Venue: Gwangju Cultural Foundation

Human × Machine Systems

“In this century Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race.’ Art as radar acts as ‘an early alarm system,’ as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression.” This passage was written by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist who shared trenchant insights and intuitions on modern society and media, in the introduction to his 1964 book ‹Understanding Media›. McLuhan’s quote seems to differ from the general perspective on art. To him, art was meaningful less for revealing emotional and feeling than for allowing us to see clues toward the future in the artist’s activities.

Today we stand in a maelstrom of new transformation. The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution has inspired hopes that information and communications and technology may bring innovative changes to our society – changes great enough to merit the “revolution” label. Experts in various fields are making predictions and drawing blueprints for the future at hand. As an art hub selected in 2017 as a UNESCO Creative City for media art, Gwangju is using media art to live out the role McLuhan described as an “antenna of the race.” It is transforming into a “futuristic” city, posing questions about what future we image and how we are responding to that future today. The technologies that are guiding the Fourth Industrial Revolution include artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, unmanned transportation (aircraft and automobiles), 3D printing, and nanotech. All have the potential benefit of allowing machinery and technology to take the place of basic human labor – yet it is also an advantage we view with trepidation, as it means humans might lose their jobs. The relationship between human and machine is not simple; it manifests in various complex forms. Some of us dream of a “post-labor era” and a future of efficiency, where basic labor is no longer needed. Some are concerned about what is left of the human domain – things only humans are capable of – when so much of our life is substituted by machinery.

So what of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as it is seen by artists, the “new prophets”? How do they perceive the relationship between technology and humanity? To explore this question, the 2017 Gwangju Media Art Festival – a three-day event organized by the Gwangju Human × Machine Systems - Yonghee Sung Artistic Director Cultural Foundation that begins this December 1 – is using exhibitions and a UNESCO Creative City policy forum to show attempts at placing 4IR’s technological devices at the center of art. Unlike typical esthetic objects, these technological objects – including AI, robots, 3D printers, VR, and drones – were not developed for the sake of art. We can detect the dynamic changes happening in society through transformations in art: the fact that this technology has been brought into the gallery and used to initiate a new way of thinking. What does it propose for us, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its state-of-the-art machinery and superhuman technology? Masahiro Miro (1927–2005), a Japanese robot scientist who sought the buddha nature in machinery, contrasted factory automation with the piano as a piece of machinery. Whereas factory automation might take away the human desire to work and reduce us to laziness, he said, the piano demands training from human beings, ultimately giving us a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment and allowing us to enjoy the arts. Our focus, then, was on the relationship, the mutual feedback between people and machines. In 4IR as with modern art, the role machinery plays as a reflection of human will in changing human consciousness, domains, and lives is as important as the use of high technology per se. Our feelings toward machines are influenced by the machines and reflected back in technology. Just as there is no nature left on Earth without a human presence, so it is impossible to imagine society or art without technology. New technologies demand from humans not simply changes in our use and manipulation of them, but also in our attitudes toward them.

The 2017 Gwangju Media Art Festival focuses on repurposing the technological objects of 4ID for artistic ends to interrogate the relationship and feedback between them and human beings, working to reveal the transformations in a complex future paradigm. As the venue for and an agent in this questioning, Gwangju hopes to play the role of a key city guiding forth another form of revolution. (Yonghee Sung Artistic Director)

 

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