14 Nov 2025
The Algorithmic Sublime: Ayoung Kim’s Cosmologies of Labor and Simulation
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
“I wanted to challenge the idea that my work exists purely in the virtual realm by highlighting the invisible labor underpinning digital creation. Motion capture, which sustains these virtual portals, is not just an algorithmic or technical process—it is also a deeply physical one, requiring endurance, sensitivity, and a willingness to be overwritten by others. If performance is often imagined as a mask, I wanted to reframe it as a mirrored screen—one that complicates familiar debates on representation by exposing their entanglement within digital infrastructures.”
It has been a landmark year for Ayoung Kim, an artist whose immersive worlds fuse generative AI, game engines, motion capture, VR, and sound design into intricate speculative architectures. With recent exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, MoMA PS1, and commissions for M+ Hong Kong and the Powerhouse Museum, as well as receiving the 2025 LG Guggenheim Award, Kim has emerged as one of the defining voices of post-digital art. Her practice exemplifies the aesthetics of simulation and hybridity, where live action collides with algorithmic and real-time systems to probe the politics of labor, speed, and technological mediation. In her acclaimed Delivery Dancer series, the artist transforms gig-economy couriers into avatars of an accelerated urban unconscious, navigating the entangled infrastructures of mobility and capital. Moving beyond urban narratives, Kim’s recent projects expand into questions of extraction and planetary materiality, linking virtuality with the geopolitics of resources. From mineral mythologies in Petrogenesis to algorithmic choreography in Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, Kim constructs parallel cosmologies in which the boundaries between the human, the machinic, and the geological dissolve into an uncanny poetics of contemporary life.
Alexander Burenkov: In your exhibitions that combine screen-based and sculptural elements—like the one at Hamburger Bahnhof this spring, which I was lucky to see—how do you decide what remains virtual and what becomes an object or installation? What are you trying to preserve or transform in the viewer’s experience by changing media? You also create sculptures from mineral particles, like Petrogenetrics, or non-human entities, like Surisol, the AI that administers an underwater lab. What kind of tension exists between your sculptures, videos, and the logic of scenography?
Ayoung Kim: Although I work with video, VR, and other time-based media like performance, I consider myself a contemporary artist rather than a “digital artist.” I belong to a generation that isn’t digitally native—I studied photography, visual communication design, and fine art long ago. I have vivid memories of developing film by hand, going through all the chemical processes. That tangible, material experience still strongly influences my work. I enjoy experimenting with exhibition spaces and scenography—engaging with the architecture of the building and the sensory ways in which people navigate it.
In this sense, I think the scenography at Hamburger Bahnhof worked very well. It was fascinating to position the artworks—mannequins, hanging sculptures resembling orbits, helmets, or mobile phones—within mirrored walls and metal shelving structures, which became key scenographic elements. The audience might feel as though they’ve entered a fictional world that has unfolded from the videos themselves, surrounding them as a physical environment. With these multiplicity effects, visitors could encounter their own reflections again and again, which reinforced the conceptual core of the video beautifully.
AB: In your most recent work, AI-Mother Plot 1991 (2025)—which combines CGI, generative AI, and historical documents and artifacts such as footprints, floor plans, and photographs—where do you draw the line between representation and appropriation? The video is accompanied by hanging sculptures resembling pictograms—what’s the idea behind them?
AK: This work was conceived as a spatial installation centered on a single-channel video, though I’m still developing the project and plan to continue filming next year. The installation includes floor plans and flickering light bulbs synchronized with the video’s procedural logic. The symbols on the hanging elements are derived from military maps—not those directly used in the Gulf War, but adapted from found historical sources. Some of these pictorial icons refer to explosives or tear gas; others represent substances used in military operations.
I was drawn to these abstract signs—detached from their semantic meaning—which appear both as 3D simulations in the video and as physical sculptures. Their geometric quality makes them visually approachable, but once viewers start to recognize what they signify, the deeper meaning emerges. Whenever I use digital media, I’m acutely aware of the physical labor that underpins it. Lately, I’ve been working with motion capture, collaborating with dancers and choreographers, and we’ve realized just how crucial this invisible labor truly is.
AB: Motion capture and embodied performance recur in your films. How do you conceive the relationship between the human performer and algorithmic systems within your choreography? You’ve also staged live performances, such as Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters Plot (2019). Do you plan to continue this performative trajectory in your practice?
AK: At the moment, my team and I are developing a new performance titled Body^n for the Performa Biennial in New York, which will premiere this November. It will be my first motion-capture-based performance, and I wanted to use it to explore precisely this theme—the idea of the doppelgänger and the invisible labor of bodies as they are captured, replicated, and rendered strange through technologies like motion capture and virtual reality. I’m drawn to the notion of the “assembled body”—a body multiplied, mediated, and estranged from its origin. The piece will unfold in a fictional environment where the physical body encounters its virtual counterpart in a state of “altered presence,” a slippage between embodiment and representation. Within this digital space, the human form flickers, refracted across screens, interfaces, and stand-ins.
