Text by CLOT Magazine
In an effort to continue their arts and culture initiatives, Hyundai Motor Company has announced a partnership with Rhizome of the New Museum. Hyundai has built well-established collaborations with global art institutions over the last decade, and this one promises experimental and inventive digital art projects from both organizations.
This partnership kicked off with the group exhibition World on a Wire. The show premiered on January 28, 2021, at the Hyundai Motorstudio in Beijing and will be in Beijing until April 5, 2021, move to the Hyundai Motorstudio in Moscow, and then in Seoul. The exhibition showcases digital life forms, exploring the artistic potential of born-digital technologies.
Using simulation as a way to model form and process, the artists created their visuals with optical technologies, virtual reality, and augmented reality, among other processes. The artists combine the familiar with alternate realities, successfully questioning the relationship between representation and reality. Their simulations are relatable, multifaceted, beautiful, and dynamic. By expanding the potential for born-digital technologies, World on a Wire reimagines our interconnectedness with technology on the individual and community level.
Rachel Rossin (USA) uses UV-printed plexiglass and augmented reality application to bring her landscapes to life in I’m my loving memory. The work plays with the relationship between digital fields and physical experience by bending the plexiglass into bodily shapes.
JooYoung Oh (Korea) has created a retro-style videogame involving a new AI tool that has hit the market. Players must assist Timo, the AI robot, in consuming as much data as possible, but along the way the bot begins to question its own existence.
And a well-known artist by CLOT readers, Theo Triantafyllidis, presents Nike. This augmented reality sculpture interprets the Hellenistic marble sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 200–190 B.C.E.), prominently displayed at the Louvre in Paris.
One artist in the show, Pete Jiadong Qiang (China), met with Michael Connor, Rhizome’s artistic director, for a conversation and play-through of Qiang’s recent work. The talk was focused around the HyperBody, a mixed-reality landscape composed of a constructed space and a virtual environment experienced through a virtual reality headset.
Michael Connor curates World on a Wire from Rhizome of the New Museum, Baoyang Chen from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Taiyun Kim of Hyundai Motor Company. Yehwan Song designed an experimental generative website for the exhibition, a website that rearranges itself as you navigate through it.
