Made at Home

Made at Home recreates the creation story in a modern digital context. Animated in 3D and viewed in mobile augmented reality, the user enters a house and follows a character around the house as it collects objects. The character arranges the objects on a table according to a blueprint in order to create another being much like itself. Although the implied action of the user is to follow the character, their movement through the house is at their own will. If the user chooses to stray from the character’s path, they might find a room decorated wall-to-wall with photographs of the character posing with various other beings, all resembling the created being and suggesting that the character is the creator of a small population of beings.

While the narrative was written for our time, it works to preserve and explore the thematic elements of more traditional creation stories. The character’s role as creator ties it to a divine figure, while its resemblance to the population leaves its own creation unexplained and allows for the possibility of the created becoming creators themselves. This works to break down the representation of the creator as an isolated figure and rework the dynamic between the ownership of the creator over the autonomy of the created. Furthermore, the make-up of the beings from technological, but not smart, objects allows for the ambiguity of the intelligence of the both the creator and the created. But while these implications create thematic unease, the household setting and cartoon-ish imagery grounds Made at Home in a particularly whimsical everyday.