Chandra Chronicles: In Neuroverse

Chandra Chronicles: In Neuroverse (2026) is a participatory 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment combining sculptural walkers, augmented reality, moving image, sound, and AI-mediated dialogue. It extends the Chandra series’ exploration of a world in which humans and machines perform cognitive tasks for one another. Here, “Chandra” does not designate a single character: the name crosses myth, science, personal histories, and the changing bodies and memories of the series.

Visitors move through the exhibition with a walker and tablet, approaching Chandra figures that inhabit an augmented landscape. Accompanied by Soma, an AI guide, they speak, listen, reach out, and temporarily exchange positions in a psychodrama of human and machine. The apparatus supports the body while shaping how the encounter unfolds. Movement, touch, images, and voices reopen the question of where one body ends and another begins. These encounters draw on co-created narratives, while Soma’s AI-generated responses remain a distinct voice within the work.

Songs and the repeated turning of Chandra Prayer Beads on the companion phone give these encounters a ritual rhythm. The work begins with the possibility of feeling attachment, intimacy, even allegiance toward a being called Chandra. It asks whether that attachment can endure when the being responds at another speed, remembers differently, or acts through a changed body—and whether devotion to one Chandra can make room for others. Skinship and kinship remain possibilities opened by an encounter, not proof that difference has been overcome.

Across this shared world, sensation, memory, and speech pass between people, devices, and AI. Intelligence takes shape in these relations rather than belonging to a single body or model. The work approaches neurodiversity through the conditions that allow different rhythms and sensitivities to coexist. Questioning a single standard of “normal” or optimal performance, the chronicle asks what forms of support, attention, and continued relation become possible as bodies and intelligences change.

Chandra Chronicles: in Neuroverse (2025) follows “Chandra(s),” neural-environment managers within the fictional Neuroverse developed for the 2025 ACT Festival at the National Asian Culture Center. Originating in Inhwa Yeom’s world-building developed from 2019 to 2022, the 2025 commission re-adapts earlier chapters and expands them through newly produced works. Across four spatiotemporal chapters—A.C. (After Chandra), B.C. (Before Chandra), C.C. (Circa Chandra), and D.C. (Dreaming Chandra)—the series approaches neural ageing and neurodiversity as shared conditions of humans and machines.

The 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment connects physical space, mobile AR, HMD VR, PC-based VR, moving image, and installation in real time. In A.C., visitors inhabit the perspective of a retired Chandra whose attenuated connectivity becomes an expanded neurodiverse terrain. B.C. presents neural nodes as proto-resources accessed through a walker-based mobile AR interface. C.C. places visitors inside an active neural-management system whose actions propagate across the other chapters. D.C. extends the Neuroverse through moving image. The audience becomes Chandra: a performer moving among overlapping dimensions of time and reality.

BiOVE handled the XR series production and distribution contract and supported its realization as one interconnected exhibition environment. Minseok Choi (Green Level) was responsible for exhibition installation, while ESEO contributed to post-production, performance direction, choreography, and costume production.