Wandering at the Exit of Deity/ 徘徊于神明的出口 CIFRA Award 2025

Winner of the CIFRA Award 2025 (category: Future Recipes)

Wandering at the Exit of Deity is a real-time generated animation. Set in a bio-cybernetic future running in game engine, the work fragments a single identity of Eyez into two diverging entities: MetaE, 3D scanned and motion captured of the artist’s biological self, and BetaE, an AI-driven virtual character trained on the artist’s dataset. One is human-controlled, the other an AI-generated clone, together forming a hybrid intelligence system that questions the boundaries between real and artificial existence.

When MetaE encounters BetaE, she confronts a visceral question: When a human identity splinters into AI clones and biological remnants, does selfhood dissolve or multiply? Their journey unfolds across liquid-data tears and procedurally generated dreamscapes, where environments evolve procedurally as they collide. MetaE chases BetaE through corridors of fragmented memory, each step eroding the boundary between creator and creation. But what emerges after their reconnection (or in our future)? A shared consciousness, a zero sum game or a hidden dimension of freedom where neither human nor AI claims sovereignty?

Rooted deeply in an abstract form of modern East Asian philosophy and society landscape, the work constructs a speculative mythos through modular, real-time environments. By merging AI-driven characters, and customized game engine systems, deity invites audiences not just to watch, but to question their own role in hybrid futures. Wandering at the Exit of Deity reframes identity as a negotiation, an unstable equation where memory, artificial reconstruction, and desire collide. It leaves audiences to ask: Which fragments of “self” do we fight to keep, and which do we dare to surrender?