Exhibitions & Events

PANEL DISCUSSION: MEMORIES IN TIME AND SPACE

Thurs, Sept. 26, 2019 | 6:30 PM

Join us for a panel discussion with Richard Vine (Managing Editor of Art in America), Carol Parkinson (Executive Director of Harvestworks), Daniel Palkowski (composer and digital sound specialist) and Hahkyung Darline Kim, moderated by  Raphaele Shirley (multimedia artist).

Within the context of the Korean Media Arts Festival exhibition Technoimagination: Memories in Time and Space, the panel will explore the relationship of time, space, memory and history and the ways in which artists use traditional and new media to re-evaluate our understanding of collective and individual memories.

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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

TECHNOIMAGINATION: MEMORIES IN TIME AND SPACE

The exhibition Memories in Time and Space is presented in two parts across SWPK’s 4th and 5th floor galleries. On the 4th floor, Memories in Time and Space I features works by Cheol-Woong 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 space-time 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 space-time between actual and virtual realities. In transcendental space-time, sensory memories extend the limitations of the world in which we exist.

 

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ABOUT THE KOREAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL

Technoimagination, the theme of the Korean Media Arts Festival 2019, introduces to New York the unique situation and characteristics of media art in Korea, as a leader of IT, in a post-media or post-digital contemporary art era. Presented at The Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Gallery (SWPK) are the exhibition sub-themes Technoimagination: Memories in Time and Space and Technoimagination: Living Data, featuring works by Chan Sook Choi, Yoon Chung Han, Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield, Eunsu Kang & Collaborators, Hahkyung Darline Kim, Beikyoung Lee, and Cheol-Woong Sim.The Korean Media Arts Festival 2019 is organized by the Donghwa Cultural Foundation, sponsored by the Korea Foundation, and presented in collaboration with SWPK and Harvestworks. Technoimagination has been co-curated by Odelette Cho of SWPK and Kyung Ran Joo of FUSE Art Project.

More information online at www.kmaf.us

 

Fri, Sept. 20, 2019 | 6:00 PM

Presented in the exhibition Technoimagination: Living Data, Yoon Chung Han’s 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.

Eyes has featured in major international conferences and exhibitions including ISEA 2019 Asia Culture Center (Gwangju, Korea), ACM CHI 2019(Glasgow, UK) and Currents New Media (Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA).

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Yoon Chung Han is an interactive media artist, award-winning interaction designer and currently an assistant professor in the department of design at San José State University. Over the past 10 years, she has created a wide range of interactive 2D/3D audiovisual art installations including biologic art, data visualization and sonification, generative art and audiovisual interface design. She earned her BFA and MFA at Seoul National University, her second MFA in Design | Media Arts at University of California, Los Angeles, and holds a PhD in media arts and technology from University of California, Santa Barbara. Han regularly participates in international media art exhibitions and symposiums including  ISEA 2017 (Colombia), ACM CHI 2017 (Denver, USA), IEEE VIS 2016 (Baltimore, USA 2016), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany 2015), ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 (Anaheim, CA), and Geumcheon Art Space (Seoul, Korea, 2014).

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

DooEun Choi is an independent curator and art consultant based in New York. Choi has recently worked as co-curator of Aurora Biennial 2018 in Dallas, art director of Da Vinci Creative 2015/2017, and chief curator of Art Center Nabi in Seoul. Since 2000, she has also curated numerous international media art exhibitions in Kyoto, Beijing, Madrid, Geneva, Enghien-les-Bains, Istanbul, Montreal, San Jose, New York, Linz and many other cities across Korea. Choi’s previous projects include Han Youngsoo: Photographs of Seoul 1956–63 at ICP MANA (2017); Why Future Still Needs Us: AI and Humanity at Art Center Nabi, QUT Art Museum in Brisbane (2016–17); BIAN (INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL ART BIENNIAL), at Arsenal Montreal (2016); Mediacity Seoul 2012 Biennial, at Seoul Museum of Art; and ZERO1 Biennial 2012, at Zero1 Garage. DooEun Choi is currently working on Quayola: Asymmetric Archaeology touring exhibition and BIAN (INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL ART BIENNIAL) 2020 in Montreal.

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ABOUT THE KOREAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL

Technoimagination, the theme of the Korean Media Arts Festival 2019, introduces to New York the unique situation and characteristics of media art in Korea, as a leader of IT, in a post-media or post-digital contemporary art era. Presented at The Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Gallery (SWPK) are the exhibition sub-themes Technoimagination: Memories in Time and Space and Technoimagination: Living Data, featuring works by Chan Sook Choi, Yoon Chung Han, Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield, Eunsu Kang & Collaborators, Hahkyung Darline Kim, Beikyoung Lee, and Cheol-Woong Sim.

The Korean Media Arts Festival 2019 is organized by the Donghwa Cultural Foundation, sponsored by the Korea Foundation, and presented in collaboration with SWPK and Harvestworks.

More information online at www.kmaf.us

Korean Media Arts Festival: Technoimagination

Chan Sook Choi, Yoon Chung Han, Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield Eunsu Kang and collaborators, Hahkyung Darline Kim, Beikyoung Lee, Cheol-Woong Sim

August 8, 2019 — December 14, 2019

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The Korean Media Arts Festival (KMAF) 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 theme of the 2019 edition of KMAF, 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.

Technoimagination introduces New York to the unique situation and characteristics of media art in South Korea, as a leader of IT in the post-media 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 exhibition sub-themes: Memories in Time and Space and Living Data. The seven artists presented in Technoimagination cross 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.

Memories in Time and Space

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 Cheol-Woong 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 space-time 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 space-time between actual and virtual realities. In transcendental space-time, sensory memories extend the limitations of the world in which we exist.

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 post-information 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. Eunsu 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.

 

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Technoimagination: Memories in Time and Space and Technoimagination: Living Data have been co-curated by Odelette Cho of SWPK and Kyung Ran Joo of FUSE Art Project. The 2019 Korean Media Arts Festival is organized by the Donghwa Cultural Foundation, sponsored by the Korea Foundation, and presented in collaboration with SWPK and Harvestworks.