“Post Human & Art”
Date: December 9, 2021, Thursday
Time: 15.00-17.00 WIB
Place: Zoom Conference & ARCOLABS YouTube Live Streaming
Language: Korean-Indonesian Sequential Interpretation
Lecturer: Unhappy Circuit (KOR)
Moderator: Bob Edrian (IND)
“Post Human & Art” is a lecture series hosted by the Korea Foundation and ARCOLABS. It was designed to motivate new ideas and discourses on art in the post-human era through invited experts, such as artists, curators, and scholars, who have been establishing an in-depth and extensive artistic perspective and practice in their own field.
There are many global issues making a direct impact on life on Earth and beyond. Ironically, no one denies that human beings are the significant cause of the impacts, which contributed to the emergence of the idea of ‘Anthropocene’ the present geological epoch which has created the global ecosystem dominated by human activities for the sake of human being.
Some artists pay attention to the way humans have established their relationship with non-humans in order to challenge the traditional idea of humanity and overcome the problem of the human-dominated world. This is not only limited to the problem between humans and nature, but also to regard the relationship between humans and non-living organisms such as objects, machines, and technologies.
The first lecture series held on December 9, 2021 will be led by Unhappy Circuit, a Korean new media artist whose work is based on the convergence of diverse disciplines, such as art, astronomy, biology, data science, and linguistics. His main curiosity is on non-human intelligent beings and by exploring and understanding them, he wishes to expand the scope of humanity and ultimately prepare for the future of human civilization based on symbiosis between human and non-human.
Unhappy Circuit is a new media artist in Korea. His works are based on a multidisciplinary perspective that intersects astronomy, biology, data science and linguistics therefore, his artworks often connect language and music, memory and data, and humanity and the universe. He has a strong interest in other intellectual beings such as artificial intelligence, whales and extraterrestrial intelligence. By exploring non-human beings, he wants to expand the scope of humanity and human civilization.
Some of his works include:
● “Music of Memories”, Asia Culture Center, 2017 (an audio-visual installation that mediate human language and computer language)
● “i Remember”, Arts Council Korea, 2018 (an audio-visual installation asking questions about the identity of artificial intelligence and its learning capacity of human memory)
● “Learning About Humanity”, Asia Culture Center, 2019 (a performance that cooks a new food recipe created with artificial intelligence)
● “A Synthetic Song beyond the Sea”, Art Center Nabi, 2019 (a piece of music created with artificial intelligence that synthesizes sound of blue whale and music of human beings)
● “A Letter Across the Stars”, SIGGRAPH Asia, 2020 (an audio-visual installation on radio signal data to search for extraterrestrial intelligence)
● “Hangeul4ETI: Interstellar Message Written in Hangeul”, Ars Electronica-Art VR Gallery, 2021 (a interstellar message to inform Hangeul to extraterrestrial civilizations)
Bob Edrian is a curator and writer based in Bandung, Indonesia. Focusing his research on the development of sound in the arts and media art, his curatorial projects include “Bandung New Emergence Vol. 6: Listen!” (2016), “Intomedia” (2017), “Soemardja Sound Art Project” (2018), “International Media Art Festival Instrumenta” (2018-2019), “Pancaran Citra Lokal” (2020), and “Universal Iteration” (2021). Currently, he is a curator at NuArt Sculpture Park and the director of Audial Plane, a division for sound art and experimental music at Orange Cliff Records. His recent work has been featured in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (2020), Bloomsbury, London.
