Roh,Jin ah

Media Raiders No. 2: Envious Cyborgs

- By Lee, Chae young


“Envious Cyborgs” by Jinah Roh, the second nominee of Media Raiders, an annual competition for rising artists by Ilju arthouse, digs out and assays the traditional relationship among art, technology and human being.
Having projected the inquiries about the ontology of human being who lives the time of the technology-based culture, Jinah Roh tries to find hints to the answers in the existence of the cyborg which has an artificial but more extensive body on the basis of artificial intelligence. The cyborg captured in her imagination is not product imagined and illustrated as a foretoken of the future society, but a symbol of human being who is being mechanized into the cyborg; Let’s look around us; a cellular phone, a digital camera, an mp3 player, an electronic dictionary and calculator, a refrigerator, a quick oven, a car and so on; the electronic mechanism has been extended deeply into the every space of life and has dismantled and replaced the organs of the human body. Ms Roh pays attention to draw up the dramatic but disturbing contrast between the human body metamorphosed into the mechanism and the cyborg reproducing the organic human body. In her exhibition, machines (works of art) and human beings (spectator) come to be fallen into cyborgs together which envy each other.
You type, I’ll talk, an installation which uses the mechanism of cyborg and abstracts characteristics of her exhibition, presents a human size of a woman cyborg in which the face of the artist is cast. Consisted of exact instruments, plastic silicone and connecting lines which symbolize the silver cord so as to move the mouth and the eye human-like, it can communicate with spectators; It recognizes and responds to the questions raised by spectators who type the keyboard in front of it. What makes the situation more ironical is that spectators are permitted only to use the hands to operate the machine extending his/her ideas, but the cyborg in the main stage uses its organs of its own will ? programmed practices. So, the artistic space can be easily turned into a paradoxical space where the cyborgs try to imitate human beings and vice versa; we find ourselves entrusting the machine with our body, heart and brain.
By the contrast of the analog and the digital, Are you still playing the piano? draws a slice of digital civilization which holds way of the world with violence. The spectator is encouraged to play the installed hologram piano at the projected music with a mouse. But if someone touches any keys with a hand by chance or by curiosity, the system gives a written warning of “Error” with a sneering sound. In this staged situation, the spectator cannot help but give up the analog, a good-for-nothing, and depend upon the digital. But the digital provides accessible space only within its own database, so that it recognizes and treats simply as a transparent error what goes beyond its limitation. Especially human wills inadequate to its law cannot escape being ruined.
The artist said, “the user utilizing interactive media feels himself, or herself very free, but he, or she is confined in the space structured and conceived only for the programming.” We can see in her series of interactive artworks the satirized and cyborg-ed human being who leads an active life without any doubts in the prescribed space by the system and cherishes the illusion of being a master of the system. But this critical viewpoint is not resulted in a simple criticism on the technology-based civilization; Ms Roh heads for the argument by Donna Haraway, a theorist on feminism, who asserted to adopt and combine technology in order to increase the social change and collapse the traditional dichotomy between man and nature, man and machinery, and the traditional discriminations against sex, race, age and class. So the satire drawn by Ms Roh is projected against the old customs which have been buried in the dichotomy, so haven’t raised the ontological question about man and its extension. Also it is a song of precaution for the artist not to be fallen into the simple juxtaposition of art and technology or the improvisational fun caused by interaction biased toward visual effect and technological talent.

Roh, Jin ah

Ph.D Candidate of School of Media, Art&Technology, Sogang Univ.
2002 M.F.A The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art&Technology Department
1998 B.F.A. College of Fine Arts, Seoul National Univ. Seoul. South Korea

Solo Exhibition:   ‘Geppetto’s Dream’, Nanji Galley, Seoul, Korea in 2010
Group Exhibitions:
<The New Epicenter :chapter 2 Post-Human at Wumin Art Center>, <Picasso &Einstein 3.0 at Seoul Art Center>,< ‘I- Robot II’ at Chosun Museum>,<'Digifesta 2010 Media Art Festival' at Gwangju Biennale Hall>,< ‘The First Decade of 21th Century’ at Gyeonghuigung Annex building of the Seoul Museum of Art>,< 'NO...' , at Gwangju Museum of Art>,< ‘I- Robot’ at  Soma Museum of Art> ,<'Hybrid Trend Contemporary Art Exhibition', at Hangaram Art Museum Seoul>,<Merz's Room' Media_City Seoul  at Seoul Art Museum>,< Selected Emerging Artists SeMA at Seoul Art Museum>