The origins of this dynamic can be traced back to Hollywood’s mid-century musicals, which often relied on dancers who performed in place of stars before filming. Dance historian Anthea Kraut, in Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies (2025), argues that “the body,” as mediated through film and culture, has always been constructed through a chain of reproductions, substitutions, and displacements. Contemporary technologies—from smartphones and sensors to wearables—extend this lineage, showing how bodies in motion continue to be entangled in asymmetrical systems of visibility and value. I wanted to revisit this economy of substitution in the digital sphere, revealing how physical risk, affective labor, and historical displacement are embedded in the very interfaces that duplicate, divide, and reassemble the body.
For this work, I invited two female performers from South Korea, collaborating with a choreographer. They will enact avatars in LED suits, engaged in intense combat sequences and emotionally charged gestures. Their motion data will not only animate human avatars but also non-human digital props—bicycles, ladders, and other speculative forms. These streams of movement will be integrated into virtual worlds developed by my team over several years: a dense urban center, a desert plain, and the interior of a fulfillment warehouse. As the performers move through both the physical and digital environments—duplicated, displaced, and refracted through layers of code—the line between virtuality and reality blurs into a choreography of conjecture, estrangement, and uncanny recognition.
AB: For both the movement vocabulary and scenography, you draw on the aesthetics of video games, martial arts, and Girls’ Love—a comic genre focused on romantic relationships between women—to investigate the recursive loop of doubling and substitution in contemporary image-making. While Girls’ Love often explores intimacy and emotional ties between women, you seem to use it not to replicate its narratives but to harness its sensibility as a framework for imagining alternative relations and worlds. Would it be fair to say that Girls’ Love functions less as a fixed genre reference and more as a cultural resource resonating with your ongoing interest in repetition, multiplicity, and speculative storytelling?
AK: Absolutely. I wanted to challenge the idea that my work exists purely in the virtual realm by highlighting the invisible labor underpinning digital creation. Motion capture, which sustains these virtual portals, is not just an algorithmic or technical process—it is also a deeply physical one, requiring endurance, sensitivity, and a willingness to be overwritten by others. If performance is often imagined as a mask, I wanted to reframe it as a mirrored screen—one that complicates familiar debates on representation by exposing their entanglement within digital infrastructures. And, perhaps most importantly, to gently crack open the virtual: revealing the affective, ethical, and material labor that underlies its shimmering illusion.
AB: Collaboration with programmers, mocap performers, and sound designers seems essential to your practice. How do you orchestrate interdisciplinary teams, and how do these working relationships shape the political and aesthetic outcomes of your work?
AK: Actually, I learn a lot through collaboration. More than twenty years ago, when I worked as a motion designer, I was quite advanced in technology, especially in internet-based motion graphics for MTV and similar projects. But eventually, I shifted toward becoming an artist because I was drawn to a more autonomous and reflective working process. My interest in philosophy and other forms of art—like singing and collaborating with composers—has always motivated me to treat each project as an opportunity to challenge myself and learn something new. I find it exciting to push my own limits. In terms of working with dancers, I’ve only collaborated once with a pole-dance company in Paris in 2016, in a project with the Opéra National de Paris and Palais de Tokyo.
AB: The Delivery Dancer narratives focus on platform labor and efficiency algorithms. Have you collaborated with or consulted people who actually work in gig economies? If so, how did their experiences reshape the project?
AK: The entire piece was developed during the pandemic, between 2021 and 2022, when I released the video. At that time, I was living in a very small studio, and since I didn’t cook much, I relied on food delivery apps almost every day. To minimize contact during lockdown, the couriers would leave the boxes by the door and disappear. One day, I became curious about who these people were—the ones meeting such essential needs during that period. I began searching for female delivery riders. In the video, you can see me sitting on the back seat of a motorbike with one of them, who generously taught me about her job—how to use the app as a driver, how to optimize movement for efficiency, even some tricks to earn a bit more. It was such an interesting and liberating experience after being confined in my studio for so long. The script for the video is fictional, but I infused it with real conversations and allowed those realities to shape the fictional conditions.
AB: This exploration of self-optimization feels especially relevant in the context of South Korea’s high-speed economic development.
AK: Oh, yes. Since the 1980s, South Korea has embraced a “winner-takes-all” mentality—almost like a real-life Hunger Games. This mindset is particularly visible in the K-pop system, where velocity and productivity dominate. Speed and efficiency have become the core values of everyday life.
AB: You describe the Delivery Dancer works as “pandemic fiction.” In your own words, what does that phrase mean—formally and conceptually—within these pieces? Does “pandemic fiction” refer primarily to temporality (works produced during or after COVID), to narrative content (stories about pandemic-era labor and mobility), or to an aesthetic mode (a kind of speculative realism born from pandemic conditions)? Is “pandemic fiction” a strategy to imagine alternate social orders that might emerge from crisis, or is it more concerned with tracing continuities—how systems solidified—during the pandemic?
AK: I started using this term even though there are no literal pandemic references in the work. I felt I needed to label the project somehow, otherwise people wouldn’t understand the context behind it. The piece originated from my experience of isolation—the feeling of the whole world suspended, the sudden visibility of hidden infrastructures. All these discrete elements came together to create the conditions for fiction in my mind. Only about 25 percent of Delivery Dancer’s Sphere is built in a 3D game engine; the rest was shot on location with live actors. That was important because I had never made a fiction film with live action before.
