Yangachi

Sally, 2019 present, 3-channel video, color, sound, 9min 19sec

Sally, 2019 present, 1-channel video, color, sound, 6min 40sec

Sally Smiles, 2020, silicone, mineral, 17×13×14cm

Sally shows the datascape of a near-future smart city of Seoul, guided by artificial intelligence named Sally. In this work, Yangachi predicts changes in our lifestyles and environments based on the technical knowledge of artificial intelligence, energy, robots, and smart cities. Can production and consumption of data, along with Platform Capitalism, transition into a model that generates basic income? Can autonomous driving and accompanying technology connect us between time zones, scales, and spaces? Will there be an emergence of new bodies that can sense and access the network? Will those bodies be able to change their sense and perception? The prophecy of artificial intelligence of the near future, that assures us "everything will soon be connected," leads us to question whether a physical being can meet human bodies via World net where everything is connectable. The video is projected as both a visual imagining of and an advertisement for the future of technology lying ahead of us. While Sally, the artificial intelligence from the future, speaks to us from the screen, Sally Smiles — the object placed in the exhibition hall — radiates the light absorbed from another medium. Calcite, a mineral attached to an object, is a mythical and naturally derived mineral used during Viking voyages to determine the sun’s direction. Like the future, the ancient time of the Vikings can also be connected via imagination; in this sense, the work connects the medium of the past with that of the future, and welcomes the audience by becoming a signal that conjoins both exhibition halls.

Minsu Oh

Outsourcing Miracle, 2020, speakers, motors, mixed media, dimensions variable

A work composed of amplified mechanical sounds and kinetic installations, Outsourcing Miracle is about the death of laborers who disappear behind the capitalist system. “Outsourcing” is a system adopted by corporations in order to speed up the production process. Subsumed by this corporate structure, working-class people become subject to precarity. The artist attempts to reveal the conditions of labor in mega-corporate structures by recording the sounds at the destruction of Icheon warehouse (April 29, 2020) and projecting them in the exhibition space. The white noise, recorded at the scene of the fire, flows through the speakers that move up and down the exhibition space; what results is the doppler effect, a distortion of sounds that is amplified and reduced by the movement of the speakers. Through sound installations, the work further speaks of the management structure of the market economy, sacrifices made in the name of corporate productivity, and the irreproducibility of disasters. The distortion of sound obscures the irreproducible time; it also guides us to a time and sound yet to be experienced. The blazing and irreversible fire from the site of disaster in Icheon comes alive in the form of fleeting white noise, and in the face of obscured time and sound, we come to sense the instant of death.

EunHee Lee

AHANDINACAP, 2020, 3-channel Full HD video installation (in-sync), color, sound, 13min

Through a three-channel video, AHANDINACAP suggests how physical deficiencies are determined in a capitalist society and how technology and science are mobilized to overcome those deficiencies. Starting with footage from a movie, this video is composed of a narrative of becoming a post-human in order to overcome disabilities, the set of criteria used by insurance companies to determine what classifies as a disability, the movement of the performer, and a robot used for rehabilitation therapy. In the name of overcoming disabilities, the science and technology industry promotes the development of prosthetics that attach machines to the human body, creating a cyborg. The artist explores the meaning of the “disable-bodied,” the etymological source of disability, and questions if the capitalist perspective on disability results in the dichotomy between “defective” and “recovered, therefore able to work.” She further questions the division of normality and abnormality—a condition to determine what classifies as disabilities—and reveals the aggrandizing presence of cutting-edge technology in the dichotomous disability industry with interviews of care workers and a person with a disability.

Youngzoo Im

Theta, 2020, 4-channel video installation, color, sound, 17min 52sec

Theta invites us to perceive our unpredictable and unstable existence through meditative and fragmented senses. Our daily lives in a chaotic world might look peaceful yet are full of precarity, variants, complexities, and interrelationships. Take technology for example: it has deeply entered our everyday lives in the form of platforms and has become inseparable from life. Our everyday routines connected by technology deter our perceptions from clearly delineating boundaries between the real and the virtual. In the midst of the confusion and illusion between those blurred boundaries, ethical judgement is suspended, while the subject of grief becomes unclear. Theta sheds light on ways we encounter and perceive uncertain events, and the condition where technology or capital has been so internalized that it has become a part of humans. To Im, science and technology is a medium for introspection and overcoming of the physical body to reach the outer world. In this work, the artist, who has explored the structure of faith, implies the hope and fantasy attached to technology and capital of our time. She questions whether the whole of humanity is experiencing phantom pain — a painful sensation from a body part that no longer exists — and whether we are at the brink of an unfathomable end of the world.

