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The question of the relation between human, nature and machine in the era of uncertainty is posed once again in search of a meaningful typology. An expanded discourse on humanity for the future is shared through the findings.

  • Butterfly Room: Special Edition (2014/2021) - Tabor Robak

    Tabor Robak's video Butterfly Room: Special Edition is shown on two big screens at Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul. Robak's work uses computer graphics in a sculptural manner and molds pristine, super-saturated digital images in three dimensions. In this work, newly produced to fit large-scale screens, 100 fictitious living creatures interact with one another with movement and color to create a dynamic onscreen ecosystem, a digital aquarium. Robak intentionally undercuts biological significance of these living creatures by highlighting their artificiality. Through this, viewers realize that these living creatures were created from the artist's imagination and have evolved through digital tools.

  • I'm my loving memory (2020-2021) - Rachel Rossin

    Rachel Rossin's I’m my loving memory consists of plexiglass sculptures bearing imagery derived from virtual worlds of the artist that are printed, melted and crooked. The artist, taking the embodiment of digital worlds as a way of thinking, created virtual worlds filled with pieces of nature's sceneries and fragmented human bodies. The artist picked up ideas from plain-air painting (painting outside) and video game culture to capture disconnected landscapes and UV-printed them on clear acrylic sheets. The sheets are then melted, shaped into bodily forms and illuminated brightly to be clothed with color and induce distortion. As a result, viewers are able to understand both the material process of texturing 3D frames with digital skins and the interplay between bodily experience and virtual worlds. The virtual worlds used as a source material of these sculptures are naturally integrated into the installation via an AR App.

  • Studio Visit (2018) - Theo Triantafyllidis

    In Studio Visit, Theo Triantafyllidis transforms the gallery space into his own virtual studio. The artist embodies himself as an Ork avatar who uses digital tools to create 3D forms, and part of the produced work is demonstrated as physically large-scale wood sculptures. This process is recorded through DIY motion capture and displayed through two mobile screens in the gallery space. Through this, viewers can appreciate the work by moving the mobile screens themselves and even experience the artist's act of creation.

    In creating the Ork character, Triantafyllidis paired this famous video game character with the performative persona of himself. The beauty of Ork is inspired by odd medieval mechanisms and engineering tools, brutalism and gaming culture. As the Ork experiences complications and frustrations of artistic labor in his virtual studio, the artist contemplates the concept of virtual labor and production in the hybrid-reality work environments of today through his act of creation. Following the digital finishing, his works are purposefully misapplied with 3D modelling and rendered physically flat. This is how mass and materiality are substituted in the world mixed with augmented reality and actual reality. Through this, viewers can join the process and act of creating these odd objects.

  • ThingThingThing (2019-2021) - ZZYW / Zhenzhen Qi & Yang Wang

    ThingThingThing is a computer system with entities generated from an ever-evolving 3D world via user request. At first, each entity is defined by a user according to a given set of parameters. Once freely released in the system, however, no more alteration made. While ThingThingThing is a reminder of a long history of artificial life in the arts and computers, relatively simple rules bring about surprisingly complicated behaviors. However, ThingThingThing lacks realism to an excessive extent because of geometric living creatures inhabiting a multicolored backdrop. In this way, ThingThingThing viewers get absorbed into its technological medium rather than a virtual world.

  • Pandemic Chronotope, 2021 - Mariia Fedorova

    Pandemic Chronotope is a web project and installation work combining digital animation and Russian illustration to tell stories of personal anecdotes about COVID-19's impact on daily life. Russian artist and UX designer Mariia Fedorova collected the general public's experience during the national lockdown in 2020. The artist attached metaphorical meanings to these experiences and wove them into a series of fairytales as in the story of a firebird which would bring a kind of salvation in relation to a vaccine. This installation work uses phenakistoscopes, animation device in the pre-cinema era, to breathe new life into fragmented stories. In this way, the harmonizing interaction between storytelling and simulation forms of the past and contemporary in the work is further highlighted.

  • BirthMark: An Artificial Viewer For Appreciation Of Digital Surrogates Of Art, 2021 - JooYoung Oh

    How would an Artificial Intelligence views media art? BirthMark: An Artificial Viewer For Appreciation Of Digital Surrogates Of Art is based on a video exhibited at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing's World on a Wire and uses an Artificial Intelligence which responds to this video in real-time. The three-screen installations visualize how the AI detects objects from each image and translate them. Another display installed beneath the screens shows semantic deconstruction of the artist's note for each work.

    While this cognitive process may have some resemblance to human perception, the AI system rarely analyzes images in ways humans would consider to be correct. The more the abstract works, the more illegible the AI's interpretations.

    The title was taken from a 1843 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which is about an exceptional scientist obsessed with perfection who also becomes obsessed with a birthmark on his lover's cheek. His determination to fix the flaw using his scientific knowledge at all costs led to tragedy in the end, paradoxically showing that it is impossible to get rid of imperfection without giving up the human quality. The title Birthmark functions ambivalently in the work, leaving questions as to whether computer systems are at odds with human culture by nature or just imperfect as any other human creation.

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