Installation view of 《Dear Alexa》 ©Seoul Museum of Art
Seoul Museum of Art presents a special
exhibition 《Dear Alexa》 on view
through July 26, at Art Archive Seoul Museum of Art.
《Dear Alexa》 is an
exhibition that reflects on how the automation of active human
information-seeking processes by artificial intelligence is reshaping both
artistic creation and our everyday lives. Through the practices of contemporary
artists who have responded to changes in the technological media environment,
this exhibition asks how we ourselves might actively find our way through the
maze that lies between information and reality.
Spanning more than fifty years of shifting
information interfaces, from the 1980s to the 2020s, the works of these eight
contemporary artists critically examine the structure of our information-driven
reality by appropriating the constraints produced by information interfaces as
conditions of artistic creation.
Installation view of 《Dear Alexa》 ©Seoul Museum of Art
They construct non-linear maps by
hyperlinking seemingly unrelated pieces of information, reinterpret historical
monuments as information interfaces, and push further the doubts and
perplexities encountered in the process of gathering materials. At times, the
information embedded within these practices can serve as an index that
prefigures changes in the times; at others, they actually form new historical
contexts that exceed the artists’ intentions.
The exhibition is divided into Gallery 1
and Gallery 2, titled “Sent” and “Inbox,” respectively. Just as the “Sent”
folder of an email interface is a space where information previously sent can
be revisited, Gallery 1 presents works that wind their way through information
we have already experienced, prompting a reconsideration of the very conditions
through which reality is perceived.
Installation view of 《Dear Alexa》 ©Seoul Museum of Art
By contrast, the “Inbox” is a space into
which new information continually flows, accreting over earlier information.
Accordingly, Gallery 2 introduces works that collect fragments of a given era
and reconfigure them in the form of an index, while also extracting the
collected information as historical material and reinterpreting it as an
alternative archive. I
In an era where the process of perceiving
reality through information is simplified into exchanges with AI, 《Dear Alexa》 proposes that we become active
seekers of information. It is also an act of reflecting on the significance of
the art archive itself, with its mission of preserving records and building a
foundation for research.
Participating Artists: Jungki
Beak, Dongju Kang, Donghee Koo, Hwayeon Nam, Songhee Noh, Jiho Park, Sojung
Jun, Sung Neung Kyung
