Between Ghosts and Islands: Three Experiments in Memory, Fantasy and Environmental Art
ISEA 2025 Session: Transmedia Storytelling

Today’s session offered three immersive works attempting to navigate memory, technology, and environment through narrative forms. The methods varied—interactive games, AI avatars, fantasy landscapes—but each tried, in its own way, to make emotional weight out of digital material.

1. The Dream Within Huang Long Cave

Jiayang Huang’s piece stood out for its intimacy: an AI-generated father named YELL, voiced into existence through psychoanalytic theory and personal absence. The work was part game, part documentary, part emotional séance. A synthetic father, built to be searched and spoken to, not loved nor vanquished. The cave setting—Huang Long, real and symbolic—made for a layered theatre of the unconscious. Yet the mother’s labor, as so often, remained structural and unseen—she fed the story, but did not star in it. A haunting and carefully unresolved work.

2. ÂLEM: A Tapestry of Consciousness and Nomadic Identity

Joshua Nijiati Alimujiang and collaborators offered a soft, wandering cosmology: patterns drawn from family textiles, AI-generated calligraphy, and a yearning to reweave personal memory into collective identity. The project moved from digital excess back to touch—3D printed patterns, hanging layers in an installation one could walk through. Audience interaction left tactile traces. The maternal was honored here: the loom, the curtain, the pattern as cosmological unit. It felt both fragile and generative, though sometimes more process than clarity. A nomadic method, in form and substance.

3. Immersive Fantasy Based on Digital Nostalgia

Yerin Doh and Joonhyung Bae presented a polished but conceptually foggy work, drawing from the fantasy canon—Harry Potter, Narnia—to stage an eco-narrative for Korean Gen Z. A room-as-island, with sand, sparse plants, and a drone-as-bird scanning for a hidden mask. When found, the drone transmorphed into an organic being—a transformation meant to suggest ecological attunement. The promise was emotional engagement via nostalgia and aesthetic fantasy. But the language inflated: “cross-cultural adaptable narrative frameworks” and “biolinks to stimulate real-world action.” Good intentions wrapped in too much mist. A beautiful stage, but one left wondering who was being changed.

Three Threads

Together, the works raised urgent questions:

• Can fantasy truly touch the ecological?
• When is tech a bridge, and when is it another veil?
• How can art remember the maternal without dissolving it into metaphor?

All three experiments deserve credit for trying to feel through complexity. But only one—the cave with its ghost-father—dared to truly stay with the ache.