Rise of New Demands in Our Near Future

Service and product designer Youngjun Kim and musician and sound artist Dohahm Oh examine new types of needs the environmental changes in our near future could create. And as a group which they’ve named it “Neeeds”, the two try to explore various needs and ways to satisfy those needs by integrating technology and art. For <2020 ZER01NE OPEN STUDIO>, the artists started focusing on religious which impacts our social lives in different ways. The artists combine AI and religion to satisfy people’s religious needs which are becoming increasingly individualized especially nowadays, where meetings and gatherings are prohibited and contactless lifestyles are promoted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thinking About the Inseparable Relationship Between Society and Religion

Using a paradoxical premise, “Religion for Atheists”, the artists incorporate AI as a medium for creating a scripture which serves as the foundation for establishing and maintaining a religion. To do this, the artists made AI writer “GPT-2” developed in 2019 to study precepts and proverbs of various religions and explored a possibility of creating a new religion. The artists open up a new path for the history of humanity by presenting us the words of a new religion created by AI and allow us to have a new look at human-religion relations by applying the law of supply and demand of a free market economy to our belief system.