By delving into Hyun-seok Kim's multifaceted approach that transposes various issues from the history of technological culture into the domain of contemporary art, it becomes apparent that he is an artist closely resembling a researcher. Not only does he possess extensive knowledge and interest in the developmental history of digital devices and media, but his perspective is not confined to a progressivist historical view. Instead, through continuous research-based work, he persistently attempts self-reconstruction. His recent practices, which thematically incorporate both tangible and intangible technological legacies, even appropriate anthropological approaches and archaeological expressions as artistic methodologies, further amplifying this tendency.

Some of Hyun-seok Kim's works have recently been discussed alongside the rising discourse of "media archaeology." Considering the temporality embedded in his works—featuring early Macintosh models that have become "modern relics" within just a few decades, AI-generated novels stored on low-capacity floppy disks, and classical memes from the early Internet history approached almost like iconological texts—his work offers individuals, who each live different timelines even within the same era and retain only selective memories, a sense of dislocation and empty gaps concerning time, memory, and technology. The questions of what to bury, when to excavate, and in what form to restore and contextualize these findings are becoming pressing issues and choices not only for individuals but also for communities within today’s art culture.

When discussing his recent interests and working attitudes, Hyun-seok Kim himself has acknowledged the terms "archaeological" or "media archaeology," but more precisely, he has revised it to "future archaeology." Whereas traditional archaeology examines stratified layers accumulated through excavated artifacts to fill historical gaps, future archaeology aims to actively populate future possibilities, drawing genealogies of the future and materializing imaginative ideas. It is important to note that the artist’s interest does not remain in historicizing what has passed but leans toward constructing a speculative archive of future human forms. In this sense, Kim’s activities of research, collection, and investigation are both vital and speculative. In a society where art, like all else, is intricately entangled with digital technology, the attainable reality for an artist might reside in narrow truths grounded in broad facts. Some degree of speculation and inference functions as the minimal methodology to refine blunt questions. Although the yet-to-be-defined terminology and critical rhetoric may cause some confusion, as interdisciplinary research methods penetrate the field of art, his work gradually excavates hybrid forms and new possibilities born from this dynamic.
 

Let us examine the kind of diagram introduced by the artist himself. Each individual work seems to be justified by a consistent curatorial intent, and a close interrelationship among the works appears firmly established. However, this is closer to a natural linkage from one work to the next rather than a chronological achievement. According to the diagram, four factors that trigger Kim’s work are matter and illusion, interpolation and deterioration—two pairs of opposing concepts. Depending on the combinations derived from these, six compositional structures are generated, and each work is positioned along one or more of these coordinates.

For instance, there was a series of experiments exposing the illusion of images by intentionally deteriorating digital images, dealing with the relationship between 'illusion' and 'deterioration' (2015–2016). Subsequently, works exploring the relationship between 'illusion' and 'matter' unfolded by summoning virtual images into the physical realm, thereby investigating the surface of illusions and physical supports (2017–2020). Since 2021, he has concentrated on works that invoke the genealogy and contemporaneity of technology, focusing on 'interpolation.' Although categorizing an entire series of works into a single framework may risk being overly schematic and may overlook certain spontaneous possibilities, it is clear that Kim’s practice has been executed within a highly structured framework. Yet, the lingering question is how we should redefine and effectively interpret the relationship between reality and representation within today’s visual culture. The issue of the amplification and diminishment of images caused by digital media intervention in the processes of art production, storage, transmission, and disposal offers a critical ground to rethink modes of production and reception of media within an era where images are consumed through the Internet and digital screens.

Among Kim’s early works, processes where JPEG files are materialized into physical prints or where physical paintings and sculptures are translated into digital forms inevitably reveal points of loss (deterioration) or inflation (interpolation). For example, in one of his early works, Meaningless Movements towards Perfection (moon) (2015), it becomes evident that the two worlds can never be perfectly symmetrical nor arrive at a smooth compromise. As a response to his previous works, Origin of Perfection (2023) signals the fluid spaces between digital images and physical materiality by restoring images through artificial intelligence. The photograph capturing the moment of a lunar satellite’s collapse taken by NASA repeatedly undergoes processes of enlargement and reduction by a single pixel, resulting in the distortion and depression of the image surface, ultimately capturing the moment when the illusory nature of the image collapses.

Surveying his works sequentially from early to recent pieces, each fragment fits into the execution structure Kim has designed. Ultimately, the driving force that moves his practice lies in establishing necessary transitions from one work to the next and in self-theorization that must be tested at each stage. Encountering a practice with such legitimate production logic is indeed gratifying. Of course, exhibitions are not meant to merely verify logic; thus, traces of the distinctive aesthetics of plastic arts are intentionally left during the exhibition process, and the high level of design completion pushed forward in exhibition production also responds to the artist's intent. The repeated application of painting, sculpture, text, prints, media devices as viewer interfaces, and exhibition environment setups is directly linked to the fact that the format of production is itself content, and the mechanisms of devices are directly intertwined with the exhibition service. For instance, Kim’s work MEMORIES was installed in two distinct versions in 2021 and 2023, respectively, stemming from clearly different intentions. The 2021 installation, where eight short stories co-written with the AI language model GPT-3 were first presented, was designed for viewing via floppy disks that could store up to 1.44MB of data. In the 2023 exhibition, these were transferred into e-books mounted on recliners. Viewers were placed in a situation where they had to lie back and depend on the stand to read the screen, allowing them to experience somewhat regressive visual culture interfaces in both setups. The issue of how viewers physically position themselves or through which device interface they receive information was an important consideration in the exhibition design.

