Ayoung Kim – Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver

Using CGI, live-action footage and game engines, Korean artist Ayoung Kim creates a speculative multiverse that blurs the boundaries between space, time and the self.

In Kim’s award-winning Deliver Dancer’s Sphere (2022), which was made during the COVID-19 pandemic, courier Ernst Mo speeds through a techno-futuristic Seoul controlled by a malevolent algorithm. Rendered as a labyrinth of regenerating routes and never-ending delivery work, Mo’s hyperreality is unravelled with the appearance of her otherworldly doppelganger, En Storm. Exploring the gig economy, self-optimisation and the isolation of networks, Kim returns to the characters of her ‘pandemic fiction’ with Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver

In this ACMI-commissioned sequel, Ernst Mo and En Storm escape the endless maze of package pick-ups and deliveries. No longer ordinary couriers, they transport something far more abstract and fundamental – the “time”. Across deserts, cities and different dimensions, they join a multiverse resistance, battling the algorithm seeking to flatten time in favour of productivity. Traversing different calendar mechanics and astronomical technologies, they’re tangled in networks of space and time that contradict and collide with each other.

Harnessing cinematic storytelling, videogame technology, app interfaces and poetry, Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver confronts disjointed realities and personas while resisting the optimisation of ourselves and society.