Artists

Veneta Androva
Raphaël Bastide
Bruno Gola
Kathrin Hunze
Yehwan Song
Shinji Toya

Yehwan Song
Body in Digital Parasitism

Video and 3D model
Download 3D model

Art Swap with Shinji Toya

When Shinji Toya’s laptop broke some time ago, he took photos and made shots of his screen to use as evidence for a claim. Because the cameras on our mobile phones are constantly available, we have become used to documenting everything with them, and only rarely delete these photos. So, Toya did not donate files from his previous work to Song for the exhibition, but images that are typical of this everyday ‘junk’ data instead.

Song was inspired by the photos of Toya’s broken keyboard and the video of his glitching screen to think about the points of contact between human bodies and machines. In Body in Digital Parasitism, she explores an alternative interface to the smooth standardized ones of our current devices that connect ever more closely to our bodies, in order to find a different kind of access to computers. With her nail extension design, Song takes this idea to the extreme. She invites us to reflect on our parasitic relationship with machines and our limits, triggering speculation about how the two might fuse.

Yehwan Song is a web artist who lives in New York. Her work specializes in creating non-user-centric, unconventional, and diverse independent internet spaces. In doing so, she explores the discomfort and insecurity experienced by marginalized users, which is often hidden beneath the facade of technological utopianism, marked by excessive comfort, speed, and ease of use.