Installation view of 《The Transparent | Adolescent | Machine of Western Seoul》 ⓒ SeMA
Seo-Seoul Museum of Art presents the inaugural
exhibition of new media collection works, 《The
Transparent | Adolescent | Machine of Western Seoul》,
on view through July 26.
Centered on the museum’s new media
collection, 《The Transparent | Adolescent | Machine of
Western Seoul》 explores contemporary conditions in
which technology and humans, code and the body, systems and sensory experience
become intricately entangled.
Combining a media art exhibition with
educational programs, the exhibition proposes how the museum can function as a
public space of shared sensibility within a technological environment.
Alongside major domestic and international media art collections, it also
features the participatory Youth Studio program for adolescents.
Installation view of 《The Transparent | Adolescent | Machine of Western Seoul》 ⓒ SeMA
The Youth Studio explores how subjectivity
is formed and transformed within today’s technological society through the
bodies, senses, voices, play, labor, and platform environments of adolescents.
In particular, it approaches teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 not as
fully formed subjects, but as “liminal bodies” through which shifting social
and technological codes most sensitively pass, as well as interfaces capable of
generating new forms of perception and relationships.
Seo-Seoul Museum of Art seeks to understand
adolescents as in-between beings who mediate between the human and nonhuman,
the present and the future, and as figures of possibility capable of
reconstituting agency within a technologically dominated society. To think
through adolescents is not to represent a particular generation but to become a
point of departure for “ontological politics” through which we sense that we
are already entangled with machines, artificial intelligence, the earth, and
the body.
Installation view of 《The Transparent | Adolescent | Machine of Western Seoul》 ⓒ SeMA
The exhibition takes shape as two responses
to these questions.
The first response is presented through the
museum’s collection (Gallery 1). This includes works that explore a posthuman
ecology in which machines, algorithms, and nonhuman beings are entangled and
operative beyond human-centered thought; works that treat the body not as a
physical entity but as a medium onto which social data is inscribed and
translated; and works that make visible the seams that emerge in the process
through which bodily action is converted into mechanical existence.
Installation view of 《The Transparent | Adolescent | Machine of Western Seoul》 ⓒ SeMA
The second response unfolds in the Youth
Studio established in Galleries 2 and 3. The Youth Studio calls on adolescents
as agents and interfaces, and serves as an experiment in new forms of
exhibition. Five participating artists propose works in a workshop format that
continue to operate throughout the exhibition, expanding the participatory
process into a sculptural field.
In these workshops, adolescents experiment
with the processes through which they constitute themselves: platforms, online
labor, technological anxiety, bodily performance, play, and the act of making.
As latent agents, they introduce discrepancies and latency into systems that
demand total synchronization, exercising the right to reassemble and perceive
their own bodies.
Participating Artists:
Yunchul Kim, Ro Kyung Ae, Joowon Song, Sungseok Ahn, Eun-me Ahn,
UJOO+LIMHEEYOUNG, Yangachi, Ji Hye Yeom, Youngjoo Cho, Jeamin Cha, Sooryeon
Choe, Laurent Grasso, Shezad Dawood, Anicka Yi, Karl Sims
