Home in Seoul
An augmented-reality art game explores the meaning of home through the traces of Seoul and the memories of its inhabitants. Participants collect fragments of the city, compose imagined homes and bring their responses into a shared archive.
Repeated movement shapes everyday life in Seoul. Housing costs lead people to negotiate what they want with what they can afford, reorganising their lives around changing places and conditions.
The work begins with this experience of dwelling. A route through the city becomes one part of a larger game, connecting listening and collecting with the construction of an imagined home and reflection on what home means.
Collecting the city’s traces
With a GPS-based mobile app and earphones, participants move through central Seoul and hear stories tied to particular sites. The route connects temporary animal cages in a market, a stream where war refugees once lived, apartments and a palace.
Listening places different scales of dwelling alongside one another. Objects, words and impressions become clues that participants can carry into the next stage of the game.
Layers of dwelling
Each site gives the idea of home a different material setting. Temporary shelters, changing neighbourhoods and monumental buildings reveal how dwelling is shaped by circumstance and history.
These traces invite participants to compare the city’s stories with their own memories. Collecting becomes an act of interpretation, choosing which fragments might belong to a home they would imagine.
Building from fragments
The collected clues are rearranged in augmented reality. Each participant builds a home from the objects and associations that matter to them, answering “What is home to me?” through composition.
The interface lets memory and imagination occupy the same environment. Different selections and arrangements give the familiar idea of home a personal form.
From the city to the exhibition
The exhibition brings the route, imagined homes and the question of dwelling into a setting that visitors can explore. Projected documentation and mobile interfaces connect the city outside to the experience inside.
Visitors encounter both the process of collecting and its resulting compositions. The exhibition offers another entry into the game’s question, through looking, interacting and comparing different expressions of home.
Home takes shape through the places we pass, the memories we carry and the conditions we negotiate. The game gives these experiences a form that can be shared.
Credits
- Project director
- Arrddon (Kiryung Nam)
- Planning
- 울산바위 / 정산희
- Object design
- 김예령
- Sound design
- 다은
- Film director
- 허윤
- Film assistant
- 김민성