2022 ARKO Art & Tech Festival: The Fable of Net in Earth

Artists, offline exhibition 
Clara Jo, eobchae, HONF (The House Of Natural Fiber), Keiken, Song Min Jung, Mooni Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Natasha Tontey, Sunjeong Hwang, Sunpil Don, Youngjoo Lee

Artists, online platform
eobchae, HONF (The House Of Natural Fiber), Keiken, Song Min Jung, Mooni Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Natasha Tontey, Sunjeong Hwang, Sunpil Don, Youngjoo Lee

Artists x guest curators
Anna Kim, Vishal Kumaraswamy x Ritika Biswas, Clara Jo x Mara-Johanna Kölmel, Li Yi-Fan x CHEN Hsiang-Wen

Writer
Bora Lee-Kil, Bosun, Hannah Seo, Mina Ha

The 2022 ARKO Art & Tech Festival The Fables of Net in Earth metaphorizes a decentralized network system of Web 3.0 by likening it to a system of fungal clusters, such as mushrooms and molds. This fable addresses the unrevealed entanglement of humanity, nature, and mythological beings as beings of earth, aiming to show the magical world they portray, and is a story about “worlding” with earth beings.[1]

Gallery 1 of The Fables of Net in Earth is called “The Unknown and Wildness” and depicts the long-standing narratives on the coexistence of mythology, spirits, and wildness (Clara Jo, Mooni Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Natasha Tontey, Youngjoo Lee). In Gallery 2, “Mutant World” introduces a speculative world created in the digital world (eobchae, Keiken, Song Min Jung, Sunjeong Hwang, Sunpil Don). “The Underground Garden” in SpaceFeelux is where HONF’s work as well as many programs that share the knowledge and practices of collectives and communities that resemble the energy of earth can be found. Meanwhile, the online virtual exhibition “Mycelium Garden” offers the audience an opportunity to explore digital works as if they’ve become microscopic spores in the micro-fictional world organized according to the growth phases of fungus. In addition to the digital artworks by eleven participating artists, the audience encounter commissioned and collaborative works by the artists with three guest curators (Anna Kim, Vishal Kumaraswamy x Ritika Biswas, Clara Jo x Mara-Johanna Kölmel, Li Yi-Fan x CHEN Hsiang-Wen). Moreover, the writings and texts contributed by Bora Lee-Kil, Bosun, Hannah Seo, and Mina Ha as the output of the festival’s pre-exhibition workshop “Worlding-with” are presented in the virtual space. We are preparing for another section of the exhibition in partnership with Digital Art Festival, Taipei, which will be released online and via screenings during the festival on September 30.

This festival explores the fictional world where different species are engaged and balanced to create a variable world. Existences under earth that create a hybrid world with multiple perspectives are “compost” beings[2] which live and die in conjunction with various creatures on Earth. You are more than welcome to stay together in the mutant world with underground beings in earth.

[1] The Fables of Net in Earth shares the wisdom of Nausicaä, a mediator from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), who connects the mutants of the fungal forest and the human community to coexist. It also refers to the ecological cycles of the imaginary world in which contaminated fungal forests prepare for regeneration and circulation in deep earth.

[2] According to Donna Haraway, “compost” is a configuration of deanthropocentrism and a concrete shape whereby life and death of multispecies are intertwined in mutual interdependence. Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble, North Carolina: Duke University Press, (2016), 32.