Jamyoung Koo, Gooroom-utils, plugin, shell, 2023, aluminum, sheet film, 5340x2320x70mm, Installation view of 《Monocoque: Principles of the Garden》 (SPACE ÆFTER, 2023) ©Jamyoung Koo

Gooroom, Sun, Red Star. Creeper, Stone, Hare, and Cascade. These are the names of the software Jamyoung Koo selected for his solo exhibition 《Monocoque: Principles of the Garden》(2023).

Gooroom is an operating system developed by the Korea National Security Research Institute. Sun is an operating system developed by Sun Microsystems in the U.S. Red Star is a Linux-based OS created by North Korea’s Korea Computer Center. Meanwhile, Creeper was the name of the first computer virus created in 1971, while Stone, Hare, and Cascade are also the names of computer viruses.

Operating systems control machines and enable applications to interact with them. Viruses spread malicious code, crippling machines from functioning properly. The “principles of a garden,” made up of operating systems and viruses, is therefore a paradoxical landscape.

Koo’s working method (very briefly put) goes like this: he decodes the source code supporting websites or applications, then takes the forms and shapes of the code and reconfigures them as sculpture. On one level, this appears like a fairly standard procedure for producing art. But when one examines the methodological joints where his decisions intervene, a series of questions arise.

Why source code? Why form? Why source code and form?

According to the artist, source code is a “genetic map” and a “blueprint.”¹ At first glance, software seems immaterial and invisible. In truth, it is not. Software is a geological extraction machine driving global-scale energy consumption.² Its supposed immateriality and invisibility are problems, for they render invisible — even transparent — the exploitative forces of global extraction. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has pointed out that software is an “ideological machine” that interpellates users into an imagined relation while concealing the operations taking place inside the device.³ This suggests we must move beyond software’s illusion, toward its hidden, fetishized underside. The source code, as the first surface of that underside, is where the user must look.

But why form? Here lies a problem. At first sight, Koo’s work may seem indecipherable. Dense diagrams cover the walls, and nearby sculptures redouble that opacity, making the complexity even more illegible. The logical or even esoteric language of source code, translated into sculptural language within the exhibition, comes across like speculative, encrypted formulas — as if reproducing yet another esoteric language. When the complex system of software is translated into the complex system of sculpture, entropy remains unchanged. To dismantle software’s ideological function and finally confront its hidden underside, shouldn’t a clearer, more transparent language be needed?

But transparency itself is software’s most paradoxical skin. Interfaces that react instantly when clicked or tapped give the user the impression that every process of machine operation is transparently shown. Yet in fact, interfaces distort: they restrict the user from directly accessing the machine. The more we demand transparent language, the more finely designed interfaces we acquire. As someone once said, ideology is not solved like a puzzle nor cured like a disease.⁴

Source code is a complex object, an abstract language, a form of writing that “repeatedly computes differences.”⁵ Translating source code into sculpture is not simply an attempt to reproduce software in another medium. It is part of a series of efforts to reconstitute something so complex as to be irreproducible, and to pose anew the ontological question: “Does the irreproducible exist?”⁶ Deconstruction, then, can begin only when one confronts the complex as complex itself.

Jamyoung Koo, Redstar-mov, 2023, tin, sheet film, 2990x2320x30mm, Installation view of 《Monocoque: Principles of the Garden》 (SPACE ÆFTER, 2023) ©Jamyoung Koo

Gooroom, Sun, Red Star, Creeper, Stone, Hare, and Cascade — they share a common ground: nature. While planning 《Monocoque: Principles of the Garden》, Koo selected computer programs named after natural entities. He had already given biological principles to his forms in past works, since he regarded the operation of software as not so different from that of living organisms.

Software named after nature, or nature renamed through software, crosses the binary structure of the natural and the technological. This act of crossing is as difficult and risky as reconstructing the irreproducible. Yet if one accepts the assertion that “nature is no longer the pure and simple first nature but a cybernetic nature,”⁷ — if one accepts that the gradual machinization of the “artificial earth” is irreversible,⁸ then one may also nod to the idea that art will become a speculative circuit that appropriates cybernetics, raising new questions about technological diversity.⁹ Seen this way, opening a hole into software’s concealed underside to lead the deconstruction of nature and technology through the “principles of a garden” is not at all strange.

Gardening is perhaps one of the oldest technologies for relating to nature. A garden evokes images of ornate landscaping or a calm space for midday rest. Yet beneath its soil, weeds, insects, and moles gnawing tree roots coexist. To understand the technology of the garden is to understand this riot of life. Koo digs beneath the software’s surface, uncovering the tumult of source code hidden beneath logical language, and individuates it. Not trees, but beneath the trees. Not roots, but beneath the roots. Only by getting one’s hands dirty with soil and dust, by digging down, can one know what lies there.
 

Footnotes
1. Jamyoung Koo, “Only Frames Left, From a Worthless Beginning,” Artist Note, n.p.
2. Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI, trans. Roh Seung-young, Soso Books, 2022, p. 43.
3. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18, 2005, pp. 43–44.
4. Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect, Polity, 2012, p. 58.
5. N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, trans. Eunju Song and Kyunglan Lee, Acanet, 2016, p. 70.
6. Alexander R. Galloway, ibid., pp. 99–100.
7. Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, trans. Hyuk Cho, Saemulgyeol, 2023, pp. 255–256.
8. Yuk Hui, ibid., pp. 75–79.
9. Ibid.

References