Ideal Home is an extended-reality (XR) narrative project exploring how immigrant experiences and the concept of home are reshaped through emerging technologies. Immigrant writers were invited to co-create a text archive of memory and displacement. A fine-tuned GPT-4 model rewrote it into a unified script, transforming cultural symbols into something unexpected.
By embedding the script into a game engine, the project blurs oral history and generative fiction, offering an alternative mode of engagement. A ghostly AI avatar drifts through layered interfaces, landscapes, and symbols, guiding players through flickering memories and cultural echoes—co-authoring a new language of belonging with machine intelligence.
Installed as a part of the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition exhibited in The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU. Curated by Misa Jeffereis (Associate Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis), Egbert Vongmalaithong (Assistant Curator, ICA at VCU), and Chase Westfall (Head of Gallery and Exhibitions, VCUarts Qatar), the 2025 exhibition reveals a cross-section of emergent practices that are rooted in collaboration, experimentation, and the urgency to make meaning in an ever-changing world.
