A multidisciplinary artist, Helen Yung will present a work entitled Gulliver’s Travels, a theatre of no actors. Gulliver’s Travels is also, as everyone knows, the title of a novel by Jonathan Swift, a satirical work written in 1721 of exceptional richness and depth. Although we often take this book for a children’s story, it is in fact a more philosophical tale of a larger scale.

A networked installation, Gulliver’s Travels by Helen Yung uses the most remembered image of Swift’s work as its point of departure: You enter to find a figure lying on the ground. Pinned down with a thousand tiny pegs, face twisting, the marionette struggles to turn to you, appealing for your help. Combining traditional puppetry techniques and digital text-to-speech technology, the artist Helen Yung creates the story live, on-site. To add color and character to the speech produced by the text-to-speech engine, the sound is processed live using digital effects.

This type of hybrid of old and new, analog and digital, high and low art is not the first creation of the young author and scenographer.

Helen Yung has made a number of artistic achievements including String Theory, an analog interactive social storytelling installation created for the 2009 festival iNiT; and Atypical Audio Guide, a parody of conventional audio guides used in museums, developed the year before in 2008 as part of “Knock on Woods: An International Roving Residency”, a program presented by Yvette Poorter and Mercer Union.

During her artistic career, Helen Yung has received several grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and also the Canada Council for the Arts. Among her other activities, Helen also serves as a member of the Steering Committee for Cultural Pluralism in the Performing Arts Movement of Ontario and the Advisory Council for the Ontario Nonprofit Network.