Tracking Human-Data Relations
<Recycling Digital Trash (RDT)> is a project by AI engineer and architectural designer Minseo Kim, media artist and graphic designer Dongjoo Seo and installation artist Wonwoo Lee. These artists from different backgrounds, try to shed a new light on our media environment that is changing rapidly due to technological advances by tracking human-data relations.
Combining AI-based Design and Architectural Methods, New Media Installations, Video and Graphics and Hands-On Performances
AI engineer and architectural designer Minseo Kim does research on optical character recognition (OCR) and designs dynamic facades which are an architectural design element. He has done research on using AI to optimize energy-efficient luminance intensity and also uses AI to develop design and architectural methods. These experiences made Kim to view AI as our new partner in near future and to think about ways to make abstract human senses more concrete.
Installation artist and designer Dongjoo Seo who studied film, multimedia, visual design and anthropology has been carrying out location-specific or situation-specific research based on objective findings and integrating that with traditional media, new media, installations, videos and graphics. He focuses on synchronizing the body senses of the audience with the physical properties of media such as media walls or screens which deliver various philosophical, humanities and aesthetic topics he draws from his anthropological research. By shedding a light on human memory, relationships, mind and appearances, he tries to explore our contemporary awareness of self and society.
Wonwoo Lee who majored in sculpture uses installation work, sculpture and video performances for his work. By creating situations his audience can participate in, he changes boring and repetitive everyday life into specific events. He tries to give a new meaning to a context or change or break down the context using the inspirations he gets from his everyday life. He tries to change the anxiousness and depressive emotions we feel in our lives to joy and excitement.
Recycling Digital Trash and Its Meaning
<Recycling Digital Trash (RDT)> is a project that explore a way to recycle digital trash and its meaning. This project by AI engineer and architectural designer Minseo Kim, media artist and graphic designer Dongjoo Seo and installation artist Wonwoo Lee, started from the artists’ desire to track human-data relations and it looks at our media environment that is changing rapidly due to technological advances. Kim, Seo and Lee focus on today’s limitless product of data and suggests that the conventional concept of recycling in our analogue world needs to be applied to the digital media environment as well. For this project, making the users receive certain compensation in the process of deleting data, the artists have developed a recycling system that can effectively recycle unnecessary data using its internal algorithm. The artists make the act of continuously deleting unnecessary data continue and the variables for audiovisual compensation which represent the deleted data constitute a new algorithm or a new media environment. The artists use this set-up to portray the contemporary digital ecosystem in today’s world where the borders between reality and fantasy are becoming increasingly vague.
