KMAF 2019 aims to present the broadening intersection of art and technology through interactive and data-driven new media installations in 21st century Korean media art ensuing the era of Nam June Paik. The title Technoimagination, as coined by the late media philosopher Vilém Flusser, refers to the technical image culture made possible by the advent of post-text cultural apparatuses such as cameras, televisions, computers and cable networks.

Nam June Paik, a video artist from Korea who is often considered to be the pioneer of media art, was inspired by the period of technological amalgamation in America and the global utility network during the 1960s. He has brought over broadcasting network media into art extensively since the mid-1970s. From then on, media art has expanded into all sorts of apparatuses from radio and satellite telecommunications, video, television, film, photography, and now to the computer and internet in all its forms. In the 1990s, the digital revolution reshuffled the way of producing and distributing arts, and has redefined our social mindset and cultural paradigm, further proliferating through the language of new media spoken by the generations of the internet in the prospect of post-media.

Today, media has become an integral part in extending our senses to experience and interact with the world. In this context, media art has come to a position where it must be embraced by the contemporary arts scene. Art operating on a media device is not simply for the sake of utilizing the specific characteristics of a medium, but to explore and convey the renewed definitions of scale, speed, and pace of change in pattern for mankind.

Technoimagination introduces New York to the unique situation and characteristics of media art in South Korea, as a leader of IT in the post-media and post-digital contemporary art era. The media artists presented here engage with this new sociocultural change as they create technological forms as the apparat-operator. The techno code is a new zero-dimensional plane code that combines dotted text with pictures, where time and space cannot be separated as with linear history. Here, space is experienced as synchronized time while time is experienced as diachronized space.

Technoimagination will be presented in two sub-themes: Memories in Time and Space and Living Data. The seven Korean media artists will participate in this exhibition as the apparat-operators, crossing the boundary between history and post-history in the context of technoimagination, while creating a new paradigm of space-time at the intersection of art and science.

Kyung Ran Joo (Director of FUSE Art Project)