Hybrid Collaborations: Between Art and Tech
Bringing together thinkers from the UAE and Korea as part of the Abu Dhabi Art 2023 talks programme, discussing histories of innovation between art and technology.
Panel discussion In partnership with Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Abu Dhabi Art Powered by GS Energy
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The Theatre, Manarat Al Saadiyat - Abu Dhabi
Location
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23-November-2023
Date
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4:30 pm
Time
This conversation between UAE and South Korea-based practitioners from art, academia, and industry traced a 30+ year arc of boundary-breaking collaboration between art and tech. Their insights moved from the practice of Nam June Paik and pioneering art and tech instigators MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) and Hyundai Motor Company to cutting-edge work integrating AI and probing human-machine creativity. The panellists hold diverse global perspectives and reflected on approaches that link innovators across eras, genres and geographies. The conversation engaged provocative questions of increasingly hybrid creativity and collaboration. How might we reconsider definitions of the artist, curator, and human in relation to emerging technologies? What new symbioses are possible in decades to come?
Panelists
DOOEUN CHOI
ART DIRECTOR, HYUNDAI MOTOR
DooEun Choi is currently serving as the art director of Hyundai Motor. Hyundai Motor has deepened its partnerships with global museums and cultural organisations, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Hyundai Motor’s own art initiatives include Artlab Editorial, a digital platform dedicated to art writing by international voices, and open call programmes such as the VH AWARD, and the Hyundai Blue Prize. Since the year 2000, Choi has curated a range of international exhibitions centred around the intersection of art and technology in various cities across Asia, Europe, and America, as well as in virtual spaces. Choi treats the space as a laboratory for experimenting with the types of experience and aesthetics that can emerge from combining scientific knowledge, artistic practices, and historical narratives. Choi’s selected projects include the Pioneer Tower Iconic Public Art Project, the BIAN International Digital Art Biennial, Why Future Still Needs Us: AI and Humanity, Mediacity Seoul 2012 Biennale, and ZERO1 Biennial 2012
SOOJIN PARK
SENIOR CURATOR, MMCA, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Soojin Park is currently a Senior Curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art(MMCA) in Seoul, Korea. In her role, Park is entrusted with the oversight of exhibitions and programs at MMCA Seoul. Her curatorial career began in the year 2000, encompassing Korean modern art at MMCA Deoksugung and Korean contemporary art at MMCA Gwacheon. In 2007-08, she contributed her expertise as a Research Curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. Park has curated numerous exhibitions and published catalogues dedicated to Korean modern and contemporary art. One of her notable achievements is the co-authorship of “Korean Art 1900-2020”(2022), a publication by MMCA. Major exhibitions she has curated at MMCA include “Artists in Their Times: Korean Modern and Contemporary Art”(2020-2022), “Quac Insik”(2019), “The Sounds of Things: The Materiality in Contemporary Korean Art since the 1970s”(2015), “Korea Artist Prize 2014”(2014), “A Story of 23 Artists: Artist of the Year 1995-2010”(2011), “Korean Diaspora Artists in Asia”(2009), and many more.
PROF GUS XIA
ASSISANT PROFESSOR OF MACHINE LEARNING, MOHAMED BIN ZAYED UNIVERSITY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Dr Gus Xia is an assistant professor in Machine Learning at MBZUAI, and he is also a professional musician. Xia’s research is very interdisciplinary. He is broadly interested in the design of interactive intelligent systems to extend human musical creation and expression. This research lies in the intersection of machine learning, HCI, robotics, and computer music. Some representative works include interactive composition via style transfer, human-computer interactive performances, autonomous dancing robots, large-scale content-based music retrieval, haptic guidance for flute tutoring, and bio-music computing using slime mold. He held the first Music AI concert last year in Dubai.
SOOYON LEE
SENIOR CURATOR, MMCA, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Lee received BA in Linguistics and MA in Art History from Seoul National University and is currently in the PhD programme at Cornell University. Her research interests intend to illuminate the employed visual languages of Asian artists derived from digital and electronic media engaging with socioeconomic transformations in the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, the research explores the condition of the society that artists reside in and the rise of new media that facilitates the generation of visual langues in the globalised context of art world networks. Since 2008, she has been working on various projects inside and outside of the museum, organising media exhibition Paik Nam June Effect (2022, MMCA), Project Hashtag (2021, MMCA), publishing books such as Pavilion, Fill the Feelings in the City (2015). She is currently organising a Korea Artist Prize 2023, a prestigious award to promote Korean artists globally.
Moderator
NADINE KHALIL
CURATOR AND CRITIC
Nadine Khalil is an independent art critic, editor and curator. Her curatorial practice deals with performativity and technology. She is currently researching the body as an expanded site of performance, labour and technological embodiment. She is the former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine, Canvas (2017-2020) and Beirut-based urban culture magazines A mag and Bespoke (2010-2016). After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she advises art institutions and non-profits on editorial strategy, content development and publications.
She was lead editor of the book, The Arts Center: Building a Performing Arts Community on Saadiyat Island, 2023, published by New York University Abu Dhabi and has contributed to: Evaporating Suns; Contemporary Myths from the Arabian Gulf, 2023, published by Hatje Cantz, Finer: a thread … in the swell of wandering words, 2022, published by Maraya Art Centre on Cristiana de Marchi’s solo exhibition, Language
as Form, Form as Language, in Lulwah Al Homoud | Universal Connotations, 2021, published by Rizzoli New York, among others. Her writing can be found in Art Agenda, Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Review Asia, Artsy, Broadcast, Brooklyn Rail, Financial Times, Frieze, Ocula and the Women’s Review of Books. She has also authored a series of artist monographs (Paroles d’Artistes) on Lebanese artists Samir Sayegh, Hanibal Srouji and the late filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, and curated video art for European film festivals such as MidEast Cut and the Arab Independent Film Festival.