DELIVERY DANCER’S SPHERE + POROSITY VALLEY 2: TRICKSTERS’ PLOT + AT THE SURISOL UNDERWATER LAB + PETROGENESIS, PETRA GENETRIX
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere
Ayoung Kim / Republic of Korea (South Korea) / 2023 / 25 min
Techno-futuristic video work from a fictional future Seoul, where a female courier moves through the city’s digital labyrinths.
En Storm (an anagram of ‘Monster’) is a female delivery rider who works for a platform called Delivery Dancer in the fictitious Seoul. The evening-night view of Seoul filled with artificial lights is somewhere between techno-orientalism and Asian futurism. In this fiction, Seoul is a labyrinth of endlessly regenerating routes, and the Dancers (workers of Delivery Dancer) pursue neverending delivery work under the control of a master algorithm called Dancemaster. This work is not only about the gig economy and platform labour, which have become immensely popular in South Korea especially during the pandemic, but also about the topological labyrinth, the possible world(s), the hypervigilance, and the accelerationist urge for optimization of body, time and space. It contains hints of a queer relationship with a counterpart from another possible world.Presented in partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen.
Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot
Ayoung Kim / Republic of Korea (South Korea) / 2019 / 23 min
A speculative fiction that revolves around the recent arrival of Yemeni refugees in Korea, and how xenophobic authorities consider them a visus in the system.
Petra has merged with its own clone and been transported into a dimension that transcends time and space. It awakens to find itself dropped on the shoreline of an island known as ‘Crypto Valley.’ The island is home to numerous minerals/data fragments that are now adrift, having lost their homes for different reasons. It is a land of boundaries, neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. Petra once again experiences a migration review, facing authorities who regard migrants as equivalent to aliens or viruses. Failing its review, Petra gets confined to the ‘Smart Grid’ that serves as an alien detention center, but after encountering a visual/auditory hallucination there, it escapes, following a beckoning voice to the island’s center. There, within the caverns, it encounters the Mother Rock, a data center or ancient cloud and transcendent presence that has existed in this place for eons.Presented in partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen.
At the Surisol Underwater Lab
Ayoung Kim / Republic of Korea (South Korea) / 2020 / 17 min
A simulation of the near future, a decade after the pandemic of 2020, which delves into a possible world, reflecting and distorting the conditions of the current world.
In the wake of climate change and depletion of natural resources brought on by fossil fuels, eco-friendly bio-fuels have become society’s main energy source. The chief source of energy in the world is macro-algae fermented to produce biofuel. In the Korean city of Busan, a ‘biomass town’ has been established over a long belt stretching from Gijang to the waters near the Oryukdo Islands. At Surisol Underwater Lab, which manages an integrated process involving seaweed farming, water quality, ocean currents, and biomass, Sohila is a senior researcher at the lab conducting reconnaissance in the waters in question.Presented in partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen.
Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix
Ayoung Kim / Republic of Korea (South Korea) / 2019 / 7 min
A spiritual journey to Mongolia, where the belief that even rocks are alive becomes an occasion to reflect on the origins of everything.
In 2019, Ayoung Kim travelled to Mongolia to research its abundant animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones and sacred caves that purify human guilts. It is the widespread belief of the Mongolian people that rocks and minerals are alive, like other natural elements. Consider the particular origin myth that human beings were born from rocks. From where does the belief come from, and why has it prevailed for so long…? Ayoung Kim traces this topic and creates her own hyperbolic mythology connected to the origin of Petra Genetrix by integrating interviews with a historian, geologist, geology museum director, and the locals. By way of the notion of Petrogenesis – which refers to a genesis from rocks – Ayoung Kim wanders the interrelated and overlapped layers of time, as though lost in the Earth’s strata. Can we think of the rocks and stones that have existed since the beginning of the Earth as the Earth’s vehicle for memory storage?Presented in partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen.