Ayoung Kim joins us to present a selection of her speculative fiction–inspired shorts, including the US premiere of Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), for which she was the first Korean artist to receive the Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica. While Kim’s practice draws on legacies of cyberfeminism and video game design, her videos, installations, and performances are equally rooted in the real. Building on fieldwork and historical research, the artist draws connections between flows of minerals, data, and migrants across borders, exploring the confluence of global resources, nationhood, and social behaviors. Often, Kim’s work is informed by specific regional contexts—from the 18th-century British occupation of Port Hamilton, off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula, to the influx of Yemeni refugees to Jeju Island in 2018—a strategy that also tacitly counters ahistorical visual tropes common in cyberpunk or science-fiction portrayals of East Asia.

From these points of departure, Kim crafts characters and alternative realities. Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix delves into animistic beliefs about rock matter in Mongolia to introduce Petra Genetrix, a fictional, genderless cluster of minerals and digital material that also appears as the protagonist of Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot, in which it navigates Korean asylum bureaucracy after being displaced from its home during the excavation of a sacred site. Kim’s newest film follows a character whose movements are governed by a different kind of system: a top-rated gig worker whose algorithmically determined delivery routes unleash an increasingly surreal version of Seoul. Combining computer-generated imagery with live action, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere is a labyrinthine journey in which performance metrics jostle with self-discovery in a thrilling meditation on digital labor.

The screening is followed by a conversation with the artist, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.

Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot. 2019. South Korea. In English, Korean, Arabic; English subtitles. 23 min.
Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix. 2019–21. South Korea. In Mongolian; English subtitles. 7 min.
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere. 2022. South Korea. In Korean; English subtitles. 25 min.