Installation — strawberrycongee

Jade (strawberrycongee) is a London based experimental game maker and creative technologist who works at the intersection of engineering, design and research with a focus on play and curiosity. From LEGO SMART Bricks and ML models to game engines and cultural archives, I turn seeds of ideas into tangible, playful things through tech.

At the Creative Play Lab she build prototypes as playable questions across code, synthesizers, electronics, 3D printing and material explorations, created dozens of play prototypes for kids age 6-12. Alongside this, her creative tech practice engineers vibes and statements through arthouse games (PC, web, VR/AR), interactive installations (Arduino, Raspberry pi), and creative applications of ML/AI, with institutions including the V&A, Tate and Anthropic.

Her game practice asks what video games could be. Using worldbuilding and interactive systems of play, she reconstructs the structures that shape our society and everyday life in order to interrogate the larger systems that construct our realities. Through an atmospheric art style, her work explores the affective dimensions of weirdness, alienation and oddity, seeking to invoke reflective, attentive and introspective experiences for its audiences.

Her games and artworks have been shown in 4 countries, monimated by A MAZE. / Berlin, the Leftfield Collection (EGX) and FIVARS.

Find the edges of a system, push past them, and bring something back that changes how people think about what's possible.

Capabilities

Installation work

Pastlife Photobooth

2026 · Installation · interactive installation, machine learning

A commissioned physical photobooth that uses Stable Diffusion + IP-Adapter to transform live portraits into vintage 1940s family photographs, printed instantly as thermal receipts. It runs entirely offline on an Macbook: webcam capture, AI style transfer, and receipt composition in a single Python pipeline triggered by a foot switch.

Using a physical printout to ground ephemeral AI generation in a tangible, yet fleeting, artifact that equally renders every user a ghost from a foreign past. The piece explores the artificiality of nostalgia and the fragility of memory, playfully questioning how emerging technology constructs, alters, and ultimately erases our personal histories.

Digital Tundra @ the Henan Provincial Cultural Centre

The piece is shown

  • Role — Concept & interaction design, ML pipeline, installation consulting
  • Tools — python, Stable Diffusion, ip-adapter, OpenCV, pillow, esc/pos
  • Shown at — Digital Tundra @ the Henan Provincial Cultural Centre

in this world nothing is coming back

2024 · Experimental, Installation, VR · VR walking simulator

An introspective VR walking simulator that explores the sensation of post-surgical memory loss through the lens of “machine forgetting.” Navigating a non-Euclidean labyrinth of impossible space connected with portals, the player moves through surreal, decaying environments textured by custom next-frame-prediction models (pix2pixHD) trained on my personal video archives.

About

An introspective VR walking simulator that explores the sensation of post-surgical memory loss through the lens of “machine forgetting.” Navigating a non-Euclidean labyrinth of impossible portals, the player moves through surreal, decaying environments textured by custom next-frame-prediction models (pix2pixHD) trained on my personal video archives.

Shortlisted for FIVARS 2024 (Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories), showcased in Canada in Nov 2024.

Training “Machine Forgetting”

Because the model only predicts the next frame based on patterns, my original memories are fundamentally destroyed in the dataset. The resulting images are uncanny and unstable; the machine's process of data degradation mirrors the human labor of forgetting, and the absent presence of the memory lingers as traces in what remains.

Level Design: constructing broken memory space via Non-Euclidean architecture

spaces you can't return to. Rooms loop back into themselves, and spaces you walk into can never be returned to. Because VR rendering makes these portal transitions visually seamless, the medium itself does the conceptual work: your body believes the impossible geometry before your mind catches up. The architecture physically simulates the grief of memory loss — the harder you try to retrace your steps, the further you get from where you started.

  • Role — solo - research, design, development
  • Tools — unity, vr, pix2pixhd, meta quest, machine learning
  • Shortlisted for — FIVARS 2024 (Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories), showcased in Canada in Nov 2024

Thin_Air Residency

2023 · Installation, Residency · residency / AV installations

Developed filters and mini-games for camera-based interactive audio-visual installations as an artist in residence at the Beams, London, in collaboration with UCLA Conditional Studio and fellow Goldsmiths artists.

about

As an artist in residence at the Beams, London, in collaboration with UCLA Conditional Studio and fellow Goldsmiths artists, I developed filters and mini-games for camera-based interactive audio-visual installations (OpenGL, Processing).

  • Role — Thin_Air artist in residence @ the Beams, London
  • Tools — OpenGL, processing
  • Shown at — the Beams, London, March - June 2023

Archeology of the Self

2021 · Installation · experimental / bio-art

Family photos transferred onto my extracted skin, using a technique called polaroid lifting. An exploration of the body as a living archive, merging physical identity with the static images of personal history.

  • Role — solo
  • Tools — polaroid lifting, mixed media

Recognition