It is not possible
that there should have been only one time
when someone obeyed a rule.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Art does not reproduce the visible;
rather, it makes visible.
— Paul Klee

History and technology, art and medium, encounter and diverge at different speeds. Human beings typically strive to close the gap between them in the name of ‘tools’ and ‘practice,’ often achieving parallelism and harmony. Such attempts, however, are not always successful. One may be too fast or too lagging, and they malfunction separately yet together through collisions, breakdowns, and aging.

More often than not, breakdowns and errors are reduced to objects of rapid restoration and elimination under the names of ‘updates,’ ‘acceleration,’ or ‘crisis’ while the history of ‘maturity’ and ‘progress’ renders unnecessary the time and efforts to reckon with the traces of past malfunctions and debris at their core.

To be sure, both in the past and present, there have always been those who criticize and resist the prevailing trends by calling for ‘slowness’ and ‘deceleration’, but such counter-movements rarely manage to escape the (interest) relationship of “antagonistic interdependence.”1 Virilio termed this “polar inertia” (l’inertie polaire)2 in the sense that ‘extreme acceleration reinforces the tendency toward deceleration and stasis’ for, as Rosa aptly adds, it is “not a tendency against acceleration but an inherent characteristic of it.”3

Though it may seem a different issue, critiques of hallucination and inaccuracy in generative AI likewise cannot escape the closed circuit of the demand to “hand over more of your data (for free).” What is more interesting, in this sense, is the work of paying attention to the immanent limits and patterns of technology, media, and history, i.e. their distinct modus operandi and the conditions as they become (in)visible through these trajectories of intersection and renewal, before mulling over their latent implications and possibilities.

The body of work that Lee Jungwoo has been quietly refining for over a decade, moving between Germany and Korea, as well as contemporary art and film, constitutes the territory of this idiosyncratic techno-aesthetic endeavor.

1. In several conversations ahead of this exhibition, the artist mentioned that while it took quite a while to place a character inside a room using generative AI as recently as mid-2025, the problem had since been solved. Placing a figure in a room had become a piece of cake, the speed incomparably faster. The new problem he now faced was that he could no longer return to that previous state.

AI that used to bend his prompts and produce erratic results is no longer there. For his latest work, In Writing ‘Hurrah for Freedom’: Cinema and History (2025), Lee instructed the generative AI to reconstruct the missing scenes of Hurrah for Freedom(1946), a film reduced to just fifty minutes after repeated re-editing and censorship.

The ‘frustrating’ AI that, until only a few months prior, would output a Western man’s face when asked for an East Asian one, and replace the prompt of a woman in a blood-stained Hanbok with ketchup, is gone. So is the ‘stubborn’ AI that ignored the command to ‘hesitate’—a quality novelist Kim Aeran suggested in a recent broadcast might be unique to human4— and forced its characters to pull the trigger without a second thought.

All of these could be sufficiently described in the name of technological ‘advancement’ or, in a certain light, could even be deemed as part and parcel of ‘maturity.’ In contradistinction to this otherwise correct understanding, Lee’s works almost obsessively explore cases that exist prior to such stages of ‘completion’ and ‘maturity,’ or hover around the threshold.

Have the earlier versions of these technologies, or the past as such, been ‘overcome’? Does the fact that we can hardly return to those stages mean that there is no need to return? Could it be that some of those past ‘errors’ were heterogeneous possibilities unable to be ‘sutured’ into the present and future? And through them, could the blockage of the present as well as the future be reopened? Let us define what these ‘errors’ pose as the problem of (ir)reversibility, in that sense that it has become difficult to go back without resorting to the mode of ‘nostalgia.’

In fact, In fact, in an essay I wrote for his solo exhibition in 2019, I already described his practice as “an attempt to render visible the problems that arise when something irreversible, whether politically or technically, becomes reversible.” This (ir)reversibility is one of the core problematiques that characterize Lee’s early-to-mid body of work. Untitled—Perfect Moments (2018) and Die Resistenz (2019), for instance, demonstrate two distinct modes of “attempting to turn back the clock.”