Sylbee Kim

Garden of Regrets, 2018/2020, single channel video, 4K transferred to HD, B/W, sound, 5min 17sec, 3D PLA print, digital print on PET and adhesive sheet, 8 freestanding mirrors

- Backlit Pilgrimage: Spiral Ouroboros, 2018/2020, digital print on adhesive sheet, 800×800cm

- Gatekeeper 7: On the Bridge, 2018, digital print on PET, 200×150cm

- Gatekeeper 13: Kaesong Factory Worker, 2018, digital print on PET, 200×150cm

- Gatekeeper 10: Drone Specialist, 2018, digital print on PET, 200×150cm

- Gatekeeper 9: Baby Offering Flowers, 2018, digital print on PET, 200×150cm

- Garden of Regrets, 2018, single channel video, 4K transferred to HD, B/W, sound, 5min 17sec. Voice-over: Joohyun Hong

- Apple of Your Eye, 2018, 3D PLA print, 18×18×18cm

- Study of Coiling Movement, 2018, 3D PLA print, 12×15×14cm

- Pagoda, 2018, 8 freestanding mirrors, dimensions variable

As the title suggests, Garden of Regrets is an allegory of religion and myth. The word “regret” refers to the feeling of guilt, remorse, or longing for an event that did not happen; the word “garden” resonates with the Garden of Eden of the Old Testament. In this sense, Garden of Regrets is evocative of the story of the first humankind who gets tempted by a serpent and thus enters a path of regret, while at the same time being a metaphor of the situation in which the capitalist belief in science and technology supplants faith in God. In the video, a serpent — the agent of seduction and warning — connects time and space of the past and present. Science and technology appear like a savior, but that scene is also montaged with that of a serpent robot that is rendered useless at the actual site of rescue. As a whole, the work is structured according to the Garam layout, a formal arrangement of Buddhist temples. The pilgrimage route to the garden is constituted by ouroboros, the shape of a snake swallowing its tail that embodies allegories of cultural transformation (Backlit Pilgrimage: Spiral Ouroboros). And 3D prints with patterns of snake skin as a materialized version of data guard the screen (Apple of Your Eye, Study of Coiling Movement). Portraits of anonymous multitude who arose through recent history confront the viewers as both Gatekeepers of the garden and witnesses to the fable created by science, technology, and capital. Passing the Gatekeepers, one can circumambulate Pagoda that reflects eight directions and guides the audience (who are reflected in the mirror) into the present, past, and future. The voiceover from the video reverberates like a public announcement: as a guide and prophet, it narrates the malfunctioning conjoinment between a machine and a human body.

EunHee Lee

BLOOD CAN BE VERY BAD, 2018, single channel HD video, B/W, sound, 16min 25sec

BLOOD CAN BE VERY BAD engages with body images captured by machines. A video essay on sensing and perceiving body image, the narrative begins with paralysis and follows the absence of sense in the lost body. The flickering video alternates between ghostly body images produced by machines and mechanical images of humans (the owner of the bodies) seeing their bodies and gasping in terror. The body images captured by technology and machines approach us in unfamiliar yet decisive ways, while death captured by X-rays keeps appearing and disappearing. Mirror treatment, a method to cure paralysis, falsely retrieves the sensations of the lost body through the reflection in the mirror. This phantom image, in turn, reactivates the nervous system and physically moves the body. The video traces this transformation of the bodily senses that takes place after encountering the heteromorphic mirror reflection of the self. This transformation subsequently becomes a metaphor of the virtual and real senses that have been morphed by technology, science, and cybernetics.

Yangachi

There were creationists, fixistes, essentialists, eschatologists, evolutionists, existentialists, fundamentalists, gnosists, originists, externalists, rationalists, and syncretists., 2012, single channel video, color, sound, 12min 49sec

There were creationists, fixistes, essentialists, eschatologists, evolutionists, existentialists, fundamentalists, gnosists, originists, externalists, rationalists, and syncretists. cross-cuts neuroscientist Dr. Park Moon Ho’s lecture performance with Daejeon Expo Science Park’s sculptures. The 1993 Daejeon Expo was an event that showcased the development of a nation through futuristic images of science and technology. It was also a symbolic space for the “national development in science and technology of the 21st century.” The neuroscientist’s lectures on science, reason, purity of language, and ecosystems, which took place at Science Park, illuminate darkness and its dormant reason; the giant models of animals, plants, insects, and planets at Science Park — the heart of science and technology — are clumsily lit by unstable camera angles and lighting. Intervening with the narrative of the science lectures through nonlinear scenes and edits, the work revives Daejeon Expo. It reveals the ideological dimension of science that is far from mathematical logic and reason. Produced in response to “Science Art,” an interdisciplinary theme of science and art from 2012 Project Daejeon, the work strides a temporal gap, resituates itself in this exhibition, and ruptures scientific logic and rationalism.