We were born without choosing to be born. We are all different, but the fact that we were (helplessly) born is the same. In order to live each individual life while understanding it, we use our ability to sense and perceive our lives, and then create an internal world by responding to images and texts provided by the outside world. We also ignore, discard, store, forget, repeat, classify, preserve, or process the images and texts in doing so. Language, sense, and emotions are good tools for creating our inner world. Language shapes our inner world and gives names to nameless experiences. The senses capture stimuli from the outside world, and emotions classify them into pleasure, pain, fear, comfort, sadness, and joy, for example. Classified stimuli interpret the past, and suggest the future so that we can make choices in the present.

Our Birthplace is a spatial map in which language, senses, and emotions are translated into visual symbols and placed on top of three-dimensional coordinates. As with all maps, it is a symbolized, reduced world that some already experienced, and evidence of experiences, while it is also an abstract image to those who cannot understand it, but a readable code to those who do understand it. If properly read, it is a guide to our future experiences, and an attempt to interpret the world and
to register and “publish” the interpreted world as a new version of the world. Our Birthplace is a VR installation consisting of continuous moving images and spatial soundscapes. VR functions as a fully immersive media by erasing the existence of the interface, allowing the trajectory of first-person viewers to construct narratives. These media characteristics give viewers a direct, immediate, spatial, mental, and personalized experience of looking into their inner side. It also gives them a shared experience of empathy/learning/consciousness while walking on the terrain of thought/consciousness/feeling.

Map of Our Birthplace is a code-decode table book and dictionary that can be referenced to read Our Birthplace. The images and sounds that make up Our Birthplace function as words with their respective meanings, and when they are placed in a space, and when they move with their own rules of conduct, our reading style changes. Map of Our Birthplace serves as a device that bridges the gap between VR experience through Our Birthplace and the reality of viewers.

Weather of the Day We Were Born is a window attached with a coordinate image that forms Our Birthplace. If a series of works is an attempt to augment the virtual world to reality, it is an attempt to augment reality to the virtual world through a window. The outer landscape, which changes every minute, penetrates the lens (called a coordinated window), and is named and translated in different ways every minute. Our Birthplace Souvenir is a fragment of Our Birthplace which borrows the meaning and role of souvenirs. Souvenirs are often acquired in order to reflect on an experience—something that would remain only an impression or memory when people have to return from a trip (different experiences from our daily lives)—or prove it to other people who share reality. Viewers will bring the work produced through the AR filter into their reality using their smartphones, prove/remember their experiences in virtual reality, connect the experiences with reality, and share them and talk about them with “reality sharers.”

Our Birthplace

• Interactive VR experience, digital printed fabric, tent frame
• Variable size
• 2021

Map of Our Birthplace

• Digital print, wooden stele
• 2800×2000×800mm
• 2021

Our Birthplace Souvenir

• AR filter via Instagram
• 2021

Weather the Day We Were Born

• Printed vinyl on window
• Variable size
• 2021