Statement
By Curator Haena NOH（盧해나 ）
“Action”
The section entitled Action, features video works that present the technological production of virtual environments created with mechanical devices such as AI generators, online game platforms, and game engines, and also involve game-like directing and narratives that use in-game characters and environmental resources. Our social relationships and conditions are reflected in the game world, in its background and environment. It has now become difficult to differentiate the game engine-created virtual world from reality. This is because games are reproductions of reality, or because the conditions of reality are their premises. As such, our lives and society are represented by means of technological media like AI generators and game engines, and it is in the game world that reality is wholly revealed. Technological media and reality maintain a relationship by intervening in one another. Games and virtual realities either reflect or change society in terms of aesthetic styles and experiences. Action, focuses on video works that deploy digital environments, game grammar, and production methods as their storytelling processes such as machinima. In these works, the digital virtual world is a space where social knowledge systems and norms appear in a feedback loop. Defined as non-human spaces of emancipation that have broken away from the systems, it is demonstrated how these worlds are interwoven with our reality and society.
1.Machinima is a compound word of machine and cinema. It was used as video recordings of game play in game engines, but it is currently recognized as an independent genre.
Gayoung AN (안가영)’s KIN Online is a machinima video that recreates situations that actually occurred in an artificial space with the people who were invited to the game platform. Based on ethical and realistic issues experienced within the virtual space, the characters propose alternative rules and safety guidelines for the game.
Meanwhile, virtual characters move out of the frame from the virtual space they were born and function in the real world. Eunsol LEE(이은솔)created a collaborative organization that can freely transform and expand the virtual character named “Kimberly” within the digital network. This organization issues digitalized virtual assets, and the members use Kimberly as a resource to imagine a digital-based community model and its activities by sharing secondary creations and their rights.
TZUSOO (추수), in collaboration with AI generator DALL·E2, has created the virtual influencer “Aimy” and expanded it in diverse realms through the digital network. Created by a mechanical device, Aimy lives on as a being that belongs to a world that is independent of humans, but her influence eventually reaches into the real world of bodies. As such, Aimy appears to hold the conditions of a post-human being where different worlds are intertwined together.
Hyojae KIM (김효재) ’s Parkour illustrates the limitations of data that is reproduced in a feedback loop within our world. The artist explores bodily movements and the related data of the people who practice parkour, a formless sport that refuses rules, standards, and forms. The fact that algorithms and AI parkour robots standardize parkour movements or limit the diversity of physical movements reminds us of the body subjugated to the data system. The parkour performers are not governed by datafication, but instead express abilities that surpass each of their different physical limitations and carry out body movements at different levels. These movements are seen as creative activities that can be performed by human beings as well as original aesthetic experiences.
Venue
Digital Art Center, Taipei
Artworks
