Anan Yoon Lee
Anan Yoon Lee (b.1991, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She researches, films, collects, renders, develops, and plays - Her artistic practice explores the relationship between Human-Animal-Machine critically yet joyful, brings the question on the role of the art and its responsibility in the era of technobiopolitics. Utilizing various medium, ranging from found footage from the Internet to CGI and video game, She depicts disparate scenery she witnessed through digital technology, where the stories on the infinite human desire and the finite material world are narrated. Anan Yoon Lee participated in a number of group exhibitions and film festivals, including Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin(2020). Currently, she is studying experimental film and media art at the University of Arts Berlin.
Spherical Garden
The unfolded 360 video “Spherical Garden“ invites the viewer to the gravity-free journey into digital Ark. The Spherical garden is planted with the eclectic digital flora and fauna found from various 3d archives for video game production or scientific, educational research. The library of digital ‚ARK-ive‘ is ever-expanding and impossible to complete. This eye-catching landscape is captured as 360°video, which exceeds the human field of view and showcase too many images for the human eye‘s capacity. The Spherical garden displays the various shape of the skies which surround the viewer‘s virtual eye. It becomes our private sky which is impossible to feel the scale of it. The camera rides beyond the shell of the sky, dive into the shell of a sea turtle, traverse across a torso of whale and a snout of the wolf. The animal becomes our sky. The boat rides on an endless loop, unveils the boundaries of the anthropocentric viewpoint. The gazing ball, a popular garden ornament and also functions as an obsolete 360° lense, is decorating the garden in various spots and reflecting the inhabitants on its surface. All the Animals, Humanoids, Vegetations, Stones, Lights, Skies and the ‘gazing’ viewers are exhibited in the spherical vitrine and the exhibition becomes meta-ecosphere.
Stick Bugged Speedrun
This work is about speculative synthetic creatures, which are animated and automated by the machine learning algorithm. The Installation displays a real-time simulation of the AI agents athletics. The agents are learning themselves to move like the living organism, especially like the stick insect. According to the rule of Reinforcement learning1, it will get rewarded when it moves faster and longer without failing down. The agents keep learning, heading to the invisible goal, but respawning at starting point endlessly before they reach the end of the level. Their desperate movement blurs the boundary of the inanimate and living organism. While the agent learning, the second monitor shows discrete footages of the uncanny insect, the so-called ‘walking stick’, the master of mimicry and the data- mother of the agent runners. Her biological name was Phasmatodea, meaning ‘Ghost’, referring to their resemblance to vegetation while in fact being animals. The Stick insect is an illusion between animal, plant, object and also aliveness and death. The footages reveal the moment when their mimicry - the act of disappearing fails. In 2020, parallel to the Covid-19 widespread, Stick insects were overexposed on social media as an annoying viral meme, and also they were overpopulated epidemically and decimated due to the warming climate. The complex mixture of humour, empathy and panic - this anthropocentric emotion is projected on this quasi-object. While the agents run, they ruminate on their mother insect - the entanglements of moving images, animate entities, and machinic agencies. They embody the desire of human to create the artificial creature and their ambivalent emotion in the so-called uncanny valley. The gym becomes the place of movement, the constitution of life, liveness and liveliness, the unstable boundaries of the organic and the synthetic, and the remembered histories and projected futures of anatomical and technical configurations2 of post-organism. They never stop playing/learning/thinking until their world (Program) ends without knowing what comes at the end of the level. The Speedrun is never completed. There are no winners nor losers. No agents are dead. This is the game of aliveness.
