Dream Resort is a visual investigation into twelve abandoned luxury resorts in the Society Islands in the South Pacific. These sites tell unique stories of nature reclaiming architecture, of temporality, and the impact of resort development. Filmed on location on the islands of Tahiti, Mo’orea, Huahine, and Bora Bora, Dream Resort contemplates the complexities of tourism 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 stand at the mercy of nature’s cycles. Cyclones, the pandemic and various other forces impacting tourism determine which sites stand. 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 above and below the surface of water, between past and future, between a soft human-sounding voice and the psychological landscape of AI.