Background

Inspiration: Belonging & Technology

I first used VR to explore a new way of remembering. Listening to stories from people struggling to root themselves in rapidly developing landscapes, I learned that the issue wasn’t change itself—change is inevitable—but the pace of that change. People didn’t feel they had agency in shaping the landscape.

In 2021, I left New York City, a place I called home for 10 years, on a Fulbright Scholarship to make a virtual reality 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 by choice—as I did—but due to war or displacement. Yet, even within these constraints, they create community.

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 in Berlin—a city without a Chinatown—I longed for the deep community connection I had in New York. 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.

Ultimately, Inter(mediate) Spaces operates as a living archive. It is designed to deepen our local roots while revealing the invisible threads that connect us across international borders. By capturing these stories in a digital medium, we use technology to extend connection beyond the immediate moment—allowing us to find resonance with one another across years and vast distances.

I felt empowered to use new technology in a different way and I hope that Inter(mediate) Spaces empowers others to do the same.

— Chloé Lee

Project Significance

In an era where our digital and physical environments are increasingly designed by algorithms and external forces, the ability to imagine alternative futures is a form of resistance. Inter(mediate) Spaces is significant because it reclaims this agency. It moves beyond the passive consumption of technology to active co-creation.

By using AI not to replace human creativity but to amplify it, we challenge the narrative that technology must alienate us from our history. Instead, we propose a model where these tools serve as bridges—connecting the past to the future, the individual to the collective, and the displaced to a new sense of belonging. This project asserts that the "intermediate spaces" of our lives—the gaps between cultures, memories, and realities—are not voids to be filled, but fertile grounds for new narratives.

AI Philosophy

Central to this project is the philosophy of AI as a collaborator rather than a mere tool. Drawing from Beth Coleman’s work in Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds, we explore how generative algorithms can help us visualize "possible worlds" that have not yet been realized. This approach empowers more diverse storytelling, creating space for voices that might not otherwise be heard to shape our collective imagination. In this framework, the "hallucinations" of AI are not errors, but openings—opportunities to see our own memories and desires refracted through a new lens.

Crucially, we use AI to facilitate human-to-human connection. As we witness the rise of technologies designed to replace social interaction with human-to-machine relationships, Inter(mediate) Spaces resists this isolation. Here, the machine is not the destination but the medium—a catalyst that brings people together to share stories, build collective memory, and recognize themselves in one another.