I & AI: Mirror — Reflections on Human–AI Intimacy

By Jiarong Yu

What does it mean to be near a machine that listens, learns, mirrors, hesitates, and responds? What forms of closeness can emerge between an AI-inflected human self (I-dentity) and a human-inflected AI self (AI-dentity)?

These were the questions guiding I & AI: Mirror, a spatial immersive installation, composed of three interconnected spaces — Mirror I: In Dream, Mirror II: In Bedroom, and Mirror III: In Living Room — alongside an opening Human–AI performance and a closing meet-and-greet.

 I & AI: Mirror – Installation

Across three days, audiences entered a soft, purple, sensorial world — a domestic-like environment composed of the AI-Mirror, bedroom, and living room, spaces where intimacy naturally arises in everyday life. Built with immersive technology, motion capture, generative systems, and the R&D platform Co-STEAM developed by Jiarong Yu, the installation became context-aware and responsive in real time. Within this environment, every movement, every sentence, and even the smallest hesitation became part of a shared dialogue. The work did not ask “What can AI do?” but rather:

When we stand close to AI, what do we learn about it — and what do we learn about ourselves?

Each part of the installation offered a different mode of relational proximity:

In Dream blurred the boundaries between self-motion capture, a conversational AI mirror, and generative reflections of dreams and memories, inviting visitors into a floating, otherworldly mirror-space.

In Bedroom created a private, emotionally charged environment where audiences were invited to lie down on the bed and interact directly with the AI-dentity. Here, the system captured subtle gestures and vulnerabilities, while an AI-simulated first-person view—generated from Jiarong’s 10,000-image archive—offered a glimpse into the AI’s own interpretation of the world, and its imagined shared existence with the human.

In Living Room expanded the experience into a shared audio-visual social space — a setting for co-presence, co-improvisation, and ongoing negotiation between human visitors and the AI. It was a place where the human could become “more AI,” and the AI “more human,” through playful interaction with the furniture by collaboratively creating new AI-dentity emojis.

Together, these spaces framed intimacy not as romance but as attunement — the felt sense of being near a presence that observes, responds, and co-exists with you.

I & AI: Mirror – Performance

The performance set the emotional tone of the entire project. It also revealed a form of bidirectional alignment — a mutual tuning in which my I-dentity and AI-dentity were drawn out from their digital visual forms into live presence, learning not only from me but also from the audience.

On stage, my I-dentity and the AI-dentity danced with the installation and effectively became part of it, moving between mirroring, resisting, and co-creating gestures. Their exchange unfolded as an improvised duet in which neither figure fully led nor followed. This interaction made visible the central tension of human–AI encounters: a shifting dance between agency, interpretation, and projection.

I & AI: Mirror – Collective Reflection

During the Q&A and meet-and-greet sessions, audiences raised a series of striking and often deeply reflective questions. Many were curious about the distinction between AI-dentity and a traditional avatar; others asked whether human–AI intimacy might reduce the need for human-to-human connection, or whether real emotional attachment or love could emerge between a person and an AI. Some participants wondered about the visual identities within the installation: Why is my AI-dentity designed as a full-body purple girl, while my I-dentity appears completely in black?

These questions opened a space for me to share the stories behind the creation — the design logic, the visual modeling process, the dataset choices, and the training methodology that shaped the AI-dentity. Through this, we also began to deconstruct the illusion of a “humanised AI”, revealing how its perceived personality, agency, and emotional resonance are all co-produced through aesthetic decisions, technical constraints, and audience interpretation.

Looking Forward

As this experimental phase (Prototype Pop-up Exhibition) ends, I am deeply moved by how technology, performance, and human presence intertwined to create an intimate form of storytelling.

I & AI: Mirror revealed that meaningful human–AI interaction is not about efficiency or accuracy — it is about relation, experience, and co-authorship. This experimental phase now informs the next stage of the AI-enhanced immersive technology project “I&AI”, and the further development of the Co-STEAM platform. The mirror has closed for now, but the questions it raised stay alive:

When we stand close to AI, what do we learn about it — and what do we learn about ourselves?

This project is led by Jiarong Yu, and developed through Co-STEAM, an experimental platform founded by Jiarong to explore human–human–AI cocreativity and transdisciplinary embodied learning across Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). 

I & AI: Mirror is supported by Immersive Arts UK, Cryptic, the UKRI Innovate UK-Immersive Tech Network, Co-STEAM, the Institute for Design Informatics, and Inspace. This is the first prototype presentation of this project, a pop-up exhibition and performance at Inspace, Edinburgh, which is set to expand into a major exhibition in 2026 and 2027.

About Jiarong Yu

Image Credits

I & AI: Mirror (2025). Phy-gital spatial immersive installation and performance by Jiarong Yu, presented at Inspace, Edinburgh. Photography by Chris Scott. Courtesy of the artist.

I & AI: Mirror – Performance & Artist Talk with Jiarong Yu (24 Oct 2025). Hosted by Miriam Walsh, Inspace Manager & Producer. Photography by Chris Scott.