Korean Media Arts Festival 2019:Technoimagination

CHAN SOOK CHOI YOON CHUNG HAN HARU JI & GRAHAM WAKEFIELD EUNSU KANG & COLLABORATORS HAHKYUNG DARLINE KIM BEIKYOUNG LEE CHEOL-WOONG SIM

SYLVIA WALD & PO KIM ART GALLERY

AUGUST 8TH - DECEMBER 14TH 417 LAFAYETTE ST, NEW YORK, NY 10003 www.kmaf.us

Organized by: Donghwa Cultural Foundation Sponsored by: Korea Foundation Curated by: Odelette Cho (SWPK) & Kyung Ran Joo (FUSE Art Project) In Collaborative Partnership with: Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, Harvestworks

the sylvia wald and po kim art gallery NON-PROFIT FOUNDATION

Message from the Chairman Donghwa Cultural Foundation is honored to welcome you to the Korean Media Arts Festival 2019: Technoimagin ation, with a season of events this Fall held at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery (SWPK) as well as at other venues in New York City. KMAF showcases avantgarde Korean contemporary artists who are courageously pushing boundaries, interpreting contemporary challenges within our rapidly changing, technology-driven environment.

Many years in the making, the Korean Media Arts Festival has been a heart-felt passion of mine, as it epitomizes the mission of the foundation. Founded in 2006 with the mission of broadening and deepening the collaborative exchange of Eastern and Western cultures, the name itself is rooted in the very word “Donghwa (東和)”. Like the sun that rises from the East (東: “Dong”), the philosophy of Donghwa is to dawn a new day, an era of global harmony and peace (和: “Hwa”).

Technoimagination supports our mission to raise a deeper understanding of the cultural make-up of our diverse global society and to pave the way to greater global harmony. The digital revolution has completely reshifted our cultural paradigm, as international boundaries have been virtually erased, and our society is interconnected at unprecedented levels.

The trade of information and culture has proliferated across all mediums and disciplines, and art remains no exception.

We are grateful to our talented artists and curators, generous sponsors, dedicated staff, and loyal partners, without whose collaboration and passionate support, KMAF would have not been possible.

Young H. T. Cho Chairman, Donghwa Cultural Foundation President, Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Gallery

Preface T E C H N O I M AG I N AT I O N KMAF 2019 aims to present the broadening intersection of art and technology through interactive and data-driven new media installations in 21st century Korean media art ensuing the era of Nam June Paik. The title Technoimagination, as coined by the late media philosopher Vilém Flusser, refers to the technical image culture made possible by the advent of post-text cultural apparatuses such as cameras, televisions, computers and cable networks.

Nam June Paik, a video artist from Korea who is often considered to be the pioneer of media art, was inspired by the period of technological amalgamation in America and the global utility network during the 1960s. He has brought over broadcasting network media into art extensively since the mid-1970s. From then on, media art has expanded into all sorts of apparatuses from radio and satellite telecommunications, video, television, film, photography, and now to the computer and internet in all its forms.

In the 1990s, the digital revolution reshuffled the way of producing and distributing arts, and has redefined our social mindset and cultural paradigm, further proliferating through the language of new media spoken by the generations of the internet in the prospect of post-media.

Today, media has become an integral part in extending our senses to experience and interact with the world. In this context, media

art has come to a position where it must be embraced by the contemporary arts scene. Art operating on a media device is not simply for the sake of utilizing the specific characteristics of a medium, but to explore and convey the renewed definitions of scale, speed, and pace of change in pattern for mankind.

Technoimagination introduces New York to the unique situation and characteristics of media art in South Korea, as a leader of IT in the postmedia and post-digital contemporary art era.

The media artists presented here engage with this new sociocultural change as they create technological forms as the apparat-operator.

The techno code is a new zero-dimensional plane code that combines dotted text with pictures, where time and space cannot be separated as with linear history. Here, space is experienced as synchronized time while time is experienced as diachronized space.

