This is a virtual immigration checkpoint where visitors become applicants to a fictional state: Beautiful Land. 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, it 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.
Exhibition views at Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio and NordiCHI demo session in 2026.
