What does it mean to become someone—or something—else online? In this episode, immersive theater-maker Scarlett Kim and human-computer interaction researcher Cyan DeVeaux explore how technology reshapes identity, embodiment, and creative expression. Hosted by Ellen Oh, the conversation traces the edges of virtual and physical reality—from avatars and motion capture to diasporic storytelling and digital folklore. Together, they show how art and engineering can meet at the frontier of imagination, with profound implications for belonging and future design.
Featured Guest: Scarlett Kim & Cyan DeVeaux
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Credits
Host: Ellen Oh
Creator/Producer/Editor: Taylor Jones
Production Support: Edi Dai
Sound Designer and Mix Engineer: Chase Everett
Theme song and Music: Juana Izuzquiza
Executive Producers: Ellen Oh and Anne Shulock
Artwork: Connie Ko
Special thanks to Deborah Cullinan
Hello and welcome to another episode of Art &, where we surface what happens when artists are woven into the research ecosystem at Stanford.
For today’s conversation, a technology-driven theater-maker and a human-computer interaction researcher explore the possibilities of identity in virtual worlds.
Scarlett Kim: I felt like theater was a laboratory for being and becoming and to imagine new worlds.
Cyan DeVeaux:
Scarlett Kim is an artist and creative producer from Los Angeles, who makes unclassifiable experiences at the intersection of live performance and immersive technology. She’s also our inaugural RSC Interdisciplinary Fellow, which is a new program led by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in collaboration with 8 academic and cultural organizations across the US and UK.
Scarlett has been visiting us throughout the year, meeting with students, staff and faculty to research and develop a number of new projects and expand her network.
When I first met with Scarlett to discuss the connections she should make on campus, I knew it was important for her to visit VHIL – the Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
Lucky for us, Cyan DeVeaux, offered to give her a tour, and they quickly realized how much their work intersected. Both Scarlett and Cyan are thinking about identity and digital representations of self, and how new tools are allowing people to explore these concepts in new ways. But the way they approached those problems was very different.
At the end of our tour with VHIL, it was obvious these two had a lot more to talk about. So in the hope that possibilities for collaboration might emerge, I thought it would be fruitful for them to meet again.
So with that, here’s our conversation with Scarlett and Cyan.
Scarlett Kim: Hi, I'm Scarlett, Scarlett Kim, I use she/her pronouns, and I am excited to be here with the Stanford community as an interdisciplinary fellow in a new fellowship program co-hosted by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Stanford Arts alongside a cohort of really incredible organizations around the world.
Cyan DeVeaux: Hi, my name is Cyan DeVeaux. I use she/her pronouns, and I'm a PhD candidate at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab in the Interaction Design Group. A lot of my research focuses on social and embodied experiences in augmented and virtual reality, and that includes exploring them as mediums for social connectedness, belonging, learning, and creativity.
Very interested in things like avatar representation and how that influences the embodied experience, and more recently I've been exploring it as a medium for dance performance.
Ellen Oh: Scarlett, let's start with you. How did you get into this space of theater and immersive technology? Were you always a theater kid?
Scarlett Kim: So, I started out in the theater and I always felt like theater was a laboratory for figuring out who I am and imagining new worlds and it's funny because in the world building class today that I spent some time with someone asked me the same question of like oh how did you start using technology and cross-pollinating it with theater and i actually don't remember or I don't think there was a genesis point of that exploration. I think for me technology and theater was always kind of the same pot of stew in that it's all kind of language and tools to be myself and be someone else and all of the above and beyond, right?
You know, when I moved to the States as a high school student, I got to play Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire in a school play. So like… can't imagine a character that's more different from me, right? But like through that role, through that experience, I got to build a new relationship to myself. Same with motion capture technology or VR or haptics or whatever technology.It can feel so shiny and tech-y and divorced from the flesh. But through that, I get to explore aspects of myself, or like, relate to myself and the world through a totally new lens. So to me, I feel like theater and technology has always been one and the same.
Ellen Oh: So, Cyan, what led you to working in virtual human interaction?
Cyan DeVeaux: That's a good question. I think it goes back to my childhood where I played a lot of virtual world games growing up. I was huge into things like Club Penguin, The Sims, Chobas. I was all in there, right? And one of my favorite things was just kind of curating my virtual appearance. And I think as a kid, I had these deeper reflections on the extent to which I could have my avatar represent me. For example, like, was it even possible to have an avatar with my skin tone, right? And two, how was I treated when I represented myself in certain ways? Because even as a kid, I noticed, like, oh, if I, like, represent this aspect of my identity, are people treating me differently and things like that? So I think that part has always been, like, in the back of my mind. And then going into undergrad, I got into discovering and exploring computer science. And the part that excited me the most was the creative aspects of it, right? And that ended up being like creative ways that people can interact with technology. So I think that those experiences led me to wanting to continue diving deeper into this aspect of looking into tech from an interdisciplinary perspective. But then going back to those experiences I had when I was a kid, just loving spending time in virtual worlds. So in some ways, I'm like living out my childhood dream.
Scarlett Kim: I love that.`
Ellen Oh: What surprised you when you met each other, learned about each other's work?
Scarlett Kim: So I come from a theater background and I am passionate about cross-pollinating theater practice with all kinds of different interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, undisciplinary practices. And it's always exciting to meet a fellow unclassifiable thinker and a practitioner. I think a lot of these shared resonant threads that we have, for example, around embodiment across physical and digital platforms, I think is a area of inquiry that is really kind of, traverses across all kinds of fields of study and practice, in person and over email, like I've just really relished the opportunity to get to kind of approach these subjects from a very multifaceted lens.
Cyan DeVeaux: I think it was an interesting point in time when I had met you because I had very recently started trying to bring the arts and humanities back into some of my research through exploring the topic of dance performance as it related to extended reality, digital representations, etc. And I remember when I gave you a tour and like hearing more about your work, it was very exciting for me to hear about someone who's been looking at these themes of physicality and virtuality, but from this artistic lens. And so it was, I think, yeah, a very happy coincidence that we met each other.
Ellen Oh: So the Virtual Human Interaction Lab is a unique space on campus. Can you talk a little bit about the mission of that lab?
Cyan DeVeaux: The virtual human interaction lab or VHIL for short is headed by professor Jeremy Bailenson in the communication department. The reason we're in the communication department is because of our focus on media psychology. In particular, we do work focused on the psychological, behavioral and social implications of augmented and virtual reality technologies.
We're really focused on exploring how it can be used to enhance life instead of detract from it. And we have a range of scholars also from interdisciplinary backgrounds, some were engineering, some from psychology backgrounds, and we also collaborate with a lot of folks across campus as well.
Ellen: Scarlett, while you’ve been on campus, you’ve been working on a project called Beasts that incorporates motion capture, VR and gaming technology. Can you tell us more about the concept behind that project?
Scarlett Kim: Yeah, so Beasts is one of the projects that I'm working on as part of my time here with Stanford. Beasts is a live motion capture performance performed as a duet between a live solo performer and her beastly digital doubles. And they coexist in two places at once. One is a physical theater in IRL, in flesh-space with audiences. And the next is the URL, or in a synthetic virtual reality space created in Unreal Game Engine.
The source material that it's drawing from is the kind of really sprawling and decentralized canon of Korean folklore, and specifically these chimeric beasts and monsters within it that are part human, part creature, often supernatural, often nonsensical in their anatomy or really kind of boundless in how they're imagined and shape-shifting often. So really kind of looking at those creatures and bringing them to life in a game engine context as a kind of metaphor for a diasporic identity. It is very much kind of touching on my experiences as a… being of the Korean diaspora. And thinking of identity rather than something that is fixed, something that is more about a constant state of becoming and something that is able to kind of shapeshift and finding belonging in the sense of shapeshifting.
Ellen Oh: The word shape-shifting really strikes me as kind of this common idea that you're both exploring in different ways that is so intriguing to me. Cyan, I know a lot of your research focuses on this idea of identity and belonging in virtual space. How do you see this manifesting in your work?
