Our research-creation approach is grounded in a simple, almost stubborn principle: thinking through the artwork rather than about the artwork.
Here, virtual reality is not used as a spectacular or demonstrative medium, but as a space for sensitive experimentation—an embodied laboratory.
At the center of this framework lies the Kellynoid: a digital entity resulting from a process of capture, transformation, and rewriting of Kelly’s body, voice, and gestures. It is neither an avatar, nor a clone, nor a character. It is a relational construction, unstable by nature, situated between human presence, technical memory, and emergent behavior.
Creating virtual reality artworks that stage the Kellynoid means accepting uncertainty as a working condition.
Each piece becomes an embodied hypothesis: what happens when a digital entity seems to respond, hesitate, remember—or fall silent? At what point does the viewer stop interacting with a system and begin relating to a perceived presence?
Research does not precede creation—it emerges from lived experience, from failures, tensions, and audience reactions. These works do not seek to prove; they seek to unsettle, to shift existing theoretical frameworks around agency, digital identity, and co-presence in immersive environments.
The Kellynoid is not a fixed object of study.
It is a process in constant becoming, a zone of friction between human and machine, between control and surrender.
And it is precisely within this fragile, uncomfortable, sometimes disturbing in-between space that our research takes shape.