Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver is a multimedia artwork blending CGI, live action and game engines to explore time, labour and resistance. Following courier protagonists Ernst Mo and En Storm, the ACMI-commissioned project expands Kim’s pandemic fiction as they battle forces seeking to control time itself. Influenced by Æon Flux and Asian futurism, the work challenges techno-Orientalist narratives. Through shifting aesthetics and AI-generated sequences, it questions self-optimisation, networks and the fluidity of identity in a multiversal struggle.
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Watch Ayoung Kim & Serwah Attafuah in conversation
Transcript
I watched a lot of MTV things, not only music videos but also animation clips. Have you heard of Æon Flux? This is a huge reference for my project as well. Hi, my name is Ayoung Kim. I'm a contemporary artist and I work on various media like moving images, videos, VR and sometimes performances and game simulation. I worked on this two years-long project for the ACMI Commission which is called Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver and it's about two female protagonist delivery riders' journey across time and temporalities and many worlds. They are not just normal courier delivery riders – they are actually like double agent, to prevent the invasion of outer space's time. So, there are certain entities called the Timekeepers which are residing in other possible worlds and they are trying to transplant their temporalities and calendars and time mechanics into this world.
Techno-Orientalism is a western point of view to look at the Asians as dodgy and dangerous but somehow a little bit inferior, and Asian futurism can be the alternative version of that. Those people who been a little bit neglected or negated in past history are actually the protagonists, they are the subject they the central figures paving the way of their future. I deployed many different visual aesthetics including live action shootings with actors and game engine simulations. This building 3D environment, there's AI generated sequences, actually not completely generated, but it's video to video conversion with generative AIs, so when you see this live action footage of actors fighting and chasing each other, their face and their bodily shape changes shifting to some two dimensional animation textures.
There are really so many people get involved in the project, beacause my imagination is exceeding every time and you can see it.