The more one sees them, the less they appear as they first seemed. This was my recurring thought when repeatedly encountering the works. Given his choice of materials — code, software, websites, programs — and his use of computer equipment, metal frameworks, 3D printing, molecular models, and other mechanical/scientific forms, the works seem outwardly dry, clean, and cold. Yet the methods, triggers, and outcomes through which such immaterial, inorganic, non-living materials acquire form are closely connected to the properties of the material, organic, living body.

This essay is a short reflection on why the artist seeks to give bodies to code, what strategies he employs, and what meanings these hybrid graftings entail.

The first concretized project of visualizing abstract programs was PPB (Phoenix Phenotype Breeding, 2018). PPB attempted to give form to the medium specificity of design-tool software. To render volumetric objects realistically on a two-dimensional monitor, one must assemble images from multiple viewports — top, front, back, perspective — and imaginatively reconstruct them into three-dimensional forms.¹ This process requires constant resynchronization between flatness and depth, training one’s senses to shuttle between 2D and 3D.

Designers, to summon the illusion of volume on a flat screen, must adjust their vision — originally accustomed to 3D depth — to the flat, depthless world, while resisting complete absorption into flatness. PPB transcribed these design-tool laws, acquired naturally by working as a designer, into the physical space of the exhibition. The artist “conceived of the exhibition window as the artboard of the design tool, extruding its layout into the exhibition space.”² The metal-framed outline of the front window was first transcribed into the glowing element at the entrance, then duplicated again as an internal metal structure. The overlapping appearance of the exhibition title, “PPB (Phoenix Phenotype Breeding),” stretched across both the front glass and the luminous structure, evokes a 2D layout being sucked into 3D space to acquire body.

Here, immaterial software is doubly bound to the body. First, the working principles of software, lacking physical form or substance, are applied in real space and literally become objects. But more fundamentally, this involves changes in sensory proportions arising from the synchronization of the designer’s (artist’s) body with software. Just as writing with pen and paper, a typewriter, or a laptop cannot be considered the same practice, since each medium modulates the sensation of conceiving and composing, so too the use of particular media reconfigures human senses.³

Though Koo’s work may outwardly appear to think and design in software’s way, what he truly pursues is not the erasure of the physical body but rather a newly recalibrated hybrid sensorium emerging from contemporary media environments. In this sense, the body — the root of sensation — is, contrary to appearances, the underlying ground sustaining his work. His interest lies not in algorithms running independently of human intervention, but in making us — humans — perceive the structures of media that generate the digital images we encounter daily.

After PPB, Koo’s trajectory increasingly widened the gap between software and the body, intensifying the heterogeneity of their connections. While PPB visualized the workings of 3D computer graphic programs such as Rhino or 3Ds Max, Development of editing methods for website structure (2020) analyzed the composition of codes that determine website properties, rendering them into perceptible structures.

The residency project 《On the Growth and Form of Software》(Incheon Art Platform G3, Incheon, 2021) delved into an even smaller unit: the process of specific source codes being revised. The direction of his work thus evolved — from the operational logic of graphic tools, to the design blueprints of virtual spaces, to the formative processes of unit elements themselves. Like progressing from compounds to molecules, from molecules to atoms, his explorations of software have increasingly turned toward fundamental structures of media.

Interestingly, even as the abstraction of his subjects intensifies, the materiality of his works grows heavier. Development of editing methods for website structure, which visualized the structures of six major art-world websites, functioned like an experiment in sculptural evolution, from line to mass, showcasing multiple stages of 3D-printed outputs. More strikingly, 《On the Growth and Form of Software》 presented the new work Soft Muscle (2021), which displays overwhelming scale and material force. By likening the process of developers debugging and completing code in open-source communities to the growth of muscles, and by visualizing code’s growth through 3D printing with carbon fiber (CFRP) molding and water-transfer films, Soft Muscle materializes the toughness and density of muscle fibers.

Carbon fiber is a material often used in high-powered muscle cars, its woven patterns and textures evoking muscular men or powerful machines. These grotesque black masses, immense in scale and with artificial textures, radiate an uncanny grotesque sensibility. That they visualize the formation of immaterial, abstract code only heightens the dissonance between the palpable intensity of materiality and the abstraction of code.

To give bodies to code — symbols complete in themselves — arises from our human cognition, which cannot perceive abstractions without concrete forms. Translating abstraction into form recalls inorganic matter becoming organic, evoking biological analogies. Koo has indeed drawn on concepts from organic chemistry and biology: likening the selection of base tags in website source code to genetic scissors, adopting molecular visualization methods to shape website codes, borrowing exhibition titles from classics in biology.⁴ Among such organic analogies, the most crucial is reverse transcription.

Viruses, unable to metabolize on their own, parasitize host cells. Some viruses, unlike normal transcription, reverse-transcribe RNA into DNA and insert it into host genomes. Viral DNA embedded in host DNA then triggers different mutations. Koo interprets such reverse transcription — which generates difference — as a search for alternative possibilities.

Since Plato, images have been regarded as secondary to reality. Yet in today’s world of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Rhino, where objects can be extracted from images, the real has become something that arrives after images. In this reversal of value systems, Koo’s act of giving bodies to code reflects the epochal shift of contemporary media paradigms, wherein software transforms the very essence of culture.

Visualizing software recalls the dominance of media in our age, the hybrid senses of contemporary humans inseparably synchronized with programs and devices. But above all, what Koo envisions is the potential to reverse-transcribe human-centered sculptural language and object-centered exhibition spaces into the immaterial language of programs, thereby generating new, unimagined mutations. We can only anticipate the healthy emergence of such mutants.


 
1. Jamyoung Koo, “Artist Talk with Critic Jihong Baek,” 《Development of editing methods for website structure》 Exhibition Catalogue (Willing N Dealing, Seoul, 2020), p. 43.
2. Ibid., p. 44.
3. This line of thought recalls Marshall McLuhan’s conception of media, but Koo’s perspective is relatively more object-oriented, compared to McLuhan’s human-centered view of media as extensions of human senses.
4. The exhibition title 《On the Growth and Form of Software》 borrows from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), which systematized the morphological development of organisms.

References

• [비평] 코드가 몸을 얻을 때: 전략으로서의 뒤집기와 다르게 만들기
  [Critique] When Code Acquires a Body: Inversion and Making Otherwise as Strategies