CICA Museum hosts New Media Art Conference 2024 in Gimpo
People attend the opening party for New Media Art Conference 2024 at CICA Museum in Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, June 29. Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu
The fashion police have entered the digital age, with "fashion police drones" that can scan your outfit, categorize your fashion sense and even determine your facial features, either going by the clothes you're wearing or facial features.
The fashion police drone is one of many unusual projects featured at New Media Art Conference 2024, hosted by the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) from June 29 to July 1. The event has attracted 27 artists and researchers from 14 countries to the CICA Museum in Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, to discuss important topics in new media art and culture, as well as to celebrate the digital age.
Its participants drew on emerging technologies and trends including artificial intelligence in art, art and copyright, art and politics, art and social media, art and mass media, art and the environment, 3D printed art, new media culture and activist art.
Participants hailed from Korea, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Canada, Brazil, China, Turkey, Iran, the Netherlands, Finland, Greece, Poland and Israel. The museum's galleries have been hosting exhibitions from June 19 until July 7 featuring artists’ solo shows each week as part of the conference.
Love Death Design, an artist-founded creative studio in California urgently promoting art as a pathway to social change, was represented represented by three members who came to Korea for the first time for the official opening party of the conference on June 29.
Love Death Design studio's members, Nick Wilson, from left, Marin Vesely and Catherine Ross pose for a photo at CICA Museum in Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, June 29. Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu
“We work to promote social and environmental justice through our work and seeing art as a pathway to social change," said Marin Vesely, one of the studio's co-founders, who is a current Fulbright art and research scholar in Brazil. "We're interested in subverting these tools, these technological tools that are maybe meant to profit off us or for entertainment as well, but to enter activism into that world and sort of diversify the voices that are being projected through this technology that we use every day.”
Love Death Design is funded by an environmental and sustainability grant from Unity Technologies in collaboration with the U.N. Environment Programme and Project Drawdown. It has been ongoing for over four years and has collaborated with over 30 people, as well as nonprofit organizations artists and residents of South Los Angeles.
“It’s been such a labor of love," said the studio's other co-founder, Catherine Ross, the current Art + Science Fellow with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a visual and performance artist from Portland, Oregon. "It's so beautiful to be able to come here and just speak to folks at the conference about our work because so much has gone into it. We feel like we're representing a big group of people. And it's also reflective of environmental racism happening in South Los Angeles. It's also happening in other parts of the world. So, it feels like an emblem or a talisman of sorts.”
The group brought two chairs to Korea from Brazil.
“To answer why we brought chairs, I don't know why," said Australian climate scientist Nick Wilson, the lead researcher and developer at Love Death Design. "We just knew that we would need them. And we wanted the chairs to be perfect. So, we had to carry them all the way here. It's also like exhibiting new media art. It's such a new format, and one of the challenges is that because it's such an isolationary experience, being in a headset, it's just a challenge that we were trying to meet.”
Ahnjili Zhuparris, an AI engineer and AI artist working between New York and the Netherlands, uses art to to educate the public and promote discussions about the ethical implications of technological advances.
AI engineer and artist Ahnjili Zhuparris poses at CICA Museum in Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, June 29. Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu
Her academic research centers around the development of biomarkers for monitoring mental and physical wellbeing using machine learning, smartphones and wearables. Her artistic research and science communication efforts are dedicated to raising awareness about AI and algorithmic violence, which encompasses the violence that may arise from or be justified by automated decision-making systems.
“My Ph.D. is actually in medicine, but my research focused on clinical surveillance. So how can we use patients' smartphones and wearable data to infer how healthy they are each day? For example, just by looking at how you interact with your phone, can we predict how depressed you were that day?" she asked.
She brought 10 fashion police drones to Korea for the event, showcasing her attention to surveillance as a whole, particularly by drones. The drones can be used to do a fashion analysis of a human target, able to categorize the person's fashion with terms such as formal, casual or athletic. They also attempt to discern the target's gender based on facial features, and again by analyzing their outfit.
“For the fashion police drones, I'm just using pretty standard off-the-shelf AI recognition algorithms to detect what gender someone is, and what they're wearing," she said. "But now I'm deploying it on a drone, and it's kind of funny because nobody expects to have a fashion police drone. But the truth is people are using these types of technologies regularly."
She cited Iran's use of drones to single out women not wearing a hijab, and U.S. airports which she said use behavioral or aesthetic analysis to identify suspicious people, for example who are wearing hoodies or burqas.
"In lots of places, you can't have your face covered," she explained. "So it starts funny, but then it goes to show the real-world parallels of how these technologies are used."
Virtual reality goggles are used to view the documentary "Gone to Water" by Love Death Design at CICA Museum in Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, June 29. The chairs were brought from Brazil. Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu
Liliana Gonzalez Jarquin, an El Salvadorian living in Montreal, Canada, introduced her project, Micro-Nude, which explores cyberfeminism, photography and social media in a unique way. Currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in art history at the University of Quebec, she values individuals who share insights into art and social equity.
“Micro-Nude is a glitch that I find in the algorithm of Instagram and Facebook," she said. "So basically, it has the purpose of bypassing the algorithm of detection. One of them, and what I'm focusing on, is mainly the female body which is the most censored on social media. The project is a hack, of course, we can see it as activism, the way to go against the rule that forbids the female body to be on social media. It has also another meaning, which is to play with voyeurism.”
CICA has been hosting international art conferences since 2017. Kim Lee-jin, director of the CICA New Media Conference (CICA NMAC), was awarded the Global Power Brand Grand Prize, cited by the standing committee of the National Assembly, on May 23.
Visit cicamuseum.com/nmaconference for more information.
Bereket Alemayehu is an Ethiopian photo artist, social activist and writer based in Seoul. He's also the co-founder of Hanokers, a refugee-led social initiative and freelance contributor for Pressenza Press Agency.