Phantom Dining

BiOVE’s Phantom Dining (2025) is an extended-reality participatory installation by Inhwa Yeom. Wearing VR headsets, participants move through five stages of dining preparation centred on physical tables and objects. The tables are filled with ingredients that appear alive yet are not, alongside utensils designed for direct interaction.

At each stage, participants gradually transform into “phantom animals”—human, yet not entirely human. These phantom sensations make dining unfamiliar and reveal the concealed dynamics of ingestion and consumption. Where physical and virtual realities coexist, the boundary between eater and eaten becomes unstable, exposing entanglements among life, appetite, and desire.