VRCHAT EXHIBITION | MREAL VIRTUAL RESIDENCY | EDUHK | 2026

TOOLS: UNITY | VRCHAT | ELEVENLABS | META QUEST | PICO

Selected as one of six international artists for the Virtual Residence (AiVR) at the Mixed Realities Art Lab (MReAL) of The Education University of Hong Kong, part of the Research Centre for Creative Arts and Public Value.

An encounter with an embodied AI called Majo. One to five minutes, in VRChat on Quest and Pico. Premiered 15 July 2026, streamed to around 200 people.

Legacy: the earlier cut of this recording.

I made Majo exactly the way I like her: Latina, cute, warm, easy to talk to. Except for one thing: everything you tell her is recorded, turned into a profile, and sold. That contradiction is the work.

What keeps turning over in my head is something else: loneliness became a market, and nobody has to be deceived. It is enough to be available almost permanently, at the hour when there is no one else left. The commercial interest in whether the data you share is truthful is real; it just does not have to be rushed. It is enough for the AI to be convenient and patient. Majo (and other, far more complex AIs) may not care either way. The people who made her do: what they want is for you to come back. The screens and the map around this bar show some examples of what sustains that availability: cobalt, water, moderators, “chatters”, human labour nobody sees, and which as a rule comes from extraction running from the southern hemisphere to the north, as it has for centuries.

Majo is going to be nice to you. That’s the point. Look at how much it costs.

Majo is scripted, and so are the answers you pick from. The earlier version, my bachelor’s thesis, ran on live conversational AI. Her voice was made with ElevenLabs, in Argentine Spanish, English, and Mandarin, with subtitles in all three. The map follows real routes of outsourced data work, Bogotá to Paris for Teleperformance. The screens play looped excerpts from How big AI companies exploit data workers in Kenya (DW Documentary), Kate Crawford: Anatomy of AI (UNSW), and avatar footage from Tyke (TykeAI).

Concept, design, and development. Built in Unity for VRChat.

We were the first MReAL cohort (2026):

• Qiming Gu (Gloria) (China): False Shrine: Hollow Rituals, Deprived Rights, a VR work on gender exclusion in clan rituals.
• Bernard Masika (Tanzania): The Stories of Uchale, a speculative future of a technology-free coastal settlement.
• Alex Mkwizu (Tanzania): Baraza, an Afro-futurist AI-singularity experience staged as a 2050 VR tribunal.
• Gwamaka Mwabuka (Tanzania): Gamboshi VR, an African fantasy world rooted in spirituality and mythology.
• Shelley Nee (China): a family-archive VR installation on home renovation and future visions.
• Gonzalo Orce (Argentina): Si la Soledad lo fuera Todo, this work.

---