Event Blog 1: Youjin Chung Solo Exhibition - "Dead Wood"

For my first event, I decided to attend the art exhibition put on by DESMA graduate student Youjin Chung. The exhibit was entitled "Dead Wood", and featured two unique works which inspired many different interpretations amongst the exhibition's attendees. During the exhibition, I had the opportunity to speak with Youjin about her inspiration for creating the works.

Youjin in the middle, along with fellow exhibit attendee Melissa Chen

The first piece of the exhibit was a kinetic art sculpture incorporating numerous servo motors mounted on what appears to be a 3D printed frame.

I was particularly intrigued by what appeared to be 3D printed representations of human body parts attached to the blades of the servo motors. The motors appeared to be spinning in a seemingly random and chaotic fashion. Admittedly, I was initially at a loss to comprehend the meaning of the work. However, I was able to gain some insight into its creation after talking with Youjin. According to her, the entire exhibition focuses on the theme of humans vs robots. As the capabilities of artificial intelligence mature, robots have become increasingly more and more human-like. Youjin points out that this has led to a new kind of thinking in which robots have become anthropomorphized, harboring what is essentially jealousy amongst humans. For instance, she brought up the example of how humans sometimes consider it "murder" when robots are "destroyed". Despite the fact that these robots are made out of lifeless, inorganic materials, humans have a tendency to attribute human behaviors and actions to them.

A still frame of the kinetic sculpture

Knowing this, I was finally able to formulate my own interpretation of the kinetic sculpture. In this interpretation, the sculpture represents one of the robots as described by Youjin, and the attached 3D printed body parts are a depiction of its human-like qualities. The mechanization of this robot via the spinning servo motors gives the piece an almost eerie-like quality, combining the endless random motion of the body parts along with the sounds the motors make as they run. I believe that the unsettling feeling that the piece stimulates is, in a way, similar to the emotional attachment Youjin describes that humans have with robots.

The second piece in the exhibit was presented in the form of an interactive game, which exhibit attendees were able to play using a game controller suspended by guy wires.

Me at the controls for the second exhibit, presented in the form of an interactive video game

In the game world, the character (whose hands appear at the bottom of the field of view) traverses through a desolate world sparsely populated with strange, animated objects. The player has the ability to walk up to these strange objects and destroy them. Upon doing so, the character's hands change color. Additionally, as the player destroys more and more objects, the screen experiences visual glitches with increasing frequency. Once the player reaches 10 destroyed objects, the screen experiences its worst visual glitch, and the entire landscape disappears. The player then sees a single infant head float onscreen, moving upwards until it disappears out of view. The screen then goes dark and is replaced with a single quote, stating the following:

"The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness."

Discussing the game with Youjin, it was clear that this game also followed a similar inspiration to the kinetic art sculpture from before. Representing the inorganic yet lifelike objects, the player's desire to destroy these objects in the game closely mirrors the jealousy that Youjin describes of humans. In the game, the inorganic objects are represented as solid-colored masses, with appendages that move in various ways. The solid-colored appearance represents the inorganic nature of the object, while the moving parts suggest its lifelike qualities. A final point that Youjin made was that while it was possible to destroy these objects in the game, the infant head that floats through as the game ends cannot be destroyed, as it is textured and modeled to look much more human-like than the inorganic masses in the rest of the game.

In the last few minutes of hearing Youjin speak, she shared the story of her own background. She explained that she had actually started out as an electrical engineering major before moving into computer science and then art. The video game presented at the exhibit was developed with the Unity game engine, utilizing scripting techniques that Youjin had picked up as a part of her computer science background. Additionally, the kinetic art sculpture's servo motors were controlled using an Arduino microcontroller, a device that I myself have played with for many years. It was refreshing to see how she was able to take advantage of her technical background in order to find new avenues for artistic expression, and this exhibit perfectly captured that.

Overall, I saw Youjin's exhibition as a social commentary designed to have attendees reflect on the increasingly prominent role of robotics in our society. In the class's Week 3 topic on Robotics + Art, we explored how the process of industrialization has led to an increasingly tenuous relationship between society's blue-collar workers and the robots/machines that are replacing, or, in anthropomorphic terms, "taking over" these job roles. Without question, these machines provide our society with an abundance of usefulness, but as we begin to share our world more and more with these robotic creations, we must adapt to live in harmony with their presence.