8637 from the light

Artworks

Ars Electronica presents

Susi Gutsche (AT)

TRACEWASTE

Yedam Warehouse, 32, Eupseong 1-gil, Gwangyang-eup, Gwangyang-si, Jeollanam-do, Republic of Korea
October 2 – 10, 10:00 – 20:00

TRACEWASTE observes and visualizes garbage movements from a citizen’s perspective to explore future urban life in the context of waste management. It tracks discarded objects using geolocation methods, providing insights into waste whereabouts, transport durations, distances, and emissions. IoT devices (0G) in a low power wide area network track various types of waste across Italy, with a special focus on textiles and plastics. Monitoring rubbish collection vehicles within Rome additionally captures urban waste collection dynamics. The interactive audio-visual installation, resembling an island of waste, challenges waste disposal culture, triggering discussion on global waste challenges. An interactive interface visualizes garbage routes, allowing hands-on exploration through a touch screen. The soundscape incorporates electromagnetic emissions from tracking devices and recordings of rubbish trucks, and urban waste sounds. The non-linear interaction between installation and viewers creates a unique experience. We are living in the era of trash, what will the future look like?

Biographies & Credits

Biographies

Susi Gutsche (AT) is a research-driven artist with a background in Social Design — Arts as Urban Innovation, the humanities and scientific laboratory work. She participated in archaeological excavations and worked in clinical research settings. In her works, she is primarily interested in the intersection of art and everyday life, routines and their aesthetics, addressing societal and environmental processes in urban contexts. Through an experimental approach, she engages with multiple media, combining video, photography, participative actions, and unconventional materials/technologies.
www.tracewaste.eu

Artwork Credits & Acknowledgement

Assistance/Design: Dimitrije Andrijević
Sound Design: Sebastian Scholz, Coding: Max Pellert
Technology partnership: Paul Pinault
Supported by SONY CSL: Vittorio Loreto, Alessandro Londei, Bernardo Monechi, Matteo Bruno in the framework of the artist residency “Big Data and the City”

The project has received funding in the framework of the European S+T+ARTS initiative, project “Repairing the Present” from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement LC01641664 and was co-hosted by SONY Computer Science Laboratories.

ARS ELECTRONICA ANIMATION FESTIVAL ON TOUR

Yedam Warehouse, 32, Eupseong 1-gil, Gwangyang-eup, Gwangyang-si, Jeollanam-do, Republic of Korea
October 2 – 10, daily screenings

10:00 Electronic Theatre | 14:00 AI & Human | 15:00 Austrian Panorama | 16:00 Electronic Theatre

Ars Electronica Animation Festival On Tour in Gwangyang presents a curated selection of three screening programs and fourteen groundbreaking animated works from Prix Ars Electronica 2023. This diverse selection invites new ways of thinking about how we experience the digital-virtual-real world we live in. A broad spectrum of styles and techniques – AI-generated images, cinematic deepfakes, hybrids between games and animations, animated documentaries and experimental-abstract works – highlight emerging trends in the field of animation and give witness to the diversity of the medium.

Electronic Theatre is the annual best-of program, a compilation of five outstanding animations chosen by the Prix jury from the submitted works in the “New Animation Art” category. Combining fantasy, erotica and body horror, IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS follows an ambiguous hero undergoing numerous metamorphoses beyond conventional masculinities of game avatars. In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, another hero, a female platform delivery driver, rushes with the speed of light through a labyrinth of endless paths, sliding into a parallel time and space. GLITCHBODIES uses video game aesthetics to introduce us to a mesmerizing group of characters with diverse bodies and minds. Lebensraum addresses contemporary problems such as overpopulation, the destruction of our living space and the steady rise in sea levels with a humorous approach. Similarly, FuneralPlay speculates on a future in which users can choose between erasing their electronic footprint after death or uploading it to virtual heaven, published on blockchain.

AI & Human. Who Owns the Truth? approaches topical disputes of our time, from data ownership and ethics of data harvesting, to authorship in the age of AI, love in time of crypto, deepfakes and image credibility. Using computer vision and machine learning, Soft Evidence is a series of filmic deepfakes created in classic cinema style. Decoding Bias imagines a therapy for AIs helping them to emancipate themselves from discriminatory algorithms. LoveCounter invites users to an “emotional autonomous region” where they can escape from the omnipresence of big data and manage their own digital footprints. The bizarre images from Planets and Robots are entirely generated by AI, yet animated by humans, showing what it amounts to when humans and AIs are equal partners in the creative process.

Austrian Panorama highlights recent animation works of local artists. Cave Painting, Not Really Now Not Anymore and The Great Tree Piece offer a meditative-poetic glimpse at more than human worlds, in which the organic and the digital are inseparably intertwined. Nature is neither pure, nor standing as a graspable whole in front of our gaze. It is rather fragmented and densely filled with infinitesimal details which reach beyond human perception. Animation becomes a tool for staging different perceptual calibrations, zooming between different proximities exceeding the human gaze, and redefining notions of physicality and abstraction, natural and synthetic. Internet Gaga and Shroomsday complement the selection with a humorous and ironic take on our contemporary times.

Joon Yong Moon (KR)

HELLO, SHADOW!

Part of Joon Yong Moon’s AUGMENTED SHADOW series initiated in 2010, HELLO, SHADOW! offers the public an immersive experience that implements augmented reality using shadows. Virtual shadows are superimposed onto real objects’ actual shadows. The project explores the nature of shadows existing at the boundary between imagination and reality.

