Empowering Communities through Collaborative Experimentation with Technology
The audiovisual material that forms the basis of the Inter(mediate) Spaces XR installation will come largely contributions from participants in a series of community-based living labs, titled "Reflections".
We are hosting in three diverse communities around the world.
What are living labs?
The concept of a Living Laboratory was first explored by MIT researchers, William Mitchell, Kent Larson and Alex Pentland. They argued that living lab represents a user-centric research methodology for sensing, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real-life contexts.
Workshops culminate in a community archive and participants’ images, audio and writings become the basis of our custom AI system used to create visual landscapes in Inter(mediate) Spaces.
Chloé Lee, the director and producer of the project, is an artist and producer based in Berlin.
“In 2021, I left New York City, a place I called home for 10 years, on a Fulbright Scholarship to make a VR project in Berlin. I wanted to understand what it meant to create meaning in a place where I had no personal history. My family has a history of migration. Like my ancestors, many migrate today not out of choice - as it was for me - but because they are forced out by war and other external circumstances. Yet, they create community despite constraint. In Berlin, I found a community in the process of creating, and I wanted to bring this process to aspects of my life where there was disconnection.
As a Chinese-American woman living in Berlin, a city without a Chinatown, I have found myself longing for the connection to Chinese community I had in New York City. At the same time, my curiosity about technology has brought me closer to other cultures and people in Berlin. This project is a way I can bridge these gaps while questioning the ways in which technology is developed and adopted into our daily lives. ”