The former converts four analogue-looking clocks into digital images and then accelerates or decelerates them by 100% every twelve hours; as a result, most viewers could not visually distinguish whether time was moving forward or backward. Interestingly, in the process of this simple deceleration and acceleration, some forty asymmetrical images were discovered.

At the time, the artist agonized until the last moment over whether to include these “bugs” in the exhibition. Die Resistenz is ​​a work that uses a drone to capture an unfinished monument to a key figure (the late president Park Chung-hee) of the movement to turn back the ‘political clock,’ and Lee revealed that he intended to bury this figure again through the work. Yet this time the drone crashes due to its embedded sensors. The GPS signal malfunctioned and the collision-avoidance sensors were disrupted in the steel-enclosed indoor environment.

These two works, which engage directly and indirectly with the mechanisms of a relatively simple device called a clock, contain the seeds of three characteristics that will consistently return and be varied in Lee’s subsequent works: (ir)reversibility, malfunction(or ‘bug’), and algorithm. As the phrase ‘clockwise’ evokes, that the algorithm of a clockwork mechanism presupposes one-directionality is self-evident.

This is why, as already mentioned above, an “attempt to turn the clock backward” is considered “abnormal,” both mechanically and politically. Strictly speaking, however, this is less a feature of the clock’s mechanism than that of time itself. The very fact that a clock can be turned backward, while there is still no “time machine” to return us to our childhood like in the 'Back to the Future' series, eloquently demonstrates this.

2. Where do these embryonic characteristics originate? At this point, a brief account of algorithm is necessary. The word “algorithm” is in fact the Latinized name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c.780–c.850), the Persian mathematician and astronomer. His work on calculation using Indian numerals was translated into Latin in the 12th century, and this book is also known for beginning with the phrase “Dixit Algorizmi” (Thus spoke Algorizmi).5

As the mathematician Chaitin’s remark suggests—“To understand an algorithm you have to program it yourself. I think there’s no substitute”6—algorithm is still widely considered something exclusively coextensive with ‘computers’ or ‘artificial intelligence.’ However, the historian of science Lorraine Daston offers a concise yet expansive redefinition, i.e., algorithm as “instructions subdivided into steps so small and unambiguous that even a machine could execute them.”7

Here algorithm is repositioned as a term designating a set of procedures, techniques, and conventions including mathematical formulas and recipes. The important point here is that “Algorithms escape context by ignoring it.”8 This disregard for context is algorithm’s limitation, but it can also be a strength, as it allows for variations beyond specific contexts when properly extracted. What is crucial for our discussion is that when a specific mode of operation is rendered visible as an algorithm, its order can often be reversed or rearranged.

At the beginning of this sensory thinking lies his first substantial work, My First Hamburger (2014). This work calmly shows the artist seated before a camera and eating a hamburger, an attempt to repeat an unremarkable act of Andy Warhol eating a ketchup-covered hamburger for approximately four minutes in Jørgen Leth’s film 66 Scenes from America (1982).

While modest compared to his later attempts to turn back mechanical devices or the clock as political history, the recognition that the simple preceding ‘algorithm’ of ‘eating a hamburger’ can be ‘repeated’ is significant. The repetition fails in this very first work due to the artist’s own phobia of ketchup. Despite substituting every element of the video with a replacement—including ketchup replaced by gochujang—as a way to circumvent it, the attempt fails. What matters for us is that the possibility of such substitution presupposes both the existence of an algorithm and an awareness of it.

It is precisely algorithm’s relative independence from ‘context’ that makes the replacement of elements possible. At one time, this work was interpreted through the lens of ‘fiction’ and ‘simulation,’ and to those versed in the history of contemporary art it may have appeared as a belated instance of ‘appropriation.’ However, as the attempt to bodily repeat the relatively simple actions of the deceased artist Warhol ended in absurd failure, this work embodied the ‘(ir)reversibility,’ ‘malfunction,’ and ‘algorithm’ evoked above in prototype.