My goal was to focus on a fragile human figure—someone trying desperately to become faster but unable to escape herself, trapped in time. That mirrors what I personally experienced during the pandemic. Our entire infrastructure is rooted in flesh, in bodies that are weak and vulnerable to something as small as a virus. We’re still feeling the aftereffects of that period, and I believe more cultural works will continue to emerge from it—whether in TV, drama, or literature. It’s not a closed chapter.
AB: Your works often respond to specific regional contexts—from the 18th-century British occupation of Port Hamilton, off the southern coast of Korea, to the arrival of Yemeni refugees on Jeju Island in 2018—a strategy that also challenges the ahistorical visual tropes often found in cyberpunk and sci-fi depictions of East Asia. Which specific Korean digital platforms or subcultures have influenced you the most?
AK: I would say webtoon platforms—these episodic digital comics originally designed for smartphones but now forming a massive cultural ecosystem. Until about three years ago, I was a devoted reader, logging on and off every day across two or three platforms. The storytelling format and visual logic of webtoons—fragmented, rhythmic, emotionally charged—have deeply influenced how I structure my narratives and think about digital spectatorship.
AB: In your interviews, you often emphasize that we shouldn’t be either techno-optimistic or techno-pessimistic, but rather develop a critical understanding of technologies. What’s your personal view on the future of AI and how it might transform artistic production and art’s role in society?
AK: Last year, while working on a project for the Asian Culture Center, I thought of myself as an early adopter of new technologies. But now I no longer feel that way—things have been evolving so quickly that the shift over the past year has been radical. Almost every month we see the emergence of new AI models and applications. I haven’t had the chance to try Sora 2 yet, but I recently met someone from the OpenAI team who told me they’re about to open their first overseas office in Seoul, which is very exciting! Sora 2 has been trained on actual video data, so their ambitions are clearly very high.
The AI models I currently use belong to what we might call the domain of “weak AI.” They don’t possess intention or autonomy in decision-making. Still, they are rapidly reshaping our image-making environment and its entire ecosystem. I believe, however, that decision-making and evaluation remain human responsibilities—and that’s crucial for creating meaning and value. AI is becoming an increasingly collaborative tool, especially as we learn to use it more consciously.
From my experience last year, many people imagine that AI will grant humans more freedom and leisure, but in reality, the more advanced the technology becomes, the more human labor it requires. We must not overlook all the background processes hidden in the so-called “black box,” including ghost work and ghost slavery—like the invisible labor behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We should also remember that AI’s mechanical calculations operate far faster than human speed, generating enormous volumes of content that still need to be edited, directed, and shaped with intention. For me, that process was painstakingly time-consuming. Like any system of art-making, AI may not entirely transform human life or the essence of art itself, but it will certainly alter some of its properties and characteristics—just as the invention of photography once did.
AB: You often use game engines and interactive architectures that operate in “real time,” like simulations. How does this real-time quality affect authorship, spectatorship, and the sense of “liveness” in your narratives?
AK: I still use Unity in most cases, and only occasionally Unreal Engine, which many artists now prefer for its cinematic precision. Before I began working with game engines, my team used programs like Cinema 4D or Autodesk 3ds Max, which required long rendering times. We couldn’t even check whether the colors, textures, or lighting were right until we had waited several days. Game engines completely changed that—they allow immediate feedback and real-time simulation.
Beyond that, they enable us to reuse existing 3D worlds and model assets as playgrounds for potential games, VR experiences, or other interactive formats. This really opened up transmedia storytelling for me, something I’m deeply interested in. When you apply these tools to different narrative structures—whether a game, a VR environment, or a video—the story begins to shift depending on the nature of the medium itself. It’s fascinating to observe how the specific features of each technology can redirect the narrative in unexpected ways.
AB: I saw a video of your compact studio, where you both live and work, surrounded by more than twenty LED screens. It’s a dense environment of digital and analog materials: towering stacks of books feeding your hunger for new narratives, and rows of screens where imagined worlds come to life. As an avid reader, could you share your recent literary inspirations?
AK: Recently, I’ve been reading The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh—his only sci-fi novel, which weaves together the story of malaria, parasitism, and indigenous knowledge in India. I also read In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics by Sarah Sharma, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina. I’m very interested in chronopolitics, and Sharma challenges the widespread belief that modern life is simply defined by acceleration. Drawing on ethnographic research with taxi drivers, frequent flyers, yoga instructors, and advocates of the slow-food and slow-living movements, she explores how social positions and forms of labor shape people’s temporal experiences. Her concept of power-chronography shows how time itself is entangled with systems of power, revealing that both speed and slowness operate as mechanisms of biopolitical control within capitalism. It’s a fascinating, nuanced analysis of how time becomes a site of inequality, management, and resistance in everyday life.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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04 Nov 2025
From Viral Texts to Sculptural Hymns: A Conversation with David Douard
By Alexander Burenkov
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