Despite the water saturated air, crumbling begins at the fringes. I wonder: how do we keep these crumbling moments? Once they are not-so-perfect anymore, we crush the mud leaves into the ground, mix them back into the pool of mud that bore them. Soon that will also be gone, enveloped by a shadow under a durian tree.
Though we may not see it, our smallest interactions shape and leave a trace on the world around us. In Temporal World, visitors explore an ephemeral memory world inspired by places that have varying levels of connection to me; from the personal, to the familial to the foreign.
In the experience, visitors meet Ismail, a Turkish flutist and nomad who I met while walking through Berlin. As an Asian-American artist, I have explored themes of migration, starting with my own family’s history. I came to Berlin to explore what it meant to find connection in a place I had no personal history.
While this VR world is made of 3D places and sounds from my personal archive, it reacts to visitors. The aim was to engage one’s sense of discovery and agency. We hear our movements shift soundscapes, and vibration is felt with a custom haptic jacket. Walls melt as we move quickly, and glitchy figures are sculptable with our particle hands. These new ways of sensing make often invisible interactions visible. By the end, through the act of walking, people make their own path, which builds beneath them.
Participants are pushed to slow down and be more conscious. A subway track may sound familiar to Berliners as it echoes over Tempelhofer Feld. Touching a lemon, takes one to my family’s ancestral home in Hoisan, China. In NYC people explore the place I called home for 10 years as it becomes foreign to me. Together, these memories show a multiplicity that represents different parts of myself, and I hope that through my experiences others can reflect on their own.
Although the places, people and things that hold the essence of meaning are fleeting, the trace left behind can always be reimagined into something new. I found meaning in Berlin making this project and that is reflected in Temporal World. People can meet Lucas and Dru who worked on the project and after the experience participants can be 3D scanned into the world, leaving their own trace.
—Chloé Lee, director/producer
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