Junghyun Kim

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb at the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art explores the experience of today’s art production involved in the creative handling of materials and technologies.

These days, the smart devices we carry around with us all day have blurred the boundaries between technology and the body in many ways. The messages we frequently exchange with other people and the algorithms created based on our previous search history not only help us save time but offer us convenience. But, they also work in the other way to keep us under the control of such digital technologies. In that virtually everything is searchable and most data of the past can be reloaded when need be, there is no doubt that human beings became still more ‘smarter.’ Nevertheless, it is also true that our right and liberty of choice or a certain initiative concerning such a process have been transferred to the technologies in question, while we remain in the dark about the logic of its design and programming. In addition, the means of communicating with the world using smart devices are reduced to two fingers, the thumb and index finger. The immense diversity of our thoughts and desires is transmitted via the single sense of touch(touching screens). This phenomenon therefore takes us to the era of touch with no trace of sensuality. However, the ways in which we perceive the world can never be unified. For this reason, although with all the possibility of connecting with everyone in everywhere and seeing more things, we sometimes have the feeling of emptiness and boredom in front of the sleek surface of the screen.

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb takes its cue from the emerging concerns about the side/reverse effects of the remote experiences of art, which is gaining momentum along with the imposition of pandemic regulations. It came as a great relief to the art community that we still can accommodate the audience beyond the virus’s reach even in the era of the pandemic by means of the virtual exhibition formats. At the same time, we also need to realize the limitations of digital media, as they ‘vaporize’ the actuality of sensual experiences in the physical space of the real museum. Then, what can be the new environmental setting required for us in the field of technologies that the digital media, which can no longer be set aside or removed from our lives, has changed? As an attempt to overcome the negative effects of the digital virtual system that nullifies both our sensual experiences and art’s materiality, this exhibition examines the meaning of production through our body and sentiments in a larger context.

In this light, to this exhibition we invite four artists who create art seeking out beneficial relationships with matters and technologies. Before working on the mediums of sculpture, painting, installation and performance, they simulate ideas in the digital setting with software programs like SketchUp, 3D Scanning, etc. And then employing various senses, they materialize the work. The Museum asked them to consider our exhibition hall to be an actual-cum-virtual space, or where the two are overlapped. In it, they were required to view production as a process of having a contact with objects making use of both the sensory system of the body and technologies. As a result, Jung Jihyun studies materials and tries sculpture in the virtual reality. Chung Heemin sets a virtual mode of ‘meditation’ and expresses the extreme sensual experience by means of mediums. Parc Rahm brings up memories imprinted in our body and mind by the uses of smart devices and provides the viewer with an opportunity of imaginative drawing. Jung Myungwoo gathers data from physical movements and creates a performance in relation to them. With the four artists, we would like to find a way for human senses to be effective in today's changing technological environment.

This exhibition takes its title, Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, from that of art critic Choi Jongchul’s essay. *In the essay, Choi sees Rosalind Krauss’s view on digital media as two-fold, writing that Krauss not merely criticizes ‘the bomb(digital media)-dropping’ and its destructive influence on human senses but also expresses important hopes and expectations for it as a rescuer. Based on Krauss’s critical judgment and faith in digital media, this exhibition neither affirms nor denies the digital environment, but perceives it as a new setting for art. The exhibition intends to talk about art production in the digital world as a method of restoring human senses. We believe that if we can get hold of the physical knowledge of feeling, touching and transforming the materials and technologies constituting the world, always in dialog with its changing environment, the moment of adventure based on belief in the real rather than fear will come to lead us.

Throughout history, a new technology has always appeared. At each moment, human beings have taken a certain distance from the unfamiliar novelty, either by raising our guard against it or looking up to it. At the end of the day, whether a technology would destroy or develop our life has always been dependent on both of our hands. So I would say, it is time to stop worrying and love the bomb.

*Choi Jongchul, “Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Media Art after Digital Seen through the Theory of Post Medium,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art, vol. 53 (2018, 02); In fact, it was in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) that the phrase in question first appeared. The film shows the tragic outcome of atomic bomb dropping. Art Critic Rosalind Krauss borrows this title in a chapter of her book Under Blue Cup (2011). Choi, in order to mediate Krauss’s post-medium theory and those of other digital theorists, uses the title with a twist for his thesis.