Installation view ©Sehwa Museum of Art

In an age where digital media seamlessly overlays our reality and the boundary between AI and human appears increasingly blurred, one must ask: what remains fundamentally irreducible to algorithms in the human experience? The exhibition 《4℃》, part of the “Non-Algorithm Challenge” series, turns to memory in search of this elusive element.

Defined as “the mental function of receiving, storing, and retrieving information about objects,” memory occupies a central role in human cognition. Retracing this meaning reveals the close ties between memory and cognition—mechanisms that artificial intelligence attempts to emulate. Deep learning models, in particular, process and analyze data in ways strikingly similar to how humans learn through experience, gradually improving over time. This resemblance can make AI seem poised to surpass human cognitive capacities altogether.


Installation view ©Sehwa Museum of Art

And yet, the complex web of embodied cognition and subjective experience—formed and layered through lived memory—is something AI cannot replicate. The capacity to feel, to sense, to accumulate memory through bodily experience remains unique to humans. While data serves as a foundational operational unit for machines and AI, unlike human memory, it does not accommodate contradiction, forgetting, leaps in logic, or illogical associations. Attempts to examine memory inevitably confront its irrational and paradoxical nature.

Questions emerge: How does memory sink or surface? Is there a primordial memory that makes us yearn for places we’ve never seen? What kinds of memories might digital or (non-)human entities in virtual worlds possess? What if all memories suddenly disappeared? What if one could choose different memories?

《4℃》 raises such questions through works by SEOM:, Omyo Cho, and Taekim, connecting sensory experience, memory, and the (non-)human. This exhibition probes the uniquely human quality of “humanness” through memory, while also asking: what can be drawn out at this juncture where the Non-Algorithm Challenge now turns its attention to memory, following earlier inquiries into sensation and the body?

《4℃》 proposes a connection between memory and a world that holds risk and mortality—a world unlike the frictionless, mirror-smooth surfaces of artificial domains. In imagining such a world, the metaphor of water at four degrees Celsius naturally emerged: the state at which water is densest, and thus symbolically saturated with the potential of memory itself.

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