Light year 98

Caution: A Beautification in progress

Leo Keulbs is the founder of the Light Year program of projected media art presented onto The Manhattan Bridge in Dumbo, Brooklyn since 2015. Leo invited Kate Shin, the Founder and Director of Waterfall Mansion & Gallery & Waterfall Arts Foundation, with her curatorial expertise and roster of international artists for the finale of the Light Year project before its closing for the major renovation of the Manhattan Bridge. With this anticipated closure in mind, Shin curated around the idea of the chord: how art bridges and brings memories and connections of cultures all over the world and within NYC, the physicality and history of the Manhattan Bridge.

Artists have not been content with simply documenting the world around them. Instead, they have sought to transcend reality by creating idealized forms of beauty that exist only in the realm of imagination. Art serves as a means of accessing and participating in this larger narrative of the human experience that we inhabit. Incorporating cutting-edge technologies creates space for new visual and sensory experiences. Waterfall has selected five works by three International Media Artists whom we have closely worked with for the past decade, who merge art with AI and VR software, and 3D animation to respond to the ongoing transformations between these technologies and the world around us, bridging the past, present, and future. By transcending the boundaries of the physical world, art, and technology invites us to expand our minds, question our assumptions, and to bring the infinite possibilities of the universe.

Through the works of Maurice Benayoun, Minha Yang, and Hye Rim Lee, these artists remind us that art is not merely a reflection of the world around us, but a poetic direction of creating new worlds, new possibilities, and new modes of being.

So, we invite you to commune with the essence of the universe through this exhibition, to explore the power of technology to expand our limited boundaries, and to participate in the unseen logos of the image.

MAURICE BENAYOUN

Emotion Winds showcases a real-time world map using a database of analysis representing the emotions in four separate categories of 3,200 of the world’s largest cities. Four emotions of the world move and spread around the planet, forming meandered natural movements similar to the brushstroke of Chinese calligraphy and ink drawing.

Emotion Winds is the last of the Mechanics of Emotions series of artworks, expanding the artist’s running theme of the relationship between ‘big data’ and what makes something tangibly human. In Emotion Winds, these same human emotions are overlaid and combined with graphic representations of natural phenomena such as global wind cycles, and a poetic visualization finally emerges and connects the past, present and future emotions with the now.

MINHA YANG

The artwork "A City on a Pilar" by Minha Yang is a visual representation of a city that appears to be in a precarious and unsustainable state, yet continues to thrive and grow. The piece embodies the idea of resilience in the face of adversity and highlights the complex interplay between human innovation and artificial intelligence. By using Stable Diffusion and ControlNet for video production, Yang has leveraged cutting-edge technology to create a work that is both visually stunning and conceptually complex.

Through the use of iconic landmarks from the New York City skyline, Yang invites viewers to place themselves within the narrative of the artwork and the symbology of home and contemplate the ways in which cities are shaped by both human ingenuity and technological progress.

“Cityscape–New York” describes the process by which the letters that designate buildings and symbols in the city are transformed into fiction. Created with AI software, Yang based the work on the sentences 'Historical Buildings in New York' and 'Places Representing New York' alongside AI-composed music.

A fictional city is used as a basic image when Optical Flow is applied repeatedly through microscopic decompression of basic images to both deconstruct and reconstruct the base image. The recursive and repetitive pursuit of the image further blurs the original symbol and helps to emphasize the fictitiousness. The work may exist, but it does exist and positions the viewer to find subtle sensations in unrealistic images.

HYE RIM LEE

Hye Rim Lee is a Korean interdisciplinary media artist currently working in Seoul, New York, and Auckland. Her work spans from digital, sculpture, and performance practices where she develops an animated character Toki, to discuss the ever-changing roles of women and the ongoing transformation of technology. Particularly focusing on Asian women, the work showcases the rise of new technology and the spread of heightened interest in Western consumerism and ideals.

Lee’s dazzling ‘White Rose Series’ shares a testament to fortitude and ability to withstand inhospitable environments. Born from her previous media art ‘The Black Rose,’ Lee underscores the transformative process where a lone thorned rose can push its way through a crack in the pavement and figuratively result in great vitality and eternal light.

The White Rose fearlessly depicts a playful diamond dreamscape for an ever-ending journey in shifting identity and spirituality. The lighter color palette, derived from Korean symbology, and wondrous objects offer opposing ideas of purity, death, love, and new beginnings. The addition of golden yellow diamonds and their unbreakable characteristics illuminate Toki’s journey as she searches for restoration. Toki searches for paradise in an overwhelming utopian dreamscape. She shapeshifts from the princess to the rose, and eventually the queen. The White Rose queen reveals a connection to the perpetual and reflective nature of our lives, as the character's immortality leads her to find eternal light. Through the diamond, the artist found that all things in creation are regenerative, eternal, and a place of hope. With the ‘White Rose Series’ Lee is reshaping the beauty of Toki, as she is no longer a representation of the objectification of women, but a spiritual being.

TOKI, the pretty doll-like cyborg, has all the conventional attributes of a clichéd femininity valued in Korean culture. TOKI is the embodiment of fantasy, sensuality, and seduction. Here she lures the audience by inviting the viewer into a fantasy, suggesting that she possesses the power to fulfill his desire for the creation of an ideal, virtual beauty. TOKI’s exaggerated eyelashes epitomize the powerful image of ideal beauty, and the ability of digital and surgical construction to create a ‘plastic’ fantasy world.

The circular projection screen in Lash echoes a full moon in the Korean lunar calendar and connects to Korean traditions accompanied by many traditions including femininity. And also symbolizes a mirror that both projects and reflects TOKI’s transformation. The mirror is the vehicle for the exchange of emotions—including desire—between TOKI and the viewer: here TOKI symbolizes, and the viewer projects, a possible perfection. Yet TOKI is teasing, she possesses her own desire and also retains the power to control and seduce the viewer. TOKI changes from cute to sensual and seductive in a process of entrapment, evocatively symbolized by the whip-like lashing of the soundtrack as TOKI blinks.