黑料不打烊

Centering the intimate relationships between humans and technology鈥攑articularly the tensions between desire and control鈥�Geumhyung Jeong鈥檚 Toys, Selected challenges fundamental principles of animacy and the limits of human recognition. The artist鈥檚 uncanny, handmade toys are composed of mannequin heads and arms, metal rods, batteries, and cables, while exposed wires form intricate mecha-cardiovascular systems. For Jeong, her DIY robotics are less a technical endeavor than a highly relational, animistic mode of creation. In both producing and performing, Jeong physically interacts with the robots, touching them in an equalizing, sensual, even fetishistic way鈥攕uggesting an erotics of technology.

Though Jeong鈥檚 robots remain motionless, indicative of sleep or pause, their expressive postures signal their latent potential for movement. Video documentation of Jeong assembling and testing the machines accompany the installation, focusing the viewer鈥檚 attention on the subtle movements of both the artist and her machines. The video works elaborate on the lives of the robots, showcasing them in motion as they fall, break, and need to be repeatedly repaired. Jeong deliberately programs the robots to require an almost obsessive level of care and attention. Rather than striving for fluid movement or convincing human mimicry, Jeong鈥檚 practice finds ideological productivity in the physical limitations and imperfections of the machine, bridging them closer to humanity. When a mechanical apparatus appears to need human assistance, what emotions are extended and how do they change? Do machines truly need our care and help, or is it we who ultimately need them?

Illuminated by clinical overhead lighting, the tabletop stations take on the appearance of an operating room with sterile surgical implements and prosthetics on standby. In this way, the exhibition further complicates the idea of the operator or the remote control. With Jeong as both an overseeing technician and orchestrator of an intimate machinist choreography, it is ambiguous who is in control of whom, and who cares for whom in the increasingly entangled relationship between human and machine. Questioning the core animating principles and building blocks of life, intelligence, somatic and emotional experience, Jeong鈥檚 works beckon us to consider our own physical and emotional existence as part of a larger technological choreography.