The media artist group teamVOID is composed of Junbong Song, Jaehyuck Bae, and Booyoung Seok. These artists create works from the perspective of systems while fusing technology and art. In this solo exhibition, teamVOID expand on their ongoing 'The Factory' series, which responds to the trends of automatisation and the increasing technological sophistication of systems of mass production.
As factories actively integrate the most cutting-edge technologies, humans are being excluded from production processes. Indeed, the relationship between factories and the humans who operate them is undergoing a shift that is part of a more massive structural transformation. Through their 'The Factory' series, teamVOID interrogates the function and form of 'the system' in contemporary society as well as the meaning of acts of production and creation by humans.
In this solo exhibition, titled Factories, the artists concentrate on the 'data' that is at the foundation of the factory system and introduce the concept of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), focusing on the increasing influence of data on systems. In factories, which are currently transitioning from a regime of 'mass production' to 'on-demand production', the production of commodities begins with 'data' itself, reflecting a change in the sequence of factory operations. That is, factories are now run by data. In the current environment, virtual, immaterial data wields an outsized influenced, and intangible data may be ignored because it lacks a material presence. In an age where the person who owns the data is the owner of the factory, the following questions emerge: Who will come to own the data? And who will run the factory?
This exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to view the group's entire 'The Factory' series, from their early work The Factory, which deals with mass production, to their recent work on NFTs. The new work they are introducing at the exhibition begins from teamVOID's initial interest in data, and it uses NFTs to visualize a scenario where the person who owns the data runs the factory. In order to operate 'The Factory' located within the exhibition space, visitors will have to purchase an NFT, which is a symbolic representation of the authority to operate the factory. This work uses the data from NFTs purchased by visitors in real-time to produce drawings using an industrial robotic arm and a conveyer belt. We hope that the Factories exhibition will allow visitors to question the relationship between data and capitalism, as well as the nature of artworks in immaterial and material spaces.
Press release courtesy ONE AND J. Gallery.
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