3. This understanding allows us to characterize Lee Jungwoo’s entire oeuvre as a prolonged, laborious play, variation, and struggle with algorithms of many different kinds. As we have seen, Die Resistenz ends with the artist’s intention- which stood against an attempt to restore a specific algorithm embedded in the “clock of political history”- thwarted by the safety algorithm embedded in the drone.

If the latter was defined as a kind of ‘bug’ insofar as it ran counter to the artist’s intention, the exhibition 《Project Hashtag 2020》 (2020) expands this into the dimension of a system that (mal)functions in reality. Here Gangnam is understood as the product of urban development algorithms, such as land acquisition, floor-area ratios, and specific logics of development profit distribution, and If One Climbs Up and Up (2020), which again deploys a drone as in the previous work, also ends in a kind of failure.

The drone he launched, assuming the completion of a new headquarters for a major corporation that had not even properly begun construction at the time, fails to reach the expected altitude due to institutional restrictions on aerial photography altitude and the electromagnetic interference emitted by a nearby power-generation facility.

Notable here is that the question this work poses (”What can be secured from the vantage point of 105 floors, 569 meters?”) ‘algorithmically pre-empts’ the completion of the new building. What is at stake is not the ‘context,’ such as the type of company or the architectural characteristics of the building, but the abstract properties of “105 floors” at “569 meters.”

To be sure, one could pay attention to the repetition of ‘failure’ or the distorted landscape of capitalism that ‘Gangnam’ embodies. Nonetheless, more impressive is that these properties are captured not through a conventional mode of ‘criticism,’ but through the unexpected collision of different algorithms.

GANGNAMBUS- which featured performers acting as guides on a city bus traversing Gangnam area to provide explanations to the accompanying audience- evokes the layered contrasts of affluent neighborhoods, redevelopment zones, and shanty towns awaiting demolition. Still, one must not miss the fact that what defines this participatory tour work at its core is the intersection of two different algorithms: the ‘bus route’ and the ‘guided tour.’

Win, Lose or Draw: The Drawing Competition (2020) likewise renders visible the collision of two institutional algorithms by transplanting the evaluation algorithm of the plaster cast drawing exam for art school admissions into the institutional space of the museum. This reading may provoke the suspicion that it focuses only on the ‘methodological’ dimension of the work. And yet, that suspicion may be born of the blind spot that the critical evocation of ‘Gangnam’ as a subject is already a worn-out and conventional one at its root.

4. This allows us to read afresh the fact that Lee Jungwoo has consistently crafted issues of death and mourning, memory and politics. Consider the Sewol Ferry disaster in Not on Board (2021), the Itaewon tragedy in Dumb Dummy Dumb-dom (2023), and the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ victims addressed in his recent To Be Determined (2024). The work that stands at the origin of this distinctive series of the so-called ‘historical trauma’ is Another Left (2019), which deals with the Gwangju uprising of May 1980.

The content and algorithm of this work are not particularly complex: it takes a key scene from the movie A Taxi Driver (2017), a Korean film about the deaths and heroic struggle of Gwangju in 1980, splits it in two, and juxtaposes them in forward and reverse playback. What matters is that the film’s climax is the scene in which a Gwangju taxi driver risks his life by shifting into reverse to protect the cab carrying the protagonist, Song Kang-ho, and the Gwangju taxi drivers collectively sacrifice themselves.

This is well known as the only fictional scene in this film based on true events. By playing it forward and backward, the artist simultaneously renders visible the moment of a choice toward death and its irreversibility. By compressing into the image of a gear shift the fictional reversibility permitted by cinematic algorithm and the irreversibility of historical time, Lee paradoxically throws into relief the tension and asymmetry between the two.

Death and time, defined at such a fundamental level as that which is ‘irreversible,’ are often presented in his work as if they could be reversed. As the title of the 2019 exhibition 《Olwookeok–geogguro geogguro》-a wordplay that reverses the adverb meaning ‘backwards,’ or ‘upside down’- suggests, this is a possibility made globally operable not only through technical means such as backward masking or running film in reverse, but also through past-oriented politics represented by ‘Park-samo’ (the conservative political fan club of Park Geun-hye, the daughter of the late President Park Chung-hee) or ‘MAGA’ (Make America Great Again).

