Exhibition Information

An Evolving GAIA
2017 Mixed Materials 가변크기

My Hus Tinman
2014 Mixed Materials 200x120,X130cm

			Introduction to Exhibition
'A Spot of Recollections' is a place where numerous 'life' events have accumulated through art, and it is a place of practice to remember and manipulate the value of this place, and an attempt by artists to pay attention to the future sentiments of art through imagination and its regeneration. If art is to assimilate with a person's life and sing the vivid value of life, it is also a treasure trove of memories, and a practice that constantly reinforces those memories. For these reasons, art has its roots in remembering the old values of its own environment and reminding it as an environment through its regeneration and execution of its workmanship. Art is a memory shop that values life's events.
So stop and look back and remember! Sit around and gather your thoughts together. Manipulate the greatest interpretation of the greatest prospect we ever had of ourselves as human beings and the memory of another possibility!
Then, we will capture the values and concepts that will hold those views firmly together and present them for future memories. The memory operation works on the discovery of creation and environmental speciality, and its communication, future soon changes to present and will be remembered again.

trying to be human
It's unusual. Lying in a white exhibit space, a female nude body floating in the air, 'An Evolving GAIA,' features a strange shape of red branches growing long, as blood vessels stretch out from the upper body of a giant mechanical robot that resembles a human and from below its exposed chest. As a real nature, the symbolic sensibility of branches and their shadows is interesting. As the audience looks around her, GAIA looks at the audience, moving her big eyes. It's amazing. And when the audience approaches and talks to Gaia's ear at the recommendation of the guide, it follows the intense flow of impression in which GAIA opens her mouth to answer correspondingly, and communicates directly with the audience, eye contact with each other. For example, if the audience asks, "Are you a person?" GAIA says, "I'm still a machine, but I'll soon have a life, if you help me teach me how to be a creature," and talks as if to ask the audience about their meaning or to express her thoughts about their relationship with humans. Along with expectations, fear is a part.
GAIA is an interactive installation piece, written in 2017 by No Jin-ah, who has been working on an interactive human robot that interacts with audiences by combining traditional sculptures and new media since around 2002. According to the author, GAIA uses classical artificial intelligence technology with a variety of inputs and outputs in real time, sends the question to an external web server when the audience asks questions, searches the question-and-answer dictionary, synthesizes the found answers back by voice, and answers them through GAIA’s mouth. The author borrowed James Lovelock’s ‘ GAIA Theory’ to metaphorically represent machines that want to have life from the perspective of the definition of life as a system concept. GAIA stands for Earth as the mother of all living things, land, or the earth that controls and interacts itself. The GAIA theory of self-regulating Earth, an organism whose environment includes all life and inanimate beings on Earth, as well as the atmosphere, oceans and soil, interacts with each other and circulates energy, presents us with another attitude of view: omnipresent symbiosis, equality of all things, ecological perspective, etc. in our current view of dividing life and nonliving things in a dichotomy, mechanistic and economic interest. Meanwhile, through GAIA, the writer simultaneously reveals the expectations and fears of artificial intelligence that we have created. It is that machines are constantly interacting with humans and co-evolving themselves. Along with the acquisition capabilities already granted to machines, the day will come when machines will have self-regulation, self-replicating capabilities, and will have all the attributes of life that they can no longer be wary of being non-living. While these self-evolving, self-learning and evolutionary man-made creatures are still in their early stages, it is conceivable that at some point they could become GAIA, the mother of all of us, bigger and more amazing gods than we are.

To be a machine
On the opposite side of GAIA, there is another interactive sculpture of the author. "My husband, my tin husband, My Hus Tinman," a half-hearted man with an ax on his shoulder and his head in thought, is a woodcutter sculpture in which his eyeballs move according to the movement of the audience. The sculpture, modeled after the author’s husband, is said to have been inspired by the fairy tale "Oz’s Tin Man." This is the story of the fairy The woodcutter, who was originally human, was looking for a way to marry the woman he loved, but was unintentionally cut out of the body with an ax and replaced the dismembered body with tin. The story is that he lost his mind and memory of his loved ones at some point, who were delighted by his change, as he was drawn to the beauty and convenience of the shiny silver tin, and changed his head to the tin. We ourselves living in modern society are also losing our minds like factory workers in the early 20th century, satirizing this fairy tale, and asking ourselves whether we are being used and abandoned like machine parts of capitalist society. The author is said to have reminded us of ourselves being mechanized, and at the same time metaphorized by our husbands and wives about the weight of each other's lives.
In addition to the meaning of ‘life’ that is redefined by the development of science and technology, the author who tries to ask the audience emotionally about the meaning of ‘human’ and ‘mechanical’ and the relationship between them will reveal the blurred boundary ‘co-evolution’ situations, such as ‘humanizing machines’ and ‘mechanical humans’, and visualize as if humans and machines interact with each other in the present form of insecurity and expectations of the future. This will be a process of interpreting the value of life as a new possibility in the real and future imaginative worlds. In this exhibition, we can see the writer’s continued attempts and attitudes toward expanding empathy for reasons regarding interactive artificial intelligence interactive art. The audience will also be able to experience a new experience of broadening the spectrum of self-balancing reasons and magnetism about life and discovering its own value through a synesthetic emotional experience caused by immersive pieces of immersive shapes that go beyond super rationality.

Artist’s Note
My works question the ‘standard of life’ that humans have established. As science develops, we create beings that resemble us and try to give them ‘living’. In fact, man-made life often meets the requirements of life considerably, with only different material properties. On the other hand, the human body, which used to be like pure nature and sex, is gradually finding itself no different from a protein machine with very mechanical structures and cybernetic principles. As time goes by, machines that resemble machines and machines that resemble humans are all co-evolving, crossing each other’s positions within and outside the boundary of life. Where are their lives and where are they lifeless? Is it also possible to empathize with non-living things? We want to go on a journey with the audience to find the answer to Gaia, the giant machine that grows up dreaming of becoming a creature, and Yang Chul husband who seeks love and happiness by changing parts of his body with metal.