Installation view ©Space Imsi

Unmake Lab slowly and carefully studies the relationships and structures between humans and technology, nature and society, within the emerging ecosystem of the Technosphere—marked by hyperconnectivity and the rise of digital natives—while aiming for collaborative inquiry throughout their working process. In the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the commercial rollout of 5G, economic propaganda surrounds us, and the intuitive use of smartphones and the internet deeply intertwines with our bodies and emotions. Everyday life, increasingly composed of data and algorithms, has become a spectacle. Within this context, the artist considers how to reconstruct and rearrange our environment toward subjective reappropriation. Rather than focusing on explanations or forms of unfamiliar cutting-edge technologies and mechanical devices, Unmake Lab prioritizes their repurposing. They maintain distance from DIY functionalism, emphasizing instead meta-level subjects and methods that intervene in technical circuits and mechanisms through alliances of small-scale knowledge and practices in alternative economies.

Unmake Lab, ComputationOperation 3, 2018, Image Matching Algorithm, silkscreen, T-shirt inflated with a fan ©Unmake L

In 〈Algorithmic Laborer: Operation 1, 2018〉, based on materials related to Guro—a region that has transformed from a manufacturing zone to an IT cluster—texts reveal the still-persistent alienation of labor. Rumors of a Double City(2017) presents an ironic coincidence where a striking female worker and a performing singer, a worker's stainless-steel lunch tray, and a state-of-the-art smartphone are matched through image searches due to formal similarities, illustrating how the weight of modernity slips from our spatiotemporal senses. In Algorithmic Laborer: Operation 2 (2018), these images are printed on T-shirts that are physically inflated with the command "expand," metaphorically suggesting the urban principles operating under neoliberal capitalism's reproduction and accumulation.

The "Quantified Self Movement" series addresses the appropriation of the self through the process of self-recording and quantification. In Facial Expression Study for Data Extraction (2017), facial expressions are treated as interfaces conveying human emotions. An actor performs like a monodrama protagonist, deliberately excluding gaze, voice, gestures, and ambiance to express emotions. Facial Coding (2017) takes eight emotion categories (anger, contempt, hatred, fear, happiness, neutrality, sadness, surprise), divides the face into four zones, and creates randomly collaged expressions, which are then analyzed by emotion recognition algorithms to generate new emotional values. Although both videos feature the same person, the contextual human emotion and the machine's quantified interpretation create a dislocation between actual and mutant selves. The artist reflects on this phenomenon as a product of the data creation era, confronting an informationalized body reconstructed by computational processes—posing questions from a relational perspective on the human-machine dynamic.

Unmake Lab, Whole Data Catalog 4 Tourists: No Results, 2018 ©Unmake Lab

In the "Whole Data Catalog: In Search of Happiness" series, quantified emotions are related to place and social nature shaped by technology. In Self Emotion Harvester (2018), the artist wears a helmet that collects facial expressions while wandering through shopping malls, artificial landscapes, planned cities, tourist attractions, riverside parks, and international cities, becoming a “Flâneur” in Walker (2018). Faces collected across different time intervals move like stop-motion animation, and the uniform, flat backdrops of the walker reflect spaces staged by the logic of capital. In this spectacle where human façades (facial expressions) and urban façades (non-places) subtly intertwine, the psychogeographic data collected become signifiers of longing for happiness in Origin of Happiness(2018). Smooth, light virtual coins are stacked like stone towers, only to collapse and be rebuilt repeatedly. When the 3D-scanned model is composited into a photo of the walking location and analyzed by a computer vision program, it is tagged as a tourist and receives the result value: No Results (2018). This resembles a vanitas—an image of the futility of happiness pursued as life’s fulfillment.

Through the works introduced in this exhibition, the role of the artist evolves from producer in the industrial era and ethnographer in the postmodern era into that of a multispecies ethnographer—one who reflectively reconstructs metaphors and repurposings of otherness and placeness. Multispecies anthropology seeks to overcome dualistic approaches between nature and culture, human and non-human, subject and object. It adopts a relational perspective to interpret human life, landscapes, and technologies integratively. Actor-network theory, which treats non-human elements such as science and machines as actors capable of agency, examines the symmetrical relationships and networks between humans and non-humans and studies the characteristics of technoscience.

By translating the relationships between data reduced through algorithms—between the real and the virtual, space and place, body and emotion—the artist becomes a mediator, allegorically and hybridly narrating society as a human–nonhuman composite. These works serve as political directives for alternative perception and action in a world of data and algorithms. What comes next is up to us.

References