ARIA 夢姬 is a CGI animated short film that explores the entangled futures of gender, technology, and memory through the figure of a female AI agent named ARIA. Set in the fictional smart city Dream Harbor in the year 2050, the film imagines an East Asian metropolis where nostalgic urban aesthetics coexist with a hyper-digitized surveillance regime. Though speculative, the narrative draws deeply from real-world histories, reflecting how East Asia’s unresolved pasts continue to shape its technological futures. 

On the verge of deactivation and disposal as e-waste, ARIA transforms into a virtual being and enters into a final conversation with her supervisory operating system. This intimate exchange challenges the myths of techno-optimism and accelerationist progress. Both non-human characters—ARIA and the Operating System—embody the dual roles of the supervised and the supervisor, revealing a recursive power dynamic where humans and machines continually co-shape one another. 

Rooted in empirical research, the work highlights how East Asian approaches to AI desgin differ from Western paradigms, particularly in the persistent gendering of robots and service technologies. Drawing from state policies like China’s 2049 development agenda and Japan’s Innovation 25 and Moonshot R&D program, ARIA 夢姬 critically examines how national dreams are encoded into machines. The film foregrounds the temporal tensions of the region—where imagined futures and chronopolitics remain haunted by historical traumas. 

While ARIA’s hyper-sexualized form may seem like a science fiction, her story is grounded in the real politics of design, labor, and identity. This is not a dystopia—it is a mirror. Through game engine cinema and speculative narritive, ARIA 夢姬 offers a poetic intervention into how we code gender, dream futures, and remember histories. 

Artists: Yu Shien and Jin Keon
Writer, editor, and colorist: Yu Shien
3D and CGI team: Yu Shien, Jin Keon, and CP 
Music: (1) Romantic 50s Waltz, Stock media provided by Matthew Reid/Pond5; and (2) Clair de lune (Claude Debussy) Suite bergamasque, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond the individuals mentioned above, this project could not have been realized without the artists, researchers, and directors who inspired us, the engineers and designers who developed incredible digital tools, and all the asset artists who contributed to Unreal Engine Fab. 

Yu Shien Yang (TW) is a filmmaker, CG artist, and lawyer exploring hyperreality, virtual humans, and digital culture. Her work engages governance, identity, and the socio-legal implications of digital embodiment, focusing on gender, memory, and chronopolitics. 

Jin Keon (TW) is an artist and director examining overconsumption, capitalism, and society. With 20+ years of experience across art, fashion, and media, he blends satire, installation, and film to question consumerism and social roles, with works shown in international exhibitions and festivals.