Jooyoung Oh (b. 1991) is an artist and researcher who explores the limits and alternative possibilities of contemporary science and technology through interactive media, including games and artificial cognitive models. With the perspective of a scholar, she investigates human visual perception and conducts simulations using artificial cognitive models. At the same time, as an artist, she continually questions the boundaries and limitations inherent in scientific and technological systems.

Jooyoung Oh has been working with an interdisciplinary background in visual design and engineering. Initially working primarily with photography, her practice naturally evolved into an inquiry into the technical implications of image-making and human visual perception.
 
This led her to begin creating technology-based artworks, starting with a program that distorts the typical process by which digital photographs are captured, shared, and viewed online. For instance, her 2017 media installation Virtual Environment Regulator 1 employs VR technology to provide a 360-degree view of a virtual environment, while simultaneously revealing the visual limitations inherent in such immersive technologies.

This work, composed of a smartphone and a fixed stand, utilizes a VR simulation app that compiles and presents beautiful sceneries from around the world in a 360-degree view. However, due to the low height and rigid structure of the stand, viewers are unable to adjust the viewing angle within the smartphone. As a result, they must bend down and contort their bodies to match the fixed perspective of the stand, ultimately being confined to viewing only a single, unchanging scene.

In Virtual Environment Regulator 2, produced afterward, dozens of images collected from various viewpoints within Google Earth View are combined to create a 360-degree environment. As viewers move through the space, the landscape shifts rapidly depending on position and tilt, often inducing digital motion sickness. In contrast to this disorienting visual experience, the viewer is placed inside a cozy tent filled with pleasant scents, creating an immersive and comfortable atmosphere. The artist explains that this work intentionally highlights the irony between the immersive setup and the dissonance created by the technology.
 
Human vision has evolved to perceive only what lies directly in front and faintly to the sides. The work proposes a VR space that reflects this limitation, demonstrating that human cognitive capacities function differently from the conveniences offered by technology.

In BirthMark: An Artificial Viewer for Appreciation of Digital Surrogates of Art (2017–2020), Jooyoung Oh explores the concept of an artificial intelligence system appreciating works of art. Incorporating AI technology, the installation features three projection screens and a 1970s-style slide projection screen that display various artists’ works. The AI “appreciates” these works and presents the outcomes of its perception in video form.
 
The tags that appear and disappear throughout the video represent object attributes classified by the AI. Following this, the screen fills with text generated by the ACT-R cognitive model—an artificial system modeled after the structure of the human brain—demonstrating the perceptual and cognitive process of viewing art.

BirthMark defines the basic states of visual and cognitive appreciation as three stages: “Camouflage” (initial perception), “Solution” (artist’s intention), and “Insight.” A voice named Rachel, trained to resemble human pronunciation, narrates the process with statements like “Shifting gaze to the left” and “Recognized image on the screen,” mapping out the AI’s simulated experience of art appreciation.

At the beginning of the work, the input data and AI’s resulting interpretations are displayed on the small screen of a vintage slide projector, accompanied by video. Like a blinking eye, each click of the slide projector introduces a new artwork into the AI’s field of vision. This outdated projector—contemporaneous with the era in which the artificial cognitive model was developed—also displays the AI’s semantic interpretation of each artwork.
 
Yet the AI is only able to extract a mere 2 to 5 words of meaning from a pool of 300 possible descriptors, and the more abstract the artwork, the more sharply its understanding declines.
 
This work reveals the limitations of scientific methodology—often regarded as the most objective means of understanding reality. By simulating the process through which an AI perceives and interprets art—a realm not easily captured by reason or objectivity—Jooyoung Oh exposes the boundaries of machine cognition and gestures toward the uniquely human dimensions that science alone cannot fully grasp.

The installation work Blind Landing (2019) addresses the evolving relationship between humans and technology today. In an era of accelerated data processing, cloud systems, and networked media platforms, humans increasingly extend their capabilities through these sophisticated tools. We often perceive ourselves to be in control of this technology—and at times, we even place greater trust in technological decisions than in our own.

Blind Landing draws inspiration from the character Fabien, a pilot in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel Night Flight. While the novel presents Fabien as a dehumanized protagonist—trained to rely on technology rather than trust his own senses in controlling the flight—Jooyoung Oh’s work embodies a machine-led dehumanization that turns the audience into passive subjects through the process of quantifying human senses. 

Through this work, Oh continues to expose how today’s convenient, predictive technologies shape our lives, often at the cost of individual agency and self-awareness.

In this way, Jooyoung Oh has consistently created environments that invite the audience to engage in perceptual experiences and interact with technology. Within this context, her works have also taken the form of games. For example, Unexpected Scenery (2020) is a game-based media work that highlights critical issues such as the misunderstandings obscured behind the achievements of AI technology, the accidental progress in its history, and the unintended side effects of new conveniences.
 
Through this work, the artist questions the technological conditions and implications surrounding these systems, adopting the narrative structure of arcade games to offer a multifaceted perspective on technology. The game is structured in three stages, each based on a specific theme: “the physical space in which AI is implemented,” “resources for constructing spatial systems,” and “accidental research outcomes.”

The game’s narrative unfolds around ‘Timo,’ an educational model AI set in the near future of 2048. Timo escapes from a factory and embarks on a journey to discover its true origins. Along the way, it seeks out the researcher who created it to understand how it was made and absorbs all the environments in which it has been trained, causing its form to gradually transform.
 
In the ending, the hidden history of AI is revealed — the very first neuron model originated from the giant squid. Inspired by the unexpected fact that today’s neural networks were modeled after the massive brain network of the giant squid, the artist encourages players to move beyond traditional human-centered views of technology and experience, through the game, how science and technology have evolved within complex environments and through chance.

