Fellow Travelers: New Exhibitions by MOON & JEON and Choe U-Ram

This fall, Seoul debuted two highly anticipated exhibitions from three artists whose work employs cutting-edge technology to interrogate our present moment.

At Art Sonje Center, 2021 MMCA Hyundai Motor Series artists MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho present Seoul Weather Station, an immersive installation and a platform to spark conversation around the climate crisis. Meanwhile, 2022 MMCA Hyundai Motor Series artist Choe U-Ram's Little Ark raises questions about humanity's survival with his kinetic sculptures.

Writer Claire Evans ruminated on both projects—illuminating their critical engagement with emergent technology, addressing their respective framings of contemporary crises, and demystifying their use of machines, many of which were created in collaboration with the Hyundai Motor Group Robotics LAB.

A yellow robot bows to a vast, curving screen. In front of it, A.I.-generated forms tumble and merge in a slow-motion whorl of gears and chrome. The robot clicks to attention, high-stepping along the length of the screen like a sentry. It pivots its head as though straining to understand what it is seeing. Voices whisper; the light strobes, reddens, flickers: a nearby stone glows from within. The impression the space gives is ecstatic and mysterious. Have we wandered into some machine ritual—a moment of arcane communion between nonhuman intelligences?

Not quite. “The goal is to guide and encourage the audience to explore the exhibition from a novel perspective,” explains Moon Kyungwon, one-half, with Jeon Joonho, of the artistic duo MOON & JEON. For their new exhibition, Seoul Weather Station, at Art Sonje Center, the pair have invited this robot—a Boston Dynamics Spot outfitted with a Smart Carbon Monitoring Processing Unit custom-built by the Hyundai Motor Group Robotics LAB—into their process as collaborator, sensor, and guide. The “novel perspective” it evokes is that of the nonhuman, a category that includes machines but which, in MOON & JEON’s worldview, expands to encompass both creatures of the living world and the world itself—a complex ecosystem of relations and minds—as a totality.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, the immersive work To Build a Fire, is an ecosystem itself, comprising MOON & JEON, Spot, the language-generating AI system GPT-3, and a constellation of coders and collaborators. The narrative, co-written with GPT-3, is told by a “once-mighty stone” weathered to a pebble over millennia. The stone speaks in more ways than one. In its presence we are reminded that our technology is merely an arrangement of minerals animated by electricity and language: talking silica. Even Spot, agile as it is, is a mineral alchemy. Stone is static only from a limited vantage. In robotics labs, it dances; over millennia, it returns to dust.

As part of their collaboration with the Hyundai Motor Group Robotics LAB, MOON & JEON have brought their carbon-sensing robot on a data-gathering journey around Seoul, measuring the effects of anthropogenic climate change in the air. The resulting data, like an ancient stone, speaks volumes. Perhaps more than any contemporary artists, MOON & JEON are awake to the brutal truths of climate change. They are known for video work set in post-disaster scenarios, populated by people seeking meaning and the seeds of new life in what remains of the gone world. To Build a Fire continues this exploration, albeit filtered through the kaleidoscopic perspectives of A.I.. Humanity, it suggests, is a blip between the dinosaurs and deep time. How can we—and our nonhuman kin—survive our own hubris?

At the nearby National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, another exhibition offers a solution: build an ark, of course. The ark in question is crafted from heavy iron and recycled cardboard boxes, animated from within by thirty-five pairs of winglike robotic oars. The centerpiece of a new exhibition by artist Choe U-Ram, Little Ark transforms from fortress to chariot, drawing climate survivors into an unknown future. For Choe, the ark is a symbol of ambivalence: we cannot all weather the disasters to come. Even today, we send telescopes into space to probe the mysteries of the universe while people starve on Earth. Collective and individual desires are often at odds; what we all share, however, is a desire to escape the now. "What will you put in the ark and where will you go?" asks Choe, fully aware that an ark, like the present, is finite.

"How can we—and our nonhuman kin—survive our own hubris?"

Like Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Choe U-Ram is entranced by technology. His kinetic sculptures, which he calls “anima-machines,” lend human desire and imagination extra-corporeal form. Technology is a means to grasp beyond our biological limitation, from exploring space to expressing metaphors unbound by flesh. In another sculpture, Round Table, a group of straw men vie for control of a single head. The head rolls, like a pinball, from torso to torso; an impossible metaphor given form by robotics. We are divided, it suggests, but survival requires consensus—and collective action. “I think the biggest task of mankind is to find out if the balance between individuals and societies is possible,” explains Choe. In his own work, humans and machines are one, but the collective and the individual are forever at odds. “There's a harmony, a fight, a struggle between the two,” Choe adds. “And no one knows what the conclusion will be.”