Can You Be My... (2022) is an experimental project that explores the emotional, ethical, and social dimensions of digital embodiment. Through a series of custom-designed avatars, I invited participants to inhabit virtual representations of four people close to me: my mother, my father, a friend, and a classmate. Each avatar was placed in a distinct virtual setting, and participants were asked to embody them using full-body VR tracking.

The project draws inspiration from the Korean documentary Meeting You (2020), in which a grieving mother reconnects with her deceased daughter through a VR simulation. While the documentary centers on loss and reunion, Can You Be My... shifts the focus toward how virtual identity mediates our understanding of self and other, and how embodied responses are shaped by social context and projection.

A central concept in this work is the Proteus Effect, the idea that the characteristics of an avatar can influence the user’s behavior through self-perception. In Can You Be My..., participants didn't just move through virtual space, they absorbed relational dynamics. When inhabiting the mother avatar, people adopted softer, more nurturing postures; the father avatar often creates stiffer or more formal behavior. These shifts revealed how deeply ingrained roles and expectations shape embodiment, even in minimalist, abstract digital bodies.

The project questions the boundaries of empathy, authorship, and emotional translation. What does it mean to temporarily become someone else? What gets carried over into the body, and what remains inaccessible? Where does personal memory end and social expectation begin?

Can You Be My... operates within the framework of critical design, posthuman theory, and digital phenomenology. It treats VR not as an escape, but as a mirror, one that distorts and reveals, amplifies and abstracts. The work asks how technology choreographs identity, and how virtual embodiment can be used not to erase difference, but to feel its weight.