← Selected Works

Encounters

An exhibition piece that gives poems digital bodies and voices — written with poet Vivek Narayanan and built with Unreal Engine MetaHumans and AI voice actors.

A MetaHuman woman's face on a monitor in the Fenwick Gallery installation of Encounters
Encounters at Conjuring Presence — Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University.
Year 2021Disciplines Real-time / Unreal, Interactive Performance, Video

Encounters is my contribution to Conjuring Presence, a group exhibition at George Mason University's Fenwick Gallery, shown online and in the gallery from October 20 to December 11, 2021. Working with the poet Vivek Narayanan, I paired poems we wrote with Unreal Engine MetaHumans and AI voice actors built in Replica Studios — letting the text speak through synthetic faces and voices.

Conjuring Presence was curated by Jessica Kallista through Mason's Loop Collaboratory, which pairs an artist with a writer to make a work together — Vivek and I were one of those pairs. You can see the full exhibition at the Fenwick Gallery.

With poet Vivek Narayanan · Unreal Engine MetaHumans · AI voices, Replica Studios

A rendered field of red poppies against a blue sky on a monitor
A rendered field — one of the worlds the poems inhabit.
A bare winter forest and distant hill rendered in Unreal Engine
A wintered landscape built in Unreal Engine.
A rendered interior with a desk and bed
An interior built for one of the poems.
A MetaHuman of an older man with eyes closed, with headphones and a printed Encounters booklet on the pedestal
A MetaHuman speaks a poem; visitors listen on headphones.
Boris Willis beside a monitor showing a MetaHuman in the gallery
At the installation in Fenwick Library.