Technoimagination will be presented in two sub-themes: Memories in Time and Space and Living Data. The seven Korean media artists will participate in this exhibition as the apparat-operators, crossing the boundary between history and post-history in the context of technoimagination, while creating a new paradigm of space-time at the intersection of art and science.

Kyung Ran Joo (Director of FUSE Art Project)

Exhibitions

M E M O R I E S I N T I M E A N D S PAC E The exhibition Memories in Time and Space is presented in two parts across both the 4th and 5th floor galleries. On the 4th floor, Memories in Time and Space I features works by CheolWoong Sim, Chan Sook Choi, and Hahkyung Darline Kim, in which the artists reveal the story of the modernization of Korea—with its distortions, lost identities of evicted migrants, and forgotten memories of marginalized groups during the War. Cheol-Woong Sim, through his interactive installation, exposes the historical distortions and propaganda latent in the English Almanac of the Chosen Government General. Chan Sook Choi reflects on the narrative of the displaced migrants of the village of Yangjiri, a community built for propagandistic purposes towards North Korea. Hahkyung Darline Kim reveals the lost memories of those marginalized during the Korean War. These memories of the past fluctuate between history and post-history as the viewer experiences them within the spacetime of technoimagination.

On the 5th floor, a different Memories in Time and Space II is presented. Beikyoung Lee’s Thoughtful Space brings the viewer into the abstract and transcendental spacetime between actual and virtual realities. In transcendental space-time, sensory memories extend the limitations of the world in which we exist.

Chan Sook Choi, Yangjiri, 2018, two-channel video installation, 8:31 minutes, mixed media.

Courtesy of the artist.

Chan Sook Choi (b. 1977) Based in Berlin and Korea, Chan Sook Choi creates narratological video works of the lives of senior women who were forcefully evicted during the Korean War. Within the social and historical context, Choi’s works shed light on the psychological migration that ladens each of these women’s stories.

Yangjiri, a village to the north of the Civilian Control Line, is a migrant community constructed under military control for its propagandistic effect towards North Korea.

The migrants of this village were provided governmental support for housing, yet their land ownership remained unacknowledged.

Their lives in Yangjiri started in 100 small, slipshod-built concrete houses, with each housing structure comprising two 29.75 m2 houses. Today the village has become an unnatural space, reminiscent of an empty stage painted by an axis of history. More than 70 residents aged 80 and older still remain there, having built their lives not on a stage but on the land. Throughout the years, the residents have extended and modified their 29.75 m2 houses constructed on land they cannot own, creating unique housing structures in the style of Kibbutz communities.

Hahkyung Darline Kim, MemoRandom Project: A (我 [a]: self, I, us), G (知 [ji]: to know), 2015, single-channel video installation with sound, 10:50 minutes (A), 8:17 minutes (G). ©Hahkyung Darline Kim.

Hahkyung Darline Kim (b. 1987) MemoRandom is a modular video installation project that translates a story-event from the Korean War regarding the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl using the pseudonym Soonyi. Recounted by Seo Nan-seok, an octogenarian who lived through the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War, the veracity of the story is as dubious as the instability of the conditions surrounding her testimony.

Each distinct in its mode of representation, the modules comprising MemoRandom approach the story-event in a way that informs the connection between fictive elements in oral and visual storytelling, factuality in performances of the everyday and of remembrance, and the production of historical knowledge. As loose translations of the story of Soonyi, the modules viewed together are intended to offer an uneven but larger picture that performs as a synecdoche for the Cold War in Korea.

Presented in this exhibition are modules A (我 [a]: self, I, us) and G (知 [ji]: to know).

Beikyoung Lee, Thoughtful Space, 2017, 3D animation, mapping and sound.

Courtesy of the artist.

Beikyoung Lee (b. 1969) Thoughtful Space is a sequel Yoon Chung Han to (b.Zero-Gravity 1983) Space (2017), continuing the expansion of space and liberate viewers’ thoughts through changes in interactive the visual object.

