“Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” by Ayoung Kim

Title:

Delivery Dancer's Sphere

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):



• Ayoung Kim

Symposium:

• ISEA2024: 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art

Venue(s):

• The Loft Theatre, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane, Australia

Artist Statement:

“As usual, the Han River is soaked in antidepressants, antihistamines, antibiotics and anesthetics!!! It’s 7 pm, evening peak time is back! Ride along before it’s too late!”

“Dancemaster always likes to keep the action to a minimum. For Dancemaster, optimization is synonymous with elegance. No matter what path an object travels, nature always strives to minimize action… You know that, don’t you? But this is no longer about nature…”

Ernst Mo (an anagram of ‘Monster’) is a female delivery rider who works for a platform called Delivery Dancer in the fictitious Seoul. In this fiction, Seoul is a labyrinth of endlessly regenerating routes, and the Dancers (workers of Delivery Dancer) pursue never-ending delivery work under the control of a master algorithm called Dancemaster. This work is not only about the gig economy and platform labor, which have become immensely popular in South Korea, especially during the pandemic, but also about the topological labyrinth, the possible world(s), the hypervigilance, and the accelerationist urge for optimization of body, time, and space. It contains hints of a queer relationship with a counterpart from another possible world.

The work is a mixture of 3D animation and live-action shooting.

Possible world(s)  

According to the possible world theory, this world is one of the innumerable worlds, and according to the logic of innumerable worlds, it is possible that there are two or more perfectly identical worlds. In this same world, even individual members may or may not be perfectly identical.

Ernst Mo is a rider affiliated with the company Delivery Dancer, a delivery platform. Depending on the call received through the operation of Dancemaster, the AI ​​algorithm of the Delivery Dancer app, Ernst Mo rides through the spots including A, B, C, D, E, in Seoul, following Dancemaster’s navigation system. It calculates the shortest distance from the starting point to the destination and informs Ernst Mo of the elegantly embroidered navigation lines. The infinitely received delivery calls and infinitely generated delivery paths are like a maze.

From moment to moment, Ernst Mo arrives at the points at which another possible world, perfectly identical to her own world, leaks. The name of the opposite entity that appears to be perfectly identical to herself is En Storm (an anagram of Monster). The main character and the opposing entity show various aspects of the relationship, such as antagonism, compassion, and affection, which cannot coexist in the same space and time. These are the states of affairs of possible worlds. These are the ways in which two entities may exist (the ways they could be), and furthermore the ways they could relate to each other.

This world seems like a world where the logic of causality does not work well. A character who died in the previous scene appears in the next scene. In this way, the world is rebuilt from moment to moment, different. Montage, a unique method of video editing that has been developed to suture shots and smooth artificial time, is used in this work to disrupt causality, and the magic begins where the syntax breaks down. (A variant of syntax is a kind of epistemic earthquake.)

This work incorporates several laws of classical physics: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Fermat’s principle of least time, Hamilton’s principle of least action.

Pandemic Fiction   

This piece, which I have classified as a sort of pandemic fiction, was inspired by my personal experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which limited international travel until early 2022. Along with the restrictions on movement, the pandemic also led to the exponential growth in delivery platforms that recruited riders through promotions offering high fees and unprecedented conditions. These delivery riders, who were the most mobile entities on the streets when taxis were scarce, delivered food packages to various destinations, striving to meet the requirements of the shortest distance and minimum time for delivery. People did not have to interact with the riders, who carried out their “invisible” labor at the behest of the master algorithm to complete their next delivery faster and serve them at an optimized time. This project gazes at Seoul as a kind of labyrinth. Mobility became more active than ever in a physically restricted mobility environment. In this story, the top-performing Delivery Dancers, known as “Ghost Dancers,” are invisible to human eyes and navigate through time and space.