Cyan DeVeaux: I think one of the robust findings when it comes to virtual reality literature is this idea that representations of the self or avatars can have an influence on both behavior and one's psychology. One of the key theories in this space is called the Proteus effect, which cites that based on the representation of your avatar, it can influence how you act, right? Maybe if you're in a taller avatar, you're, you know, walking around more confidently. And I think this has emerged in my research in two different threads. In my first thread of research, I was interested in how proximity, from the avatar self to the physical self, influences one’s sense of immersion while in virtual space.
And trying to understand how like, depending on how inclusive a platform is towards different ways that people want to represent themselves, how that can affect that. But more recently, I've been exploring it as a medium for just… I think it's a medium of identity exploration too, where you don't have to be exactly as you look in real life. Sometimes it can be a little bit more playful, sometimes it could be a beast, right? And that in turn can have perhaps some positive applications in the realm of social virtual reality as well. I've done ethnographies of virtual worlds, and I've spoken to people who see avatars as a site of liberation and freeing.
So more recently, I've done a study exploring how different types of avatars, some more playful, some more realistic, influence people's sense of playfulness, flow, and perhaps anxiety when dancing in immersive virtual worlds.
Ellen Oh: I’m curious what you both think an artist’s role should be or could be in the world of tech and innovation.
Scarlett Kim: I think of the role of the artist as being stewards of imagination. And I think that often in XR and with emerging technology, there's opportunities to really think about what do we actually mean by liveness or what do we actually mean by embodiment or bodies and kind of being able to ask those questions and be curious and playful from a like unexpected lens. And I'm, you know, like it's kind of even this week, technology is constantly glitching and failing all the time. And I'm so usually so much more interested in that than how it's meant to work, like even working in game engines, which were originally designed to serve as a kind of like a technology tool for like AAA video games or massive cinematic masterpieces. I'm always like, well, what are more subversive, kind of like, ways that we can use this technology? What are ways that we can kind of look in the shadows or the edges and kind of tell stories there? How can it be a platform for access? You know, I love all the things that Cyan just said about access and kind of the social aspect aspect of it. I think there was a research you shared with me around kind of motion capture specifically as a kind of canvas or for imagining new futures, and I found that really exciting of, oh, if we can actually imagine, use this as a palette for imagining, we can actually perhaps world-build new futures as well, which for me goes back to actually why I first started being a theater artist because I felt like theater was a laboratory for being and becoming and to imagine new worlds and I think sometimes in the kind of fictional or kind of constructed context of theatrical storytelling we can get at questions about you know authenticity or around kind of truth in a way that's surprising.
Ellen Oh: I think, Cyan, you touched on this a little bit, but I'm curious, working, kind of sitting where you do in more of the tech and engineering world and space, what do you think artists can contribute to the design aspects and the engineering and the new directions that we're headed from a kind of computer science space? Where do artists fit in?
Cyan DeVeaux: Oh, so much. In fact, I'd say there's a growing number of HCI, or Human-Computer Interaction Conferences, that are trying to incorporate artists into the conversations that are happening there, right? Because I think all these things interact, you know, artists, you know, science fiction, engineering, et cetera. And when I think about how I see it coming into play and even thinking about how I feel inspired by your work, Scarlett, is just the ways in which art can help you see meanings and see alternate meanings, right? And it is through seeing new meanings in the world or seeing different meanings in the world that we can then imagine, right, what we want for our future. And when we imagine what we want from our future, we can then think of, okay, how might we design for that future? Or what futures don't we want and what shouldn't we design for, right? So I really like this view of art being just a lens at which to see the world. And through seeing the world, we can figure out how to build for that world.
Ellen Oh: The two of you really are building a new, our new, our new culture, like what we think of as culture and entertainment. And I think Scarlett, you've really blurred the lines between what is performance, you know? Now TikTok is a platform for performance. But you have also worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and everything in between. And now you're putting, you know, virtual scenes and screens on a stage where there are live audiences and virtual spaces kind of all all in one. Can you talk a little bit more about how you're imagining, like, the future of theater?
Scarlett Kim: Going back to the context where Ellen, you and I first met, which is through the Royal Shakespeare Company Interdisciplinary Fellowship, I believe the driving question there was around the future of culture work. And what does it mean? What is the role of the artist as the kind of chief architect in imagining the future of theater. I was just talking to some students today in the world-building class and talking about how theater has been actually the petri dish for all kinds of new technology in its history.
