Beautiful Land is a virtual immigration checkpoint where visitors become applicants to a fictional state. Each applicant is assigned a profile at the outset and locked into a forward-only sequence: they navigate an interface where retreat, revision, or exit is impossible. In this space, agency is an illusion. While applicants encounter questions, their responses are never truly theirs. Instead, behaviors like hesitation, attitude, and emotional cues steer the system as it constructs and determines entry or denial.
Applicants are filtered through three metrics: Productivity (utility), Obedience (reliability), and Celebrity (aesthetics focused criterion). This model fuses neoliberal market-style selection with authoritarian ideological screening, extracting a “legible” identity from behavior rather than testimony.
By framing migration as an irreversible passage, Beautiful Land makes the mechanics of border power tangible. It reveals the cold, automated logic of blocking the age-old practice of human migration. Every movement becomes a non-neutral flow of fear, risk, and data where the applicant is filtered, scored, and rendered visible to authority.
The technical infrastructure, including voice cloning, and generative text, was developed in collaboration with Dr. Mathias Funk (Full Professor, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology). The lyrics for the Beautiful Land national anthem were co-written with Dr. Funk; the music was generated using Suno.ai. Conceptually, this work draws profound inspiration from the speculative architectures and surveillance themes found in in the movies and TV series: 2001 A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Minority Report, and Person of Interest.
The initial development of this project received partial support from Cultuur Eindhoven.
Exhibition at Tenjinyama Art Studio from Feburary 26 to March 6, 2026.