In 2022, Kim Hyun-seok embarked on a full-fledged narrative experiment through artificial intelligence-generated programs with his work Dialectic of Illusion. Image, language, and sound generation programs through AI language learning became new creative tools that drew attention from many artists around the same time. They also posed challenges to artistic expression and narrative methods traditionally considered exclusive to human domains such as improvisation, chance, and intuition. For Kim Hyun-seok as well, incorporating AI into his practice marked a significant turning point.

However, alongside this, an increasing number of people have begun to express fatigue toward the rapid commercialization of AI-based generative programs and various image enhancement devices, as well as works utilizing them, because something appears to be missing between the purpose and outcome of such works. Some may have expected novelty from works aiming to intensify the dichotomy between machine and human or to promote unprecedented forms of collaboration, only to be disappointed. Perhaps this is because they fail to move beyond the long-standing issues surrounding technology and humanity, or because the resulting formats still adhere to familiar linguistic grammar and visual conventions to some extent. When compared to the more advanced discussions or effective outcomes found in academic disciplines like Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or in service sectors awaiting commercialization, this impression becomes even more pronounced.

Nevertheless, it is worth continuing to closely observe the formal implications and discursive compositions conveyed through Kim Hyun-seok’s highly adaptive engagement with technological advancements. The Q&A exchanged between two AIs in Dialectic of Illusion is particularly thought-provoking. The uneasy movements of viewers as they experience the work also generate a peculiar sense of discomfort and alienation. The philosophical dialogue, resembling a Zen-like question-and-answer session between two machines facing away from each other about future perception and cognition, makes these machines feel like independent intelligences rather than mere reflections or substructures of human interiority. Physically and psychologically, it is only the human that drifts around the work.

The subsequently released Daisy-Chain-Agora (2023) also shares similarities with previous works in that it connects dialogues among multiple virtual theorists. What stands out at this stage is not the skillful utilization of AI but rather the sophistication and richness of the dialogues themselves. The space modeled after a “daisy chain,” referring to a serially connected form of data processing, becomes an agora—a conference site effectively visualizing the area of Kim’s current deepest interest and a platform for knowledge production.

This work draws inspiration from the historic Macy Conference held in New York in 1947, which focused on cybernetics and remains a groundbreaking example of interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge production. Within the circularly structured agora, virtual scholars representing fields such as archaeology, philosophy, ecology, design, and computer science engage in intense conversations centered on the steep evolutionary trajectory from humanity’s first tools to contemporary objects. Although partial leaps and content errors are embedded, Kim Hyun-seok’s virtual symposium is designed to reflect his prior research on the nonlinear developmental history of technological leaps and regressions, spanning from Oldowan stone tools to the latest iPhone. Compared to previous works, this stage—which utilizes both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.0—feels more intricate and refined, allowing one to sense the astonishing advancements in machine language learning achieved in just over two years.
 

Looking at Kim Hyun-seok’s output in 2024, his work appears to have entered a phase of visible deceleration. Yet, the span of time the artist traversed over the past year was incredibly vast. Furthermore, as his previous focus on digital technology became divided and intertwined with interests in humanity, civilization, and nature, the clarity of his practice seems to have diminished, while the complexity of his concepts appears to have grown. It raises the question of whether he has now entered a corner where he must seek new imaginative forces in the vacuum created by venturing into a world that existed without technology.

Lucy 1.0, the almost prototype-like piece that has materialized as his only concrete work this year, is a sculpture combining a skull and a smartphone. In the work, Lucy is conceived as a neutral being that does not represent any specific gender, race, or language—much like how one does not expect such designations from AI programs prior to their initialization. From Lucy’s mouth flows a murmur narrating human history, spanning from Australopithecus anamensis 3.9 million years ago to Homo sapiens sapiens and eventually the post-human. This piece serves as the starting point for the artist’s research on post-humanity and, after multiple revisions, will likely become its final outcome.

As a vision that reaches back to the origin point of civilization through temporal diffraction while imagining the end of the material world in post-apocalyptic terms, the artist's imagination here recalls Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The black monolith that signals both the beginning and end of the film functions as the first point of human contact with civilization, an infinite space projecting mutable humanity, and a synecdoche for the infinite recurrence of technological civilization and the cycles of life. Following his VR work Sword of Damocles (2022) and its successor The Octopus is the Screen, the recurring image of the “black stone” consistently emerges as a comprehensive symbol of technology, humanity, and civilization.

From the stone axe, shaped to fit perfectly in the human hand, to the frequently updated artificial intelligence programs, the voyage of technology has advanced without hesitation—so in what direction is it now turning? If Kim Hyun-seok is currently stepping back from his previous course to broadly and distantly survey its surroundings, and if, at the end of his gaze, the image of the drifting human finally comes into focus, perhaps his practice is in the process of moving toward its next coordinates. At times, the artist's schizophrenia serves as the engine that initiates new work. As he spends his days imagining the octopus as the model that post-humans might one day embody, one may expect that Kim Hyun-seok could calmly sift through the appropriate knowledge and dismiss the fallacious logics that would explain how a rock became an octopus and how an octopus becomes human—together, perhaps, with his GPT companion that has grown alongside him throughout this creative journey.



*This article is a special contribution commissioned as part of the "2024 Korean Art Criticism Support" program organized by the Korea Arts Management Service.

References

• [비평] 김현석의 기술 항해기, 인간 표류기
  [Critique] The Technological Voyage of Hyun-seok Kim, and the Human’s Drifting Journey)