Have
you ever reflected on the 50-won coin, now nearly obsolete under the pressure
of murderous inflation and the dematerialization of value as a store of wealth?
I imagine that few young people today would pause in thought upon seeing the
rice stalk engraved on the coin. The rice variety depicted on the obverse
is Tongilmi. With the onset of the postwar baby boom, rice production
began to lag, and the government poured its efforts into breeding new
varieties. Crops vulnerable to environmental conditions everywhere underwent
histories of artificial hybridization, and the East Asian preference for
Japonica rice finally met its solution through a man named Huh Moon-hwe.
Serving as a professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Seoul
National University, in 1964 he requested a dispatch to the International Rice
Research Institute (IRRI) from the Rural Development Administration, then
grappling with the rice crisis. Working at this institute in the southern
region near Manila, Philippines, his repeated hybridizations ultimately bore
fruit in the creation of Tongilmi. Though it later fell into disuse due to
its poor taste and susceptibility to cold damage, Tongilmi was
nonetheless widely cultivated across South Korea, meeting the nation’s rice
demand and, as an image, earning an eternal guarantee by being inscribed on
coinage.
It
is self-evident that hundreds of crossings must have been undertaken to secure
a single variety of Tongilmi. Such artificial selection is minuscule in
duration compared to the scale and history of natural selection, and in certain
domains it is difficult even to draw a strict line between the two. The desire
to avoid becoming the unfit within nature is always osmotic and reciprocal. In
the long historical process whereby the wolf became the dog, was only human
desire reflected? Both dogs and humans projected their desires onto one another
and evolved accordingly. Dogs, becoming gentler, more loyal, more lovable,
fulfilled the species mandate of flourishing within the fences of human care.
This cannot be explained merely by the short two centuries of modern breeding
culture. Thus, the very concept embedded in the word “artificial selection”
distorts reality by separating humans from nature and concealing the
reciprocity of desire. All beings in nature experiment with programs that
imagine and design the position of the other—whether species, instinctual, or
conscious—as partners in the realization of desire, just as flowers and bees
do. The flower seeks reproduction; the bee, nectar. In this scheme, who,
indeed, is the subject of desire, and who the object?
We
can read a similar map of desire in the work of Sora Park. In 《Meta Beauty Innovation》, staged in the form
of a product launch, as if to declare that the aesthetics of novelty today
exist only in commodities, a wearable device called ‘‘Eye Meta’’,
reminiscent of a facehugger, is advertised. It is a cosmetic device that can
reflect rapidly shifting trends, update itself in real time, and adjust beyond
the control of its user. In the video, the repeated pitches of the “Doctor”
sound less like the trappings of science fiction, digitality, or futurity than
like urgent issues of today. ‘‘Eye Meta’’ can “predict how many
‘likes’ one might receive on social media,” thereby maximizing the “labor
productivity” of influencers who monetize attention.
Despite the Doctor’s
insistence that the device “transcends evolution,” it still appears to remain
within the frame of environment and adaptation, as a problem of desire
circulating inside that framework. A strange game begins within the household
of the attention economy. Each party, like flowers and bees, gains something
and gives something up. Audiences gain visual gratification and consume
advertisements; influencers gain attention and revenue while exporting
pleasure; advertisers pay money and gain traffic; and the platform siphons
profit from all three. A sacred gambling table is set, one on which it seems
that no one will lose.
The
power formula of ’Eye Meta’, which drives such an economy, is noteworthy.
An organism’s appearance depends on a kind of spontaneity that arises within
the desires of others. For a certain appearance to be considered beautiful, it
must be rewarded through the act of being seen and the radiance it emits.
Beauty is not an intrinsic essence derived from the harmony of the eyes, nose,
and mouth; rather, it resides in the act of being seen. The more intensely the
radiance refracts through the gaze, the more strongly it is transmuted into
allure.
Because radiance must be concentrated through the magnifying glass of
another’s eyes, those eyes become a camera obscura through which
beauty is projected. Thus, appearance is less an indivisible relic owned by the
self than an asset fluctuating according to complex temporal scales. ’Eye
Meta’ inclines away from fixed, stable appearances and toward a portfolio
method that detaches them from temporal determinacy. Now, appearance is active.
No longer determined unilaterally by external evaluation, it behaves instead as
a skilled investor, predicting and responding to how judgments will be made.
In
this process, ’Eye Meta’ acquires a kind of sublimity. Until now, the
radiance of appearance had always presupposed an ontological reciprocity: one
first bestows radiance upon others, but it is only with the guarantee of return
that such radiance exists. Yet the ultimate altruism of ’Eye Meta’ transforms
the radiance of appearance from something biological and organic into
effortless “likes,” converting the emission of light into an index, and drawing
spectators into its circuit so that they, too, become part of the radiance’s
pilgrimage. Self-sufficiency and exaltation in the act of being seen are gone.
