Dream Resort is a visual investigation into twelve abandoned luxury resorts and hotels in the Society Islands in the South Pacific. All in various states of rehabilitation or decay, these sites tell unique stories of nature reclaiming architecture, of temporality and impact of resort development. Filmed on location on the islands of Tahiti, Mo’orea, Huahine, and Bora Bora, Dream Resort contemplates the complexities of dereliction which lie at the intersection of climate change, ocean dynamics, human action, and economic policy decisions made locally and globally. Enterprises such as Sofitel (Huahine), Hyatt and Club Med (Bora Bora), Intercontinental (Mo’orea), and many others fall at the mercy of nature’s cycles. Cyclones, the pandemic and various other forces impacting tourism determine which sites survive. For the narration, the artists collaborate with ChatGPT, which responds to the prompt, “A boat lost at sea finds refuge in an abandoned hotel.” The poem is co-edited by the artists into a work of speculative fiction and is translated into a futuristic voice-over layered with field recordings. Dream Resort oscillates between layers above and below the surface of the water, between past and future, between a soft human-sounding voice and the psychological landscape of AI.
Alongside the video work is a series of custom-made lightboxes in artists’ frames.
This project is funded, in part, by California Maritime Academy and The Puffin Foundation.
