Jung Seung: Data Refraction_Digital Orchestra

Media artist Jung Seung grafts together dystopian worldviews with humans, engineering theory, and technologies to get at life’s core in innovative ways. Since 2016, he has worked on a series of experimental projects that combine visual art with science and technology under the keywords outer space, living organisms, and data. Data Refraction: Digital_Orchestra continues Jung’s project of turning the life and death of organisms into data. Jung’s works here riff off the hypothesis that the universe is brimming with endless information, prompted by an intuition that all entities that exist in the universe, whether organic or inorganic, each leaves traces (data) or the power of influence (force). The artist collaborates with developers, engineers, and scientists to collect, in real time, data created through the growth and development processes of living organisms; this data is then transmitted via computers. The collected data is subsequently passed through a specially developed program, one that gives the data visual, auditory, and performative forms.

As one mixes paints on a palette before painting, Jung employs different parameters within the digital program—his version of the palette—and experiments with production methods. The exhibition includes interactive animation, data visualization, sculptures, installations, and robot performances. For Digital Orchestra, a new sound installation, Jung analyzed footage of plant life and growth, then composed 100 digital sounds. The audience hears these sounds as the process of cell division unfolds before their eyes. In consideration of the space—the work placed in the center of two floors that partially open out—the six channels each play a track, and Jung experiments with merging these sounds together over the entire space to complete an orchestral effect. Martien Wing is a kinetic and performative work wherein robotic movements are controlled by data transformed from the earlier plant life footage. In the performance piece Scattered Scream-harness, Jung places a choreographer with a wearable robot inside a digital environment, encouraging the commune with a digital medium.

Jung Seung’s work is unpredictable, combining as it does mechanical movement with living things. Plants and the human body that sustains itself by continuous cell division repeat the cycles of life and death in the time-lapse footage, while the machines generate shifts and transitions as though they were thinking beings. These explorations attempt to redefine life through the coevolution between human senses and machines.

Text by Sun Mi Lee, Curator, Alternative Space LOOP
Translated by Emily Yaewon Lee