Both works Eyes is an biometric data art present a space for thought within a relationinstallation that transforms human iris based, overlapped, and expanding virtual data into musical sound and 3D animated space. images. In this interactive installation, Han seeks to allow participants to explore their According to Stephen own identities through Hawking’s the uniquetheory, visual mankind living in the expansion of images and sounds generated fromphase their iris the universe one day experience patterns usingmay iris recognition techniquestime and in reverse when it enters into contraction sound synthesis. In the process,a aesthetically phase.

Arthur Danto in “After the derived End of beautiful and C. mesmerizing artwork, Art”, also proposed that art, after the end of from the human body, is created through art, would result in a period of pluralism that individual experience and multisensory has escaped all types of format.

Throughout interaction. history, art has relentlessly gone beyond and crumbled continually changing Biometric boundaries, data reveals fascinating stories the ways in which mankind understands spaceit not only through the genetic information and time. provides, but also in its potential to explore narratives in relation to others, culture Whereas Zero-Gravity series or society.theWhile the body Space of biometric employed the hexahedron as a tool to patterns provides a way to assess and reduce the feelings and associations of distinguish individual identity, the techniques visual behavior, Thoughtful Space abstracts used to measure such patterns allow for the ocean’s flexible movements standardization andand lossdiverse of identity.

Sonic through the use of cubes, resulting in an interpretations of iris data could lead to new unfamiliar ecosystem that frees the viewer’s systems of measurement through the creation patterns thought. of one’sof own “sonic signature,” possibly triggering new methods of interaction in the fields of art and science.

Cheol-Woong Sim, Thirty Years of the Unwelcomed Others, 2017/2019, interactive video.

Lost and Found-Forgotten Data, 2017/2019, digital print installation, size variable.

Courtesy of the artist.

Cheol-Woong Sim (b. 1958) Cheol-Woong Sim’s Thirty Years of the Unwelcomed Others is a hypertext project based on the records of the English Almanac of the Chosen Government General (19071938; total of 24 volumes). Presenting a structure that allows historic records to be experienced from a present perspective, the work specifically deals with the past and the present of the city of Seoul—from its colonial period to its periods of modernization and urbanization.

By utilizing hypertext functions to induce the user’s awareness and reaction, Thirty Years of the Unwelcomed Others communicates to viewers through a multilateral reciprocal conexus to reveal the ways in which the place and space still present today was formerly dominated and exploited by the Chosen Government General during the Japanese Occupation. Synchronizing interlinked information and experience, the artist makes full use of the characteristics of hypertext to create a virtual space of interconnected space-time. By criticizing the purported factuality and authenticity of the English Almanac of the Chosen Government General during the Japanese Occupation, Sim’s interactive archival work brings to light the falsification of history, propaganda, and cover-ups.

Exhibitions LIVING

DATA

Ever since the advent of the internet, an influx of data has become available from a variety of sources. As an era of Big Data has dawned upon us, the amount of unstructured data and the methods of its analysis have greatly increased, thereby intensifying the imperative to know the types of data to extract and filter, today a common interest in all fields including the arts.

Living Data presents data based works by Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield, Yoon Chung Han, and Eunsu Kang and collaborators. As artists and educators who have combined art and data in the labs of universities, they explore postinformation age themes including the ethical issues in artificial intelligence, the privacy of biometric data, and the living systems of virtual environments.

Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield’s Infranet employs an artificial life agent with an evolutionary neural network that transforms urban infrastructural data into a virtual artificial ecosystem. Eyes

by Yoon Chung Han utilizes biometric data to transform iris patterns into an interactive installation of musical sound and 3D-animated images. Eunso Kang’s Aural Fauna presents an unknown organism form, called aural fauna, that enigmatically reacts to visitors’ sound and touch.

The three works presented in Living Data expand the boundaries of creative expression through their visualization of analyzed data, revealing a data-dependent artistic communication relevant to contemporary society’s data dependency.

