On April 9, the KAIST Space Institute announced the launch of Good Morning Mr. G-DRAGON, the world’s first media art-based space music transmission project, created in collaboration with media artist Jinjoon Lee (Professor at KAIST’s Graduate School of Culture Technology) and global K-pop artist G-DRAGON.

This groundbreaking project is a fusion of science, art, and popular music—a convergence of KAIST’s cutting-edge space technology, Professor Lee’s media art, and G-DRAGON’s voice and music track (Home Sweet Home), forming a new kind of “space cultural content” experiment.

Good Morning Mr. G-DRAGON inherits the legacy of Nam June Paik’s iconic 1984 work Good Morning Mr. Orwell, which connected the world through satellite as a medium. This new project ventures into space by interpreting fragments of emotion, existence, and perception—captured through the most intimate human sensory organ, the eye—using AI, and transmitting them beyond Earth.

Good Morning Mr. G-DRAGON was produced as part of Professor Jinjoon Lee’s large-scale art series ‘Open Your Eyes,’ which explores human emotion through AI using the human eye as a portal to the inner self. This particular work is an AI-driven media art piece based on iris data from G-DRAGON.

The video component, which visualizes the infinite cosmos as seen through G-DRAGON’s gaze—an artistic interpretation of the universe reflected in the human psyche—was projection-mapped onto the KAIST Space Institute’s 13-meter space antenna, a world-first. Alongside the visual installation, G-DRAGON’s track Home Sweet Home was transmitted into space via KAIST’s satellite technology, completing a symbolic performance where the inner universe is broadcast outward into the cosmos.

This transmission is also connected to NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. SETI has a history of transmitting music into space, including tracks by the Beatles and Missy Elliott. The G-DRAGON space music transmission marks South Korea’s first-ever participation in a SETI-related project.

This project goes beyond mere technological achievement. Professor Jinjoon Lee explains, “Today, we live confined within endlessly structured gazes and systems—within invisible algorithms. Even our identities are only permitted to breathe within predetermined frames.”

He continues, “In an era marked by discrimination, hatred, division, and controversy, algorithms define the individual, and platforms fragment our emotions and identities. It is precisely in such times that art must reinitiate hopeful discourse on community and existence—not just from a global perspective, but from a cosmic one.”

References

• KAIST 우주연구원 보도자료 (KAIST Space Institute Press Release)
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