Death, of course, lies at the extreme end of this reversibility, but when it becomes reversible, what becomes most ‘homeless’ (nan-cheo, 難處), in the most literal sense, i.e. nowhere for a corpse to be placed, is the tomb. This is why the grave was at the core of The Golden Age of Grave Robbing (2019), arguably the emblematic work of that 2019 exhibition. The figure presumed to be former President Park Chung-hee describes his own plight with the subtitle “My grave lost its function long ago,” while an unidentified wild beast is depicted as having found its proper place to die.

It is no coincidence that most of the films reconstructed in the exhibition’s third section (Olwookeok–geogguro geogguro) involve entering caves, disturbing graves, or robbing tombs, and that the two actors who appear in the second section were figures associated with Sewol victims and Princess Deokhye (1912–1989), the last princess of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, who was forced into decades-long exile under Japanese colonial rule, respectively.

Each, in different ways, had wrestled with the issues of deaths rendered “without a proper resting place” and this carries two implications. One is that, unlike the climax scene of A Taxi Driver used in Another Left which was the only fictional scene in the film, the reversal of (ir)reversibility in death is no longer fictional. The other is that the allegory of the ‘empty tomb’- symbolizing, as in Christianity, a singular meaning of (Jesus’) ‘resurrection’- is not activated in the same way.

Entering the 21st century, the victims of the May 18 Uprising, Park Chung-hee, and the victims of the Sewol Ferry disaster began to wander the netherworld separately yet together, but on completely different spectrums. This is not unrelated to the implications of the T-shaped gesture repeatedly and clumsily attempted by the figure on the left-hand screen of Dumb Dummy Dumb-dom, which faintly evokes the Itaewon tragedy.

The T-pose is the default posture to which a motion capture system automatically reverts when sensor signals are lost, and the figure onscreen constantly repeating a gesture similar to this posture.

5. The most conspicuous recurring expression in Lee’s portfolio, as reconstructed at the 2025 juncture, is the phrase “does not~.” He consistently emphasizes that he “does not correct or optimize,” and that what matters is not “how completely it has been restored.” What is preserved instead are errors and malfunctions. The diverse media Lee has drawn upon merits discreet consideration here.

Consider the series of technologies ranging from drone (Die Resistenz), motion capture (Dumb Dummy Dumb-Dom), photogrammetry (To Be Determined), AR (Plant Apples and Get Avocados), game engine (Because: Surrounded by Three Dimensions, 2024), and generative AI (In Writing “Hurrah for Freedom”: Cinema and History). In line with our ongoing discussion, these various devices all ‘malfunction.’

Still, these errors, failures, and malfunctions have been with him from the very beginning. As the title Die Resistenz suggests, to be sure, Lee once regarded the malfunctions of the drone and other devices as mechanical ‘resistance’ working against his own intentions. But now he leans toward the view that this reading was itself a ‘misreading.’ The ‘breakdown’ in question is redefined not as the machine’s ‘resistance’ but as an event that occurred during the process where protocols embedded in the drones competed with human commands.

For Lee, this logic applies to the ‘hallucinations’ produced by AI as well: these are no longer regarded as ‘malfunctions’ but as the products of a proper ‘functioning’ or operation in accordance with the algorithm built into the system. As the 2019 exhibition title  《Olwookeok–geogguro geogguro》 amply suggested, letters written backwards or voices distorted by backward masking can also render visible the distinction between ‘functioning’ and ‘malfunction’ as something self-evident.

Nonetheless, as Untitled—Perfect Moments eloquently demonstrates, the fact that people could not tell the difference between accelerated and decelerated time already carries within it the possibility that the distinction between the reversible and the irreversible, between normal operation and malfunction, may not be as self-evident as it seems.

His most recent works explicitly foreground this new way of reading. 《Loops of Algorithmic Karma》 (2024) consists of three works: To Be Determined, Because: Surrounded by Three Dimensions, and Plant Apples and Get Avocados. To Be Determined constitutes a practice of remembering and mourning the deaths and suffering of the ‘comfort women,’ based on data recorded by visiting and documenting the Berlin Statue of Peace, which faces pressure for removal, day after day. But the fragmented 3D mesh created by photogrammetry is never fully restored.