Yoon Chung Han, Eyes, 2018, interactive art installation, 3D-printed objects.

Courtesy of the artist.

Yoon Chung Han (b. 1983) Eyes is an interactive biometric data art installation that transforms human iris data into musical sound and 3D animated images. In this interactive installation, Han seeks to allow participants to explore their own identities through the unique visual images and sounds generated from their iris patterns using iris recognition techniques and sound synthesis. In the process, aesthetically beautiful and mesmerizing artwork, derived from the human body, is created through individual experience and multisensory interaction.

Biometric data reveals fascinating stories not only through the genetic information it provides, but also in its potential to explore narratives in relation to others, culture or society. While the body of biometric patterns provides a way to assess and distinguish individual identity, the techniques used to measure such patterns allow for standardization and loss of identity. Sonic interpretations of iris data could lead to new systems of measurement through the creation of one’s own “sonic signature,” possibly triggering new methods of interaction in the fields of art and science.

Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield, Infranet, 2018-present, AI/AL data art installation.

Courtesy of the artists.

Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield (b. 1971, 1975) “Within this landscape of city data, artificial lifeforms are born, dwell, and die. The varieties of kinds of data in the city become resources of metabolism to the taste of each creature.

Each one explores according to its unique neural network, through which it can carry ideas to share with others” (Ji & Wakefield, 2019).

Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial beings with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon a variety of open city data as their sustenance and canvas. Within the city-as-ecosystem, these lifeforms form spatial networks through which associations can spread, in simple and more complex contagions, telling stories of possible patterns that were invisible.

It is an aesthetic-cybernetic experiment in homeostasis as only a condition of heterostasis.

With thanks to students Amir Bahador Rostami and Nicole Skrypuch in the Alice lab at York University for support in gathering data.

Eunsu Kang in collaboration with Donald Craig, Austin Dill, Songwei Ge, Barnabas Poczos, Aural Fauna, 2019, machine learning algorithms (ADD, PDD) and interactive systems developed by the artist team, 3D-printed objects. ©Eunsu Kang and collaborators.

Eunsu Kang (b. 1974) and Collaborators

Aural Fauna project presents an unknown form of organism, aural fauna, that reacts to the visitor’s sound and touch. According to The Sirens of Titan, harmoniums feed on humming vibrations on the planet’s surface, the song of Mercury. They perceive the world through touch.

Inspired by them, the aural fauna is a family of creatures that become “alive” when there is a sound or touch fed into them. The fauna also sing in harmony to the visitor’s sound to express their acceptance of the visitor’s presence.

The bodies and sounds of the fauna are generated through machine learning. The creatures’ bodies appear as 3D-printed or virtual forms in the video projection. The unique form of each entity is designed by creative AI developed by the artist team. Their sound is generated in real-time using the WaveGAN algorithm in response to the participant’s touch. This project presents a utopian vision of the world where different species, and possibly even machines, interact with each other with no fear and without the rejection or hatred that spring from it; the human visitor and aural fauna create harmony together.

Special thanks to Chun-Liang Li and Manzil Zaheer for their help in the algorithm development.

Acknowledgements Donghwa Cultural Foundation would like to express our deepest appreciation to all of the individuals and organizations who assisted in putting together Technoimagination.

Special thanks to the following collaborative partners, staff, volunteers, designers, technicians and translators, without whose suport and dedication, this festival would not have been possible.

Ann Thurmond, Jennifer Lee, Raphaele Shirley, Taezoo Park, Alexandra Fanning, Minhwa Kim, Carol Parkinson, Andrew Dyck, Tashi Gombo, David Lindberg, Stephen Schaum, Chris James, Teddy Ouwerkerk, Cindy Jang.

SYLVIA WALD & PO KIM ART GALLERY 417 LAFAYETTE ST, NEW YORK, NY 10003 www.kmaf.us