostly used in performance and I would pan it across the room on the projector. In a way, I'm touching the audience members with these ghostly hands. Also thinking about the quality of light, where it can reach far beyond where I can physically reach as a body.

Olivia Sherman
You had mentioned earlier that you were a little bit less “new media.” Would you like to explain what new media means to you, and what new media work means to you?

Ruby Que
I think the concept is very malleable. I think a lot of times when people think about new media, they're thinking about AR, VR, virtual environments, or game design a lot of the time.
The way I engage with new media is mostly through digital projections and projection mapping.

Olivia Sherman
What does receiving this award mean to you?

Ruby Que
It's affirming. As artists, we're always looking for recognition, but also financial support. It's so important to have financial support because like myself and like many of my artist friends, we work a million jobs and we're just trying to get by and especially as new media artists, we may not make work that is immediately marketable or sellable. It's hard to sell a video. It's hard to sell an installation or a performance. We're not sculptors or painters who can go to art fairs and sell things and have a career in that sense. So I think it's especially important in the fields of digital media and performance and time-based media to have financial support.

Olivia Sherman
Do you have any current projects that you're working on that you would like to share with us?

Ruby Que
I am working on this body of work that is a little elusive still. It's in its very early stages, but essentially, I'm teaching a few people Cantonese. I’m recording these long sessions of us speaking Cantonese and English and learning to speak each other's language to each other and only cutting out the moments of pauses and stutters. So that's something that I'm working on, and I've been interviewing and talking to three of my friends and recording our sessions. It's still taking shape, but I'm imagining that when it’s installed it’ll be in low parabolic speakers.
So you can only hear the sound when you're right under the speakers and you're kind of showered in it. I think it would be a very intimate experience. So that's something I'm working on.
And then another thing I was working on, I did a residency with the Chicago Puppet Lab last year and I was working on this piece called Touch and it's 4 projectors, 2 puppeteers. I was working with ephemeral materials such as ice, sugar, light and sound.
I was thinking about again, what intimacy looks like in a world that is rapidly changing and connection feels fleeting. I had presented a work in progress of this piece in May, but I am trying to develop it into an hour long for theatrical production, hopefully to be shown next year. So that is also in progress.

Olivia Sherman
Do you have a website that I can link in an interview so that anyone that reads it can see your work?

Ruby Que
rubyque.net