DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/82DT-BM43
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8005-5527
Defense Date
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
Kinetic Imaging
First Advisor
Kate Sicchio
Second Advisor
Robert Paris
Third Advisor
Semi Ryu
Fourth Advisor
Jennifer Rhee
Abstract
This thesis explores the entangled relationship between language, memory, and technology through the lens of immigrant experience. Moving from programming to visual storytelling, I investigate how dyslexia, bilingualism, and cultural displacement have shaped my ways of reading, writing, and coding.
Beginning with personal reflections on switching from computer science to art, I trace how code offered a form of clarity and expression where written language had once failed me. Yet as I ventured into real-time simulation and XR storytelling, I encountered new forms of mistranslation—where narratives dissolved, mutated, or resisted coherence altogether.
Through a series of experiments in code-driven art, culminating in the XR project Ideal Home, I examine the possibilities and limitations of machine translation for human emotions. By fine-tuning GPT-4 on collaboratively gathered immigrant stories, Ideal Home stages an encounter between fractured memories and algorithmic interpretation, inviting participants to wander through a ghostly landscape of drifting texts and partial recollections.
Drawing inspiration from thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Svetlana Alexievich, and Pauline Oliveros, I propose mistranslation not as failure but as a generative space—a terrain where hybrid identities and unfinished memories can unfold. In a world shaped by linguistic and technological thresholds, perhaps an ideal home is not a destination but a moment of shared uncertainty: a fleeting agreement between human and machine to continue searching, even when no final understanding is possible.
From ink to code, from binary to boundless reality—until all returns to emptiness.
Rights
© Weitong "ShanMu" Sun
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-4-2025
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Creative Writing Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Interactive Arts Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Language Interpretation and Translation Commons, Screenwriting Commons