Jooyoung Oh, Virtual Environment Regulator 2, 2017, Installation view of 《Artlab Daejeon 2017》 (Lee Ungno Museum, 2017) ©Jooyoung Oh

Jooyoung Oh graduated from the Department of Visual Communication Design at Hongik University, earned her master's degree in Culture Technology at KAIST, and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree. She previously participated in the "Small-scale Art Project" held at Ilmin Museum of Art in 2015, and in 2016, she joined the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Hong Kong and the group exhibition "Visual Virtual Dystopia" hosted by the Seoul Museum of Art. These experiences have steadily established her as a media artist exploring the intersections of technology and human desire. As she continues her research in the field of media technologies such as VR devices and smartphones, most of her works examine human attitudes toward technology.
 
Her practice is premised on the idea that all new technologies reflect human hopes. Examples include terrain browsers like Google Earth, which allow users to share three-dimensional global geographic information, and VR devices that provide a 360-degree field of vision. At the 2017 Art Lab Daejeon, Oh also presents works using such cutting-edge technologies.

Jooyoung Oh, Virtual Environment Regulator 1, 2017, Smartphone, tripod, 3D printed VR headset, 78x40x40cm ©Jooyoung Oh

Virtual Environment Regulator 1 aims to offer technical convenience in viewing 360-degree perspectives by recalibrating the environment to match the viewpoint of individuals accustomed to linear perspective. Inspired by the observation that people using VR devices capable of full 360-degree vision tend to focus only on what is directly in front of them, the work compels viewers into uncomfortable postures in order to see a fixed scene on the VR screen. Through this bodily discomfort, they become newly aware of sensory perception mediated by the body and simultaneously recognize the limitations of state-of-the-art technologies.

Virtual Environment Regulator 2 focuses on the environment in which 360-degree rendering is produced. Google Earth View, which offers 360-degree spatial information, forms a cave-like virtual hemisphere made by stitching together dozens of images from different perspectives. At Art Lab Daejeon, viewers are placed in a cozy cave-like installation created by Oh and are assigned the task of watching Google Earth View. The immersive environment, paradoxically, is distant from the way humans actually perceive objects. Whereas Virtual Environment Regulator 1 forces viewers to observe in the most uncomfortable way, Virtual Environment Regulator 2 provides a visually uncomfortable experience in the most comfortable environment—thus creating two opposing conditions between the works.

Jooyoung Oh’s work reconstructs environments that use the most advanced technologies in the most inconvenient ways. Through this, the artist invites viewers to engage their bodies—intersections of matter and mind, intuition and subjectivity—as a medium. Her gesture of presenting landscapes that resist immersion via new technologies may appear dystopian at first glance. Yet, by discovering understanding and hope for humanity amid repeated failures, her gesture also assumes a utopian character.

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