In another game work by Jooyoung Oh, Hope For the Rats (2020), the audience experiences the record of failures encountered by a researcher named P by becoming the researcher’s lab rat. Players control the experimental rat and symbolically navigate through various stages, directly experiencing the difficulties of discovering scientific truths and the unintended sacrifices that follow.
 
Through the inevitably repetitive experience of failure within the game, the work reminds us of the imperfect foundations on which scientific truths stand. Although our daily lives are surrounded by countless scientific research outcomes, truly understanding the complexity and diversity of these achievements is practically impossible. Jooyoung Oh reveals the inherent imperfections behind science and technology permeating our everyday lives through an immersive game that the audience actively controls and engages with.

Recently, Jooyoung Oh has been presenting works focused on the climate crisis, mobility technologies, environmental resources, and care. For example, Kestrel Drone (2022), exhibited at 《ZER01NE DAY 2022》, is a biomimetic AI drone project that substitutes the subject of technology use with “birds” to provide care.
 
This work proposes technologies for adaptation and coexistence between human and non-human ecosystems in the near future, through the kestrel, a Korean resident bird best adapted to human environments. The kestrel is designated as Natural Monument No. 323-8; only 49 individuals were recorded in Korea in 1999, but it has since adapted to urban ecosystems, with a population now exceeding 300 annually.
 
The Kestrel Drone acts as a foster parent to various resident birds within the city while communicating with them and deterring birds by mimicking the calls of raptors to prevent bird collisions.

The following year, at the 《2023 BusanMoCA Platform: Ingredients Mining》 exhibition held at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Jooyoung Oh collaborated with researcher and curator Kim Do-yeon and kinetic artist Kim Jung Un to present the ‘Young Bird Care Center’ project, created for the migratory bird sanctuary on Eulsuk Island.
 
Inspired by common tern nests on a sandbank in the Nakdong River Estuary, ‘Young Bird Care Center,’ for which a Kestrel Drone, a robotic drone modeled after the kestrel, a species which has adapted to and thrives in human environments, is imagined as caregiver to migratory common terns, presenting a worldview promoting the proper fostering and stewardship of nature through collaboration between humans and technology.
 
Along this, its sound installation piece, Young Bird Interaction, aims to understand the sensory experiences of birds from a human perspective, creating a sound environment suitable for the raising of birds, in the manner of an incubator, incorporating the sounds of the sandbar - wind, the warning calls of predatory birds, and human voices, into the museum using patterns based on the actual distribution and coordinates of common tern nests in the Nakdong River estuary in 2023.

Through ‘Young Bird Care Center,’ the audience can perceive and understand the nestedness of the common terns among different species and within their own species with the aid of technology. Through experiences within such auditory spaces, the artist makes us realize that all living beings on Earth do not exist independently but perceive and live with each other as caretakers who nurture and support one another.
 
In this way, Jooyoung Oh delves into how science and technology have naturally permeated our daily lives and how our perceptions have been influenced by them. At the same time, she appropriates human-centered technologies to propose their meanings and future potentials through her works. To this end, the artist creates works centered on new reflections about the agency of machines and non-human entities, providing opportunities to explore better coexistence with the non-human in an increasingly advanced technological society.

 ”Today, science seeks to dissect the mind, reducing human existence to mere physical processes. This reductionist approach risks losing what cannot be restored. Yet, within this loss, new forms of emergent recomposition may arise. My work engages with this crisis and its possibilities.”  (Jooyoung Oh, Artist’s Note) 

Jooyoung Oh majored in Visual Design at Hongik University and earned a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST, where she also completed doctoral coursework. Her solo exhibitions include 《Displaced Impossibility: A View from Out of Place》 (Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2024), 《View from out of place》 (Space Illi, Seoul, 2022), 《Let’s Know What I Don’t Know》 (PlaceMak 2, Seoul, 2020), and 《Dice Game》 (Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, 2020).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as 《2023 Busan MoCA Platform: Ingredients Mining》 (Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, 2023), 《Generation that Generates: in Action, Universe, Derivatives》 (Art Center Nabi, Seoul, 2023), 《To you: Move Toward Where You Are》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2022), 《Onlife》 (Gyeongnam Art Museum, Changwon, 2022), and 《Game and Art: Auguries of Fantasy》 (Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, 2021).
 
Jooyoung Oh was selected as a New Media and Multidisciplinary Artist for the MMCA Residency Goyang in 2024. She won the IEEE BRAIN WINNER Award at Austria’s Ars Electronica in 2019 and received the Grand Prize at ART+SCIENCE COLLIDE in 2017.

References

• 오주영, Jooyoung Oh (Artist Website)
• 백남준아트센터, 랜덤 액세스 프로젝트 작가 – 오주영 (Nam June Paik Art Center, Random Access Project Artist – Jooyoung Oh)
• 아레나, 가상공간의 가치, 2022.03.10
• 플레이스막, 내가 무엇을 모르는지 알자 (PLACKMAK, Let’s Know What I Don’t Know)
• 대전시립미술관, [게임과 예술: 환상의 전조] 아티스트 토크 I 오주영 (Daejeon Museum of Art, [Game and Art: Auguries of Fantasy] Artist Talk I Oh Jooyoung)
• 오주영 인스타그램, 황조롱이 드론 (Jooyoung Oh’s Instagram, Kestrel Drone)
• 탈영역우정국, 불가능한 조감도 (Post Territory Ujeongguk, Displaced Impossibility: A View from Out of Place)
• 부산현대미술관, [리플렛] 2023 부산모카 플랫폼: 제료 모으기 (Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, [Reflet] 2023 BusanMoCA Platform: Ingredients Mining)