And Plant Apples and Get Avocados literally states, ‘planting apples and getting avocados.’ Although designed to summon a virtual monument through the spatial coordinate tracking algorithm of AR technology, the output varies each time, even when the same location and action are repeated. Certain elements fail to appear, or are replaced by unrelated objects. Measured against the proverb “you reap what you sow,” these amount to nothing but unambiguous instances of ‘malfunction.’ Yet by refusing to correct them, the artist renders visible the immanent limits of the AR tracking algorithm.

The most recent example of ‘planting apples and getting avocados’ is In Writing “Hurrah for Freedom”: Cinema and History. Even when asked for the face of a Korean man from the mid-to-late 1940s, the AI outputs a Western face and persistently refuses the artist’s prompt calling for a suspended fire order. The default villain is not the Japanese, but the German army.

Lee does not raise an explicit critique regarding the limitations of artificial intelligence or engines that exhibit such ‘bias.’ For instance, he does not expose the background or ownership relationships of AI technology as Kate Crawford did in ​​Atlas of AI, nor does he call for improvements in poor labor conditions and acts of environmental destruction.9

Instead, Lee underscores that “given a condition, the system produces the most ‘fitting’ result within that condition,” and draws a line by stating, “In other words, in current work, there is no longer a distinction between normal and abnormal, or between malfunction and normal functioning.”

In his terms, “what this indicates is not the system itself, but the gravity operating the system today.”Could this conclusion be regarded as a fatal weakness in his work? Does saying there is “no distinction” between “normal and abnormal,” “malfunction and proper functioning,” amount to a counsel of surrender, urging us to simply accept the given reality?

In this sense, Because: Surrounded by Three Dimensions is intriguing. By overlaying assets from Korean commercial films about naval battles of the Imjin War onto game engine simulations, Lee raises the question of whether the conditions of Joseon, or Korea, which is ‘surrounded by the sea on three sides,’ constitute an “unavoidable geopolitical fate.”

Although waves are twisted and gravity is reversed by artificially inputting values ​​exceeding parameters, these malfunctions are revealed as constructs of the technical language of statistics and simulation. Does this mean that “fate” does not exist? Is there no algorithm that cannot be overcome? In the sense that we live in a world where even death- an example of the limits of irreversibility- has become a reversible phenomenon? If so, why was it that the artist could not eat “ketchup”? Between a nation’s geopolitical position and an allergic reaction to cucumbers or peaches, which is the more powerful algorithm closer to “destiny”?

Equally illuminating is his latest work using generative AI, In Writing “Hurrah for Freedom”: Cinema and History. Hurrah for Freedom, made just after liberation, underwent a series of censorship and re-edits on account of its director’s pro-Japanese collaboration and the lead actor’s defection to the North. Ultimately, only a 50-minute segment survived in a tattered state. Connecting an AI respirator to the ragged body, the artist wrote:

It follows how the freedom promised by generative models—“anything can be created”—diverges from and overlaps with the freedom invoked by the film in the immediate post-liberation period. It also follows how the vacancy produced by the lead actor’s defection is erased again, now through automatic content filtering and data bias.

In Writing “Hurrah for Freedom”: Cinema and History places these two eras of “freedom” onto the same procedural surface—generation and recomposition—and tracks how past censorship and present-day bias repeat and mutate under contemporary technical and media conditions.

And in one scene, the audience hears—in Korean and English—the sentence: “No image can defy the gravity of the latent space.” On the split screen, three characters are visible, sharing obvious resemblances and subtle differences. First, the man delivering the line stands precariously in the arms of a nurse behind him, clutching his left arm as if wounded in both instances.

Behind them stands an officer wearing what appears to be a German military uniform, and all three are in a forest. Once this basic composition is established, the differences become clear. First, the wounded man and the nurse on the left screen are white, whereas the two on the right screen are Asian. More precisely, the nurse on the left screen is female, but the nurse on the right screen has the face of a man wearing a female nurse’s uniform. It would generally be difficult to see a ‘transgender’ character fitting for a film made in Korea in the mid-1940s.

