Nothing Makes Itself

Participants, exhibition and live art:
PyoungRyang Ko & ATOD, Gijeong Goo, Borahm Kim, Shinae Kim, Ayoung Kim, Yunchul Kim, Choyeop Kim, NewBotong, V.A.B Lab + art and disaster, Susie Ibarra & Michele Koppes, Studio ThinkingHand, Sissel Marie Tonn, Ursula Biemann, Ji Hye Yeom, Min Kyoung Lee, LeeJungYeon DanceProject, Hyejoo Jun, Jihyun Jung, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Collective Doingle Around, Yoon Chung Han, Dongwook Hwang & Dongkoo Jung

Visit the online platform.

Satellite project
Net Show (curated by Sola Jung / Hyewon Kwon, Mary Mattingly, Ackroyd & Harvey and Ben Okri, Narae Inni Jin)

Zero Makes Zero (organized by Min-hyung Kang, Hwayong Kim, Youjin Jeon / Sunwoo Nam, Taein Park, Hyejin Yeo, Kyudong Lee, Mokhwa Lee)

Fragments of Hospitality (curated by diana lab / 109, blblbg, MC. mama, Eunjeong Koo, Grace Kim, Mooming, Insook Bae, SooYon Song, Wonjung Shin, Sewon Ahn, Seungwook Yang, Oro Minkyung, Jiro Ueta, yiyagi, Yuhee Jeong, Jinho Jeong, Hamamu, Hotpinkdolphins, SeoYeon Hong)

Online exhibition
Diakron, Suzanne Anker, Studio ThinkingHand, City as Nature, TJ Shin, Jaewook Lee, Chang Hanna, Christina Agapakis · Ginkgo Bioworks & Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Sissel Tolaas

ARKO Art Center will host the art festival, Nothing Makes Itself 1), supported by Art & Tech Program of ARKO (Arts Council Korea). The exhibition explores the method of transversality that redefines the relationship between humans, technology and environment as symbiotic and malleable. The festival presents 35 artists (teams) in visual and multidisciplinary arts and about 50 works based on theories of science and technology or incorporating various technologies—including VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), 3D printing, robotics, data visualization, sound installation, moving image, and the web. The idea traversing Nothing Makes Itself is “trans-corporeality,” which is derived from American literary scholar and ecocultural theorist Stacy Alaimo, serving as a mechanism that breaks away from human-imposed dichotomies and suggests interconnection and interaction between the human and non-human bodies. 

The festival highlights data-based visual projects that demonstrate how closely humans and the environment are related. Some of the works visualize the links between the invisible environmental elements and humans through their convergence with bioscience or imagine interpenetrations of materials in sci-fiesque images. Other works envisage humans in a hypothetical, future environment driven by climate change or look into the voices of diverse lives and communities behind the weight that environmental issues carry and their symbolic images as one goes through the pandemic era. The process will conceptualize the foundation for how heterogeneous elements are interlaced and expand their points of contact and how multiple values coexist in another time that will arrive, built with accumulated continuities of the present. 

Nothing Makes Itself presents 35 artists (teams) in visual and multidisciplinary arts and about 50 works based on theories of science and technology or incorporating various technologies. The projects will be shown as indoor and outdoor exhibitions, live art performances at SpaceFeelux, online exhibition and satellite project with three collaborate curators and teams. As artists living in a pandemic era, their projects contemplate the relationship between technology, humans, and the environment and conceptualize the future world reflecting the current environmental issues. The festival will feature artworks that involve collaborations with experts in the field of visual art, technology, science, and environment or long-term research. They will be shown in a physical exhibition, live art performances at SpaceFeelux, and a website designed for the festival’s online projects. Though the works in the online exhibitions are not necessarily about a web environment or technology-based, they highlight more extensive discourses or research outcomes regarding environmental issues. Furthermore, it takes note of artists’ practical activities, interviews, workshops, and research-based archives. The festival will introduce artistic imagination and practice as a bridge between theory and its elucidation in each discipline and look into the possibilities of an alternative future. 

The title Nothing Makes Itself is excerpted from Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.