The international contemporary art symposium, ‘2020 Korea Research Fellow: 10×10’, runs 1–14 October 2020
The international contemporary art symposium, ‘2020 Korea Research Fellow: 10×10’, runs 1–14 October this year. Its theme is ‘Art After Pandemic’, examining paths for culture in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. The initiative is hosted by Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and the Korean Culture and Information Service (KOCIS). The symposium is part of K-Fellowship, a KOCIS project to encourage exchange in contemporary art. Featuring a number of influential curators from around the world, the event is organised by Daehyung Lee, former artistic director of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In his essay Art, the Super Vaccine, Lee looks at how art can offer a brighter future by broadening the parameters of perception. ‘The role of art must be to connect people beyond time and borders,’ Lee argues, ‘and to remind people of how creativity enables a comprehensive understanding of differing histories and cultures.’ Find out more here.
ART, The Super Vaccine
by Daehyung Lee
‘What will you do 10 years from now for the survival of the human race?’ This was the question posed in 2008 by game-designer Jane McGonigal, director of the California-based Institute for the Future, to 8,000 participants in the MMO game Superstruct. Superstruct is a knowledge-network-based multiplayer forecasting game aimed at combating five threats to the survival of the human race – specifically, ‘Quarantine’ as a result of a respiratory disease pandemic; ‘Ravenous’ due to food shortages; a new form of global ‘Power Struggle’; ‘Outlaw Planet’, which involves new cybercrimes including fake news and hackers; and ‘Generation Exile’, which involves mass immigration as a result of environmental problems. The game implies a great deal in terms of predicting future problems and presenting a model for overcoming them together through the power of a collective intellect transcending both borders and generations. In fact, during the eight-week period over which the game was played, it was able to predict the future of energy, food, health, security and the social security network, and consequently produced more than 500 creative solutions for the survival of humanity.
Now, 12 years later, the world is witnessing the real version of the Superstruct game as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The timetable for globalisation came to a halt thanks to quarantine measures that attempted to stamp out a respiratory disease pandemic, just as the game had predicted. Thus, a reality grimmer than the dire simulation within the game (in which the number of people who could gather in public places was limited to 10, and survival was attainable by sharing information online), have become the survival conditions for this very moment.
Historically, pandemics tend to accelerate polarisation, and with it sentiments of hate such as xenophobia, social conflict and division. Our choices at this very moment are therefore important. Will we forego globalism and walk the path of isolation? Or will we build a knowledge network for the survival of the human race? This may be our last chance to walk the path of coexistence by means of global collaboration and solidarity. We must trust each other and work together to preserve our love for humanity and the cultural and humanistic values we’ve created, only with difficulty, on such a basis. Within this, the role of art and its potential to connect opposing values by transcending time and borders is more important than ever before. Although art can’t change the future, it can change human beings and their perceptions, and they, in turn, can affect what happens.
Rather than being fixated on chasing breadcrumbs in the immediate moment, human beings are animals that know the value of imagining or projecting their minds forward. This is the verified power of the humanities, including art and philosophy, which make human insight possible. On the one hand, COVID-19 is a biological disease, but on the other, we must not overlook how it is simultaneously a sociopolitical disease that can give rise to feelings of hate and division. Although artists are unable to produce a vaccine, they must fully serve a social role, through their art, by providing philosophical and artistic immunity that is capable of preventing the collapse of social communities.
Amid this common crisis of humanity, art’s ability to draw out empathy can help connect the marginalised and those with different ideas, thereby restoring social solidarity. This makes it necessary for us, following the pandemic, to gather our wisdom with respect to the birth of art and its modes of existence and experience. Toward this purpose, we must also discuss what kind of support is needed in terms of institutions and policy. Thanks to digital technology, a wave of information is connecting people with people, cities, nature, and technology, and with a human sensibility rather than that of a machine; thus, the philosophical role of art relative to the fundamental question of how to redefine these relationships has never been more important.
The new calling of art will be to ask the crucial question of what will preserve a humanity that differentiates human beings from robots – how do we resist being reduced to 0s and 1s. We must create an environment in which an artistic imagination capable of going beyond boundaries and reading between the lines can meet with a technological imagination capable of drawing out a new level of collaboration and expression. Surpassing a biological understanding of human beings, a cultural, social, historical, and ultimately comprehensive understanding of human society becomes important. The future is not a utopia that inevitably arrives. It is an extremely fluid landscape that changes constantly depending on what we are imagining. And whether it is a dystopia or a utopia depends on the dreams and actions of people living now. Humanity will only find the right path through this fog of information when the philosophical consideration of ‘how to see’ precedes that of ‘what to see’.
Ultimately, the competition will be over what kind of leadership art is able to demonstrate in a changing technological environment. Furthermore, a mutual collaboration model such as those of global solidarity and solidarity by industry will shine the limelight on a style of leadership capable of responding to the speed of these changes. Artists are now in an era of collaboration that involves connecting cutting-edge technologies such as 3D printing, virtual reality, AI, biotechnology, and blockchain. In the twenty-first century, however, technology is no longer a passive tool of artistic expression. It now functions as a framework of thought for actively understanding the world, and a neural network that makes global collaboration possible. As a result, technology has expanded its influence to the level of determining how art is created, in what form it exists, and what kind of social value art is capable of producing.
On the other hand, art determines the position whereby humans will observe the world with a tolerant attitude along with offering insights so as to prevent human thought from being encroached upon by big data and AI algorithms. Consequently, recent political, social, cultural, and environmental changes driven by technology are increasingly becoming the topics of art. Various problems facing the human race, such as the coexistence of humans and nature, humans and robots, and humans and microorganisms, designs for the disadvantaged, sustainable energy, marine ecosystems and plastics, are excellent research topics for artists.
The essence of this conversation is to understand the various values of humans and societies. We must be able to raise the fundamental question of what and how we will address, using technology, the need to generate new meaning and experiences. Works of art that move human hearts mostly involve conversations between a range of values surrounding technology and humans, rather than the simple merging of technologies. The role of art must be to connect people beyond time and borders, and to remind people of how creativity enables a comprehensive understanding of differing histories and cultures. Thus, art must constantly consider its social and public role. It must read the values of the period and weigh the role and practices of art in the midst of these values. Art that offers a tolerant worldview and that is capable of seeing the value of diversity and marginalised voices is the kind of art we look forward to in the future.
We can only survive now by further strengthening our solidarity with local communities. At the same time, we must also strengthen global solidarity online. Art can afford a brighter future for humanity to the extent that it widens the horizons of perception. We are looking at a creative methodology and a window through which to understand the world – not just another format.