What remains is a flash aimed indiscriminately at others—an artificial sun.
This inorganic, metallic magnetism imprisons the wearer beneath the skin, repositioning
them into the realm of precious metals. If jewelry’s radiance traditionally
enhanced its wearer, ’Eye Meta’’s glow petrifies the user into
mineral form, Medusa-like, rendering them radiance-itself. Upon this fallen
sublimity, trends reflect moment by moment, never crystallizing into a stable
image—appearing instead as if a face trapped within were desperately struggling
to burst forth. Every trend vying to crown itself as the trend
competes endlessly in real time.
Now,
attempts to find consistency in the face or to endow it with the essence of
subjectivity are bound to fail. The image of Tongilmi rice conveys
stability because its replication guaranteed a consistent indicator of value
(50 won is always 50 won). Yet this stability was always a fiction. The
stability of currency could only be registered once the economic reality—that
its value is constantly eroded by inflation—had been concealed. Likewise, the
sameness promised by human appearance was always fictional, undermined by the
factors of aging and the evaluations of others, but guaranteed only by ignoring
this reality. ’Eye Meta’ is, in contrast, brutally honest. It lays
bare that the system of the face belongs within the evaluation mechanisms of
assets, and demands continuous adaptation. The appearance I believed to possess
was valid only in the functional sense of eyes, nose, and mouth; as a
decorative image arising from their assemblage, however, appearance belongs to
the opposite realm. ’Eye Meta’ directly strikes this truth: that what
we took as immutable essence is in fact exposed as fiction.
In
the past, what allowed one to sever from particular styles or trends was
uniqueness itself. Uniqueness was the source of aura, the very ground on which
art secured its place in opposition to craft. But the ontological comfort once
guaranteed by the uniqueness of the face—like a fingerprint—corrodes under the
cultural dominance of ’Eye Meta’. The mark of uniqueness, created through
the idiosyncratic arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, becomes a relic of the
past. Eyes, nose, and mouth, simply by “being attached,” reveal themselves as
decoration. And decoration, by definition, can always be replaced.
The
obsolescence of the face as an old model is amplified by the rarity of ’Eye
Meta’, which only 500 individuals can own. Now, synthesis is no longer the
interaction of eyes, nose, and mouth. Once, the complementarity of those
features formed expressions from which one could infer the soul, but the era
has changed. The capitalist alienation that separated ownership from being now
constructs a phantasmagoric heterotopia, wherein possession of ’Eye Meta’ constitutes
existence. The metallic fluidity of radiance-itself is augmented by rarity,
visually marking social power and status. The halo migrates, historically
transformed, from the background to the forefront, radiating outward from the
face.
‘Eye
Meta’ can be seen not only visually, decoratively, and functionally, but
also symptomatically. “Our future depends on how quickly we can change,”
declares the Doctor, making ’Eye Meta’ appear less like a luxury for
influencers than like a survival kit. In this sense, ’Eye
Meta’ becomes not simply a superfluous accessory but a necessity,
something one must acquire. Adaptation to change is both the effort not to be
excluded in an accelerating world and the very battlefield on which all beings
have struggled since the dawn of life.
Because ’Eye Meta’ “automates”
the analysis and reflection of data, adaptation no longer belongs to subjective
capacity but to the problem of performance and imitation. And imitation has
always been inseparable from fashion. The speed at which one imitates fashion
has long served as a marker of class. Since fashion reveals hierarchy, we must
look past the illusion that it “passes by” and recognize instead that
it flows downward. To participate in this flow is to both situate oneself
within a particular style and stratum and distinguish oneself from lower
strata. Thus, ’Eye Meta’ compels us to choose between extinction and
imitation: to sink into ruin, or to enjoy comfort in a bunker.
We
may now analogize ’Eye Meta’’s figure with that of Tongilmi, which
stands at its very opposite pole. Tongilmi achieved a kind of
eternity, but it could not withstand the accelerating changes of inflation and
the dematerialization of the world, and so it was phased out. Its decline in
value rendered it invisible, compounded further by the diversification of
payment methods. ’Eye Meta’, on the other hand, cannot achieve any stable
form, and thus seems to guarantee nothing—yet paradoxically captivates us with
the sense that it will never be flung outside the flow. This
liquidity—recalling Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity”—is capital’s liquidity,
and touches the liquidity of our lives as well. The surface of ’Eye Meta’,
which shelters us and conceals us within its flow while rescuing us from the
threat of being washed away, may be likened to a newly sprouted horn for
humanity. But of course, having sprouted new horns, we can no longer be
classified as human.