Lee Nam Lee (KR)

Waterfall Turned into a Poem

By arranging over 5,300 volumes of books—ranging from ancient oracle bone scripts to modern texts—into an organic structure symbolizing the foundation of human history, the artist aims to depict the enduring transmission of civilization and spirit across time. The waterfall of ancient characters, interwoven with a chronological flow of philosophical and literary knowledge, represents the continuity of ideas and wisdom from antiquity to the present day. For individuals today, immersed in a sea of images and digital information, the artists seeks to evoke contemplation on the intangible essence and values embedded in human history. The cascading flow of text serves as a reminder of the unseen forces that shape our culture. As part of this exploration, the artist collaborated with the GFLAS Life Sciences Team at Seoul National University to extract DNA data from my hair. The genetic sequence was digitally processed and presented across both video and print media, further intertwining personal identity with the broader historical and cultural narrative.

Biographies

Biographies

Born in Damyang of Jeonnam province, Lee Lee Nam graduated from Chosun University in Korea with an undergraduate degree in sculpture and a doctorate degree in Fine Arts. In his digital reinterpretation of classical masterpieces that reveal nature’s wonders and life’s aura, he attempts to breathe new meaning and vitality into each pixel of image. At the 2016 Busan Biennale, he was the first Korean artist to present a virtual reality artwork using Google’s Tilth Brush technology. In 2019 he was part of group exhibition at Tate Modern. His works are included in numerous prominent museums such as the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Suning Art Museum and the Zebrastraat Museum in Belgium.
www.leeleenam.net

Jeongju Jeong

Luminous City

The Seoul National University Southern Practice Forest residence, built in 1919 as an employee residence during the Japanese colonial period, is a nationally registered cultural heritage site that reflects the spatial composition of Japanese housing from that era. A structure featuring monitors alongside mirrors and stainless steel plates is installed within the residence. The monitors display videos of the Southern Practice Forest, the exhibition space, and urban architecture in Gwangyang, blending shifting colors and historical events. The imagery evokes a simplified building form, reflected in the mirrors and metal surfaces, creating a dynamic interplay. Titled Luminous City, this work combines the LED visuals with the metallic framework, revealing a complex presence within the room that echoes over a century of history, inviting contemplation of cultural memory and the passage of time.

Donah Lee

L’espérance

This video artwork offers a digital reinterpretation of a traditional cultural heritage object—an ancestral folding screen—reimagined as contemporary art. Originally gifted to the artist by his father in 1991, the screen features traditional calligraphy and East Asian cultural motifs, representing the love, identity, and legacy passed down through generations of the family’s diaspora. Through digital media, the folding screen transcends its status as a historical artifact, becoming a spiritual heirloom that remains alive and relevant today. In the video’s final scene, vibrant flowers symbolizing happiness bloom, reflecting the enduring vitality of this cultural heritage, sustained by the father’s love and life. This work bridges the gap between tradition and modernity, blending personal experience with universal emotions. It seeks to generate new meanings by reinterpreting cultural heritage through a contemporary lens.

Jaehyung Lee

Machine impromptu & Face of City_Seoul

Machine Impromptu explores new possibilities in AI art, demonstrating how nature, humans, and machines can harmonize to create a unique form of artistic expression. The limitations of AI-generated music, often composed through random functions within structured algorithms, highlight its lack of spontaneous artistic inspiration. In response, this artwork seeks to transcend that constraint by incorporating the randomness of nature. A fish tank, with a ‘staff’ drawn across it and fish acting as the ‘notes,’ is scanned at a steady pace to create music that evolves in real-time as the fish move through the water. The position of each fish determines the musical scale, which is played automatically on a piano, while the accompanying chords are generated by an AI system.

Face of City is a project that delves into the emotional landscape of a city, capturing the collective sentiment of its inhabitants. By analyzing a vast array of social media posts from a specific region, the project uncovers the emotional undercurrents that define the city’s atmosphere. These insights are visualized through a dynamic facial representation, with expressions that shift in real-time, reflecting the changing emotions of the population. In this piece, the emotional states of different demographic groups—men, women, the elderly, and the youth in Seoul—are conveyed through their corresponding facial expressions, which are derived from social media data specific to the Seoul area.

Changkyum Kim

Watershadow & Flowers

A video camera captured the reflection of a person on water, and through careful editing, the artist transformed the footage to mimic real water when projected onto a dish. What appears to be water is, in fact, a virtual illusion. As one peers into this virtual surface, one might encounter a person’s image, while shadows occasionally emerge, altering the experience. In everyday life, shadows cannot exist independently; they are bound to the objects that cast them. In this artwork however, the shadow appears real, yet its source is absent—it’s the shadow of a person who is not there. The work blurs the line between reality and illusion. It seems tangible, but at moments, reveals itself as an artifice. When the video ends, the dish is revealed as a simple white object, stripped of its illusion.

Exhibition Credits

Exhibition team

Woosong Bang – Head of overseas cultural trade support at Gwangyang Culture City Center, Professor of Yewon Arts University
Laura Welzenbach – Head of Export, Ars Electronica
Daniela Duca De Tey – Exhibition Producer Ars Electronica Export and co-curator Ars Electronica Animation Festival