The Elizabethan theater was a raucous space for political debates and wrestling and throwing rats and was a space of Dionysian, debaucherous, inappropriate conflict, right? And now, you know, often, theater and the kind of institution of theater can be seen as this exclusionary and elitist space. But I'm always really interested in access, and how we can define theater expansively.
I'm curious about co-authorship with the audience. What is the kind of role that the audience can have in co-creating the environment or the characters? Like, how can I actually see whatever the expression, the format of the piece ends up being. Not so much as a kind of expression of a finalized, conclusive thought, but rather a evolving site for collaboration or iteration together. I think it's interesting because working with technology can be quite demanding. Like today, you know, I spent all day trying to figure out this one issue with particle systems. And basically, I want a child version of myself to spontaneously combust into a swarm of frogs.
And it's like, OK, so I actually have a specific vision for that and I want to accomplish this. And it requires rigor and expertise and specific, very technical troubleshooting. So I feel like I'm constantly oscillating between super laser focus on work like that and also kind of constantly zooming out. And like reimagining process and product, like rethinking this idea of best practice or excellence, like all of these ideas that are codified with, you know, assumptions, right, of what is good or what is capital “A” art. And I just find working with emerging technologies empowering because of that, because so many of these tools are being built as we are speaking about them. So we actually have an opportunity to model use cases for them in a much more artist-centered way, in a much more iterative, process-oriented way, and in a way that encompasses some of that kind of really critical thinking around, like, the sinister and devastating leveraging of technology. Like, that is definitely present in our society. So how can we actually use this opportunity to think expansively and abundantly?
Ellen Oh: Cyan, how do you think Scarlett's work might push you and your colleagues to think differently about virtual interaction?
Cyan DeVeaux: Going back to how art can be a source or a place of imagining things. Really admiring the artistic lens that you take to your work. Because we study similar contexts, but like the types of questions that you have are a bit different, right? You use these metaphors in how you view your work and also in how you create your work. And I feel like those are sources of inspiration to me, right? And rethinking the ways in which the concepts that I come across on a day-to-day just influence the ways in which I look at them, which I think is inspiring too for future research questions and even future theory to derive from it.
Ellen Oh: You both touched on this a little bit, but I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about art's role in helping you shape or understand your identity within cultural contexts and just within your personal evolution?
Cyan DeVeaux: Yeah, I think this is a really wonderful question, and I'm thinking of it from a few different angles right now. In the context of virtual reality or even virtual games as an art form, this process of going from the physical to the virtual and the relationship between the two, I think inevitably forces you to confront or think about aspects of identity.
What aspects of myself do I want to preserve? What do I even have control over preserving, and what's being changed as you're in this space where, you know, your digital representation is different. You have more control over the environment, how you're represented, and the space around you. So in some sense, in that process of curating representations and going from this physical to virtual, it does force you to think more about yourself and who you are in that space and the relationship outside of it.
Cyan DeVeaux: And then also, when I think about art as sites of reflection, even in your description of these, even for me, it made me think more about my own, this diasporic identities, having relatives from Jamaica, Trinidad, England, and just making me think about those things too… in a way that like I think the framing of it that I see within your work and other people's work I think provides framing for me to think about those reflections within myself so that's how it comes up for for me.
Ellen Oh: I really I loved Scarlett's depiction of multiple selves because I too have felt like “I'm not this and I'm not that.” So how am I represented in the world? Because I always feel like I'm divided in half and I exist in these in-between spaces, but maybe it's a multiplicity of me instead. I like that visual and you're representing it… Anyway.
Scarlett Kim: I love… I'm so inspired by what you said, Cyan. And I think what you just said helped me articulate the kind of bubbling thoughts in my head, which is I feel passionate about the role of art as a kind of call to action to imagine, which I feel like imagination has been a big theme in our conversation today.
Scarlett Kim: And, you know, curiosity and playfulness as a strategy, you know, perhaps unlock imagination. I think imagination also as an antidote to the status quo or as a way to build new futures. I feel like it is critically important, you know, in an uncertain world, especially to kind of champion artists as leaders and how we imagine and build new futures.
