Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses

Artist:  An Jungju & Jun Sojung, Lee Eunhee, Wang & Söderström, Jenna Sutela, Andreas Wannerstedt, Yeom Ji Hye, Basma Al Sharif, Yuri Pattison, Sharif Waked, ASMRctica, Ali Cherri, Kim Ayoung, Kim Woonghyun, Simone C Niquille / Technoflesh, Ahmad Ghossein, Sylbee Kim, Maha Maamoun, and Andreas Wannerstedt

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; Director Youn Bummo) presents Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses at MMCA Seoul from Friday, June 1 to Monday, September 12 as the second season of Watch and Chill, the world’s first subscription-based streaming platform for contemporary art, where the audience world wide can freely access to the media collection of major international art institutions.

Created by MMCA and presented in collaboration with prominent art institutions, Watch and Chill offers subscribers around the world the opportunity to watch the works from the participating institutions’ media collections and of the artists of each community. Launched last year, its first season was a collaboration among four Asian museums, such as M+ in Hong Kong. Presented as part of a three-year plan, the platform now expands its partners to Europe and the Middle East─and next year to the Americas and Oceania.

For this year’s Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is partnered with ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, which boasts one of the largest architecture collections in Europe, and Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) in the United Arab Emirates, an internationally influential institution that organizes the Sharjah Biennial among other programmes. The curators of Watch and Chill 2.0 is Jihoi Lee, Hoor Al Qasimi and James Taylor-Foster. Under the theme of digital sensoria and its symbiosis today, Watch and Chill streams works from around 20 artists in the different regions, while simultaneously showcasing them in physical spaces as internationally travelling exhibitions.

Watch and Chill subscribers will be alerted with a new piece of work every week. (subtitled both in Korean and English.) The offline exhibition at MMCA Seoul introduces Air Rest, designed by the architectural studio BARE (Yunhee Choi and Jinhong Jeon), affording visitors the experience of sensory terrain by assembling pneumatic modular units made with semi-tranparent air structure. Other participating artists, designers, and creators from Korea, Europe, and the Middle East include Andreas Wannerstedt, the duo of An Jungju and Jun Sojung, Kim Ayoung, Sylbee Kim, and Maha Maamoun, among many.

The contents for both the online platform and the offline exhibition respond to the relationship between technology and human perceptual systems, venturing beyond the flatness of the screen to evoke various forms of synesthesia. They consist of four sub-topics: “Optical Tactility,” “Calibrated Projection, “Trance, Cross, Move,” and “Bits of the Spirit.”

Following its offline exhibition at MMCA Seoul, Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses is scheduled to open in September at the Al Mureijah Art Spaces of Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) in the UAE, and in October at ArkDes (theSwedish Centre for Architecture Design) in Stockholm. The art streaming platform Watch and Chill will remain available until the final touring program concludes in December 2022. The exhibition is made possible with support from Meta Open Arts.

Also available on the online platform is the satellite project The Tales I Tell 2.0. This project expands the scope of Watch and Chill through literary works focusing on the user experience of the online platform from the perspectives of the humanities, sociology, and the performing arts. Other associated programs include a talk and performance (6 July) titled “ASMR—Digital Intimacy and Care,” featuring performance studies scholar So-Rim Lee and ASMR artists Miniyu and UNO, and a roundtable (12 August) titled “I See a Scent,” which brings together neuroscientist Jang Dongsun and professor Moon Jeil, and participating artists Kim Ayoung and Yeom Ji Hye. Both of these will take place at Gallery 7 of MMCA Seoul and streamed online.