INTER(MEDIATE) SPACES

2024.-2025
Extended Reality Installation, Living Lab Series, Web XR
Runtime: 25-30 minutes

This project is in an early development and research phase. It has received public funding from Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg through 2025. It was a finalist in Dok Leipzig’s November 2023 Exchange XR, a pitch presentation showcase, as well as The Portal’s inaugural International Delegates pitch forum at Re.publica in May 2024.

Inter(mediate) Spaces (IMS), a generative AI virtual reality (VR) experience, brings two people in separate physical locations together, to walk through and shape a shared, ever-shifting virtual space, where they see the impact that their words and dynamics have on the environment around them.

This experimental fourth place explores and creates new ways of sharing space, immersing us in 3D reflective and abstract worlds that ‘glitch’, blur and morph. A collaged, impossible cityscape heterotopia, with wild green patches pushing through crevices of highrises. As participants walk on an abstract 3D scaffolded walkway, the material of our avatar bodies reflect back to us our emergent world, a curved mirroring of reality or unique lens through which we perceive the world. As they recall memories aloud, walls shift, revealing a creek, not unlike the one that they described. Waxy leaves of loquat trees sway, voices echo, and we see shared landscapes and future projections.

IMS uses new technology to visualize and understand complex data processing systems that shape our daily lives but are often obscured. Drawing inspiration from Beth Coleman's Reality Was Whatever Happened, IMS approaches AI as a collaborator, where different ways of 'thinking’ join to envisage new, otherly landscapes and possibilities that embody the diverse dreams and visions of individuals and places around the world.

Developers and city planners have the power to create spaces that are conducive for community building, but should they alone imagine and decide what others’ shared spaces look like? Inter(mediate) Spaces says “No”, and does it in two parts: a series of in-person Living Labs in New York, Montreal and Berlin and a traveling VR installation.

Inter(mediate) Spaces concept art. Two people standing on opposite sides of a virtual space.

Reflections: A Digital Memory Living Lab in Chinatown (NYC) at Index on Walker Street. Part of Inter(mediate) Spaces.

Inter(mediate) Spaces “Reflections: A Digital Memory Living Lab” series invites people from each community to partake in this free five hour one day event to collectively reflect on placemaking, memories, and collaborate through guided writing exercises, AI generations, interviews and walks to enrich the future of each community. The lab does not require prior technical expertise and is open to everyone. All necessary technology and tools will be provided. The materials produced by participants in this lab series shall include personal images, videos, audio and writings. By the end of the day, curated works will be installed in an online 3D gallery and the materials become the basis for the long-term VR installation.

The labs are held in three different places, and New York City’s Chinatown was one that naturally came to mind first. It was a neighborhood that felt like home when I lived in New York. I held the first successful lab there on August 3rd, 2024, after a pilot lab that was held in Berlin on May 11, 2024.

The next lab, November 17, 2024, will be held in Montreal at a community center that my grandfather runs for the Lee Association. This organization, whose members share the same last name, is struggling to find ways to engage the younger generation. With this lab series, I hope to bring an intergenerational group together.

What is a Living Lab?
Typically in a workshop, participants are given a set method to learn from one person or a select few. Here, the living lab format redistributes power to stakeholders who are deemed capable of contributing valued knowledge, and who co-create and participate in an exchange of knowledge. The project takes the stance that this approach can and should extend to the process of designing their shared physical spaces, where communities can imagine and realize the shared spaces that would better serve them as stakeholders.

Photos by Wei-Ta Chen

Chloé Lee facilitating at Reflections: A Digital Memory Living Lab in Chinatown (NYC) at Index.

Reflections: A Digital Memory Living Lab in Chinatown (NYC) at Index. August 2024. Inter(mediate) Spaces.