I think for me, I am always thinking about my work as a kind of love letter or an invitation or a kind of proposal to the folks who come join me to kind of spend some time in this rehearsal room where we get to be ourselves and be someone else and kind of spend time together in this context. And then once we leave and once we go back to our lives, maybe there's something that's a different lens that you can apply to your what you assume to be true about your day to day life. Or perhaps there's a kind of something mundane that you can now celebrate. I think, you know, my coming of age story as an artist coincides with my coming of age story as a as an immigrant coming into this country and really figuring out, like, who am I and why is it that I don't identify with kind of these established stories around what it means to be a immigrant or what it means to be XYZ. So I think genuinely, in a very utilitarian way, art was a space where I was just tinkering around with other ways of narrativizing and making sense of my own experiences.
Scarlett Kim: And so, you know, I think it's it's not like it's not that I seek to model that for others because that feels prescriptive. And it's it's more that I'm like excited to share kind of like, hey, here's my kitchen where I'm kind of like collaging and kind of trying out different experiments about how I can think about myself and how I can kind of like kind of view my experiences and accept my experience, is like, do you want to come join me? And we can all kind of do that together or do that for each other. I think it's a kind of like, I hope, I always hope that my work feels like a kitchen where we're all kind of spilling stuff and making stuff. And maybe it often feels like it's the process is the meal.
Cyan DeVeaux: So I couldn't help but notice that we both have names that are colors.
Scarlett Kim: It's true.
Cyan DeVeaux: And I think it's really interesting considering that we both kind of work in these artsy, creative spaces. So I was curious, where did your name come from?
Scarlett Kim: Wow. I have so many versions of this story, actually, because I increasingly I felt so ashamed about how I chose this name when I moved to America. And then so I kept coming up with less and less shameful stories. But recently I'm like, you know what? I don't care. And so this is, I guess, the story. I was preparing to come to this country by myself. And I was with my parents trying to figure out, like, what is a name where I will fit in? Everyone will think I mastered this idea of how to be American. And my mom was like, Gone with the Wind. You know, like, that's the iconic movie. which I now find very cringe and problematic that my that is one of the sources of my name but at the same time I was obsessed with Project Runway the fashion reality show and there was a designer whose last name was Scarlett and I was like this is a sign. But I think it's been a interesting few years in the last few years a lot of my diasporic Korean friends are on the journey of kind of like using their Korean name as their one name. Like a lot of us have your Korean name and your English name. And I don't know, I'm always thinking about this.
For now, I celebrate that I am multiple, that I have my Korean name and my English name and my many Second Life and Sims usernames. But a name, you know, is such a weird thing. Now I'm curious about what is the story behind your name?
Cyan DeVeaux: Yeah, wow. I mean, similarly, it is also a media reference. So the story my parents say is that it comes from this comic book called Spawn. And apparently there's a little girl character in it where her name was Cyan. And I think my parents, I think, saw that either in the comic book or the show and wanted to name me that. And then they paired it. My middle name is Jade. So it's kind of like this bluish greenish color and then this kind of greenish. Yeah, yeah. So that makes sense.
Ellen Oh: And I like this balance of the cool colors and the hot colors fiery balance it you know goes really well together in this environment so thank you both so much for this really inspiring conversation and I look forward to see to seeing if and how your work continues to inspire one another and um hopefully there's collaboration in your future.
Since recording this episode, Scarlett and Cyan have co-written an academic article and this summer in Vancouver, they will be presenting together at SIGGRAPH, an international conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques
From Stanford Arts, this is Art &.
Ellen Oh is our host. The show is produced and edited by me, Taylor Jones, with additional production support by Edi Dai.
Chase Everett is our sound designer and mixing engineer. Our theme song and music is composed by Juana Izuzquiza.
Series artwork is by Connie Ko.
Executive Producers are Anne Shulock and Ellen Oh.
Special thanks to Scarlett Kim, Cyan DeVeaux, Deborah Cullinan, Stanford Vice President for the Arts, and Stanford Live.
Art & is recorded at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University.
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