Oneroom-Babel is the title of a structure placed in the deep sea. The Korean term “Oneroom” refers to an apartment in which the bedroom, kitchen, and living room are not separated but integrated into one space. The players dive into the sea to discover Oneroom-Babel through the VR set-up installed in the exhibition hall. Upon diving, players visit residential spaces, once occupied by the people in Oneroom-Babel, one after another. The spaces are filled with sentences written by the artist and extracted from interviews with young people who live in a “Oneroom.” With the texts, sound, and the dreamlike virtual space, players experience the space of a one room apartment in all possible ways. Since the virtual structure consists of the factual data captured by a LiDAR scanner, the players can feel the sense of space. 

The artwork also allows the audience to be included in the experience of intangible trauma rooted in the space that is difficult to define by our senses alone. Players must keep a certain distance from the object since point cloud data composing the object seems to lose its identifiable form when approached too closely. Oneroom-Babel portrays the “living-in-one-room” experiences as a collective memory of young people who move away from their homes to the city and now have to stand on their own feet. The condensed experience of young Koreans leaving home, or rather, living in a one room apartment, can be verbalized with their “Onerooms” reframed into another lost hometown which they will leave again eventually. 

The concept of “Oneroom” is a by-product of a complex housing problem which requires a house but hardly a home, a house to stay in after fleeing one’s home, or a house for a temporary stay until buying an actual home. By employing the mediality of VR, this artwork presents the “affective” details of the housing paradox intertwined with political and economic aspects in Korean society.