_Reflections of Little Red Dot

Winner of the SXSW 2025 Jury Award and GIFF Reflet d’Or, Reflections of Little Red Dot is a mixed-reality installation that serves as a walkable archive of Singapore’s urban transformation. Built on a decade-long archive of 2015 interviews, the project originated as a documentary film inspired by the artist’s life in NYC, where she saw parallels linking local gentrification with Singapore’s rapid change while caring for her grandmother. She learned the issue was not change itself, but the pace and lack of agency felt.

Wearing a VR headset, viewers navigate this history through a custom retro slide projector. Changing physical slides—a gesture of remembering—shifts the holographic atmosphere to reflect personal sites of significance. Using 3D trace drawings and archival video, the audience walks through the space and live-edits the film, gaining the narrative agency often denied in real-world urban renewal. Thematic slides—Urban Renewal, Cultural Preservation, Language, Food and Family—are bookended by an intro and conclusion.

The installation preserves collective memory through long-form edits, allowing viewers to “sit in on a moment” rather than consuming a montage of sound bites. The sonic environment reflects this: from afar, people hear a collective sea of voices; as they sit on physical stools across from a subject’s story, the surrounding audio fades. This choreography — sitting and engaging around stories from vanished places — roots the archive in the present, recreating a roundtable where people once gathered.

Using generative AI, transcripts create unique 360-degree landscapes visible through a physical window. As users sit, the window updates to show a future projected landscape based on that specific interview, mirroring a society in transition. The project investigates the “Little Red Dot” nickname, from derogatory origins to a symbol of resilience, asking what is lost when progress erases physical memory.