Exhibitions
《Nothing Makes Itself》, 2021.09.17 - 2021.12.12, ARKO Art Center
September 10, 2021
ARKO Art Center

Poster
image of 《Nothing Makes Itself》 © ARKO Art Center
ARKO
Art Center will host art festival, 《Nothing Makes Itself》, supported by Art & Tech
Program of ARKO (Arts Council Korea). The exhibition explores the method of
transversality that redefines the relationship between humans, technology and
environment as symbiotic and malleable.
The festival presents thirty-five
artists (teams) in visual and multidisciplinary arts and about fifty works
based on theories of science and technology or incorporating various
technologies—including VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), 3D
Printing, robotics, data visualization, sound installation, moving image, and
the web.
The
idea traversing 《Nothing Makes Itself》 is “trans-corporeality”, which is derived from American literary
scholar and ecocultural theorist Stacy Alaimo, serving as a mechanism that
breaks away from human-imposed dichotomies and suggests interconnection and
interaction between the human and non-human bodies.
Also, it aims to resist
separating itself from the mechanism of fluid interconnections between humans
and nature and simply observing the current situation from a particular field
or point of view. The festival looks beyond the symbolic images hanging over
modern society and pays attention to each individual's life and burden of
reality. It does so while disrupting the cognitive frame of human-nature
division to acknowledge diverse principles, which have been overlooked in human
history.

Installation
view of 《Nothing Makes Itself》 © ARKO Art Center
The
festival highlights data-based visual projects that demonstrate how closely
humans and the environment are related. Some of the works visualize the links
between the invisible environmental elements and humans through their
convergence with bioscience or imagine interpenetrations of materials in
sci-fiesque images.
Other works envisage humans in a hypothetical, future
environment driven by climate change or look into the voices of diverse lives
and communities behind the weight that environmental issues carry and their
symbolic images as one goes through the pandemic era.
The
process will conceptualize the foundation for how heterogeneous elements are
interlaced and expand their points of contact and how multiple values coexist
in another time that will arrive, built with accumulated continuities of the
present.