What is interesting in this respect is the German officer shared by both screens. He appears as a white man in both screens and is the only one among the three characters who maintains visual consistency. As Lee points out, this is both a preposterous outcome and an inherent limitation of the generative AI datasets available to him in mid-to-late 2025. This is in the sense that the reason World War II is ultimately remembered as a U.S. victory over the German army is a product of history, in which countless films have expanded and refined the former’s dichotomy of good and evil.

6. Can all of this be said to be nothing more than “gravity”? Does rendering a system’s gravity visible suggest the possibility that the gravity itself might change? Or, like the weight that the concept of “gravity” itself holds for the Earth and humanity, is it something given as a kind of ‘fate’? In the earlier essay already mentioned, I wrote that in Lee’s oeuvre history is “stuck awkwardly between tragedy and farce.”

This “awkwardness” or unease could be a limitation of his works but also its honesty. Yet when Marx twisted Hegel to say “history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” it was also a question asking about the possibility of action within historical repetition. Does Lee’s “gravity” close that question, or open it differently? Is the algorithm of gravity also reversible?

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: “It is not possible that there was only one time when someone obeyed a rule,”10 and adds: “It is not possible that there should have been only one time when a report was made, an order given or understood, and so on.” 11 For him, “To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).”12

That is to say, to the philosopher, an algorithm is a “custom” exposed to the possibility of change. In a related passage, he also writes: “The machine seems already to contain its own mode of operation,” which means that, “If we know the machine, everything else- that is the movements it will make- seem to be already completely determined.” And then he adds:

We talk as if these parts could only move in this way, as if they could not do anything else. Is this how it is? Do we forget the possibility of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don’t think of that at all.13

To what extent, then, are algorithms for Lee capable of “bending, breaking off, melting”? Can even a firmly frozen algorithm evaporate or melt like ice cream?

The question, strange as it is, is not his alone to answer and, in that peculiar sense, the past, present, and future of the work he has refined demands the attention of many more with keen eyes and ears. If, as Klee says, art truly “makes visible,” then rendering visible what was an invisible algorithm suggests that “[machine] can, after all, also move quite differently,” just as AI continues to insist in various domains in ways that cannot be reduced to mere ‘hallucination.’

 

1. The irony of maintaining and preserving one’s status through antagonistic relationships, independent of intent, is found across various fields, disciplines and history. While such evocation often reinforces cynicism toward all criticism and resistance, confronting the power of bondage that contains even hostile movements is precisely the foundation of fundamental thought and critique. cf. Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Lim Jie-Hyun, “The Antagonistic Complicity of Nationalisms: On Nationalist Phenomenology in East Asian History Textbooks,” in Contested Views of a Common Past: Revisions of History in Contemporary East Asia, ed. Steffi Richter (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), 205–222. 2; Michael Burawoy, “For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review, Vol.70 (Feb. 2005), 4–28; Peter F. Drucker, “Science and Industry, Challenges of Antagonistic Interdependence,” Sciences, Vol.204, No.4395 (May 25, 1979), 806-810.
2. cf. Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia (London: SAGE, 1999).
3. Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality, trans. Kim Taehui(Seoul: Elpi, 2020), 56.
4. “Human flaws or limitations… In fact, they are virtues and individuality”, Son Suk-hee’s Questions 4, MBC News April 15, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVyMqldFQU4. cf. Kim Ji-hwan, “Hesitation Absent in AI”, Kyunghyang Shinmun, April 20, 2026.
5. Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 85.
6. Gregory J. Chaitin, Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science, and the Limits of Reason(London: Springer-Verlag, 2002), 44.
7. Rules, 8.
8. Ibid., 271.
9. Cf. Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 87(§199). Emphasis original.
11. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 84 (§193).
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.

References

• [비평] 알고리즘과 아이스크림: 이정우 작가론
  [Critique] Algorithm and Ice Cream: On Lee Jungwoo’s Oeuvres