Full description from the venue
Gangneung Art Museum, Gyodong, presents Unsettling Yet Endearing, an exhibition by Jinah Roh, an artist who has explored artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Since the early 2000s, Roh has combined traditional sculpture with new media technologies to create AI-based conversational robots and real-time interactive artworks. Her work focuses on the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, between the living and the nonliving, and between emotion and algorithms. The machines in her works learn and imitate human senses, language, and emotions as they attempt to communicate with visitors, yet they respond under conditions and within environments designed by humans.
The exhibition title, Unsettling Yet Endearing, stems from the ambivalent feelings with which we regard these machine beings. Machines that seem to make judgments and respond on their own provoke anxiety about a future we cannot control, yet the sight of these machines, made by humans, moving imperfectly and seeming to long for connection, evokes a curious tenderness. The title does not make clear what it is that is unsettling and endearing. It may be the machines, the humans who made them, or the relationship between the two as they come to resemble one another. Through AI-based machine beings that grow to resemble humans yet ultimately cannot be human, the exhibition seeks to explore the feelings of anxiety and tenderness that we experience as we live in an age of technology.
In a variety of ways, the works in the exhibition raise questions about artificial life, the body, memory, death, machine perception, and the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. The large-scale AI robots that answer visitors’ questions, blink, and move their mouths are encountered not as mere devices but as beings that respond and form relationships with us before our eyes. In conversing and exchanging responses with the works, visitors come to ask what it means to be human, whether it is possible to empathize even with nonhuman beings, and what coexistence should look like in an age of technology. Today, as the boundaries between humans and machines blur, we hope that Unsettling Yet Endearing will offer an opportunity to reconsider our perceptions of and attitudes toward nonhuman beings.