CHU MIRIM

Chu focuses on the data that makes the web and citywork in a ‘data-driven society’. While we are not activelyaware of it, invisible data and the technology thatprocesses it have already permeated every corner of ourdaily lives. Proof of data’s dominance in our lives ‘awayfrom keyboard’ was established during a Kakao Talkdata center fire in Pangyo last year. The fire caused aservice failure due to simple physical damage to theserver battery, and almost all of society stopped. Whenthe messenger went down, communication was cut offand it was impossible to call a taxi or pay at a cafe. Dailylife became chaos. When the data linked to thesmartphone became unavailable, we could not summoneven trivial memories such as photos or contacts. Now,the data cloud has become the external brain that storesmemories and relationships.

In the exhibition Chaos Kong Chu intends to reconsiderthe daily life of a data-driven society that we experiencein modern times. The artist becomes a ‘Chaos Kong’,referencing an engineering strategy ‘Chaos Monkey’developed by Netflix that slows down the network orstops the entire group of machines in order to test forpotential failures, while recording data loss. ‘ChaosKong’ refers to the highest level of Chaos Monkey, designed to reduce errors in data processing systems.Such chaos engineering is an experiment to intentionallygenerate and build solutions proactively ahead ofproblems that may occur in the operating environment.

Chu examines the transformation and loss of data thatshe has created and backed up since 2001, andreinterprets the scrap data that could not be backed updue to incomplete synchronization. In Chu’s art, first ofall, the daily environment of the contemporary era is setas the web and the city. Then, while overlapping thesetwo places, import and export to the web screen arerepeated. In the process, she proposes a new backup byrealizing what is lost or newly created: as a flat surface,a video, or a screenshot of a video work rendered as aflat work.Just as new data is created by takingscreenshots of video data viewed on a smartphone, theartist intends to propose new backups that evoke dailylife in a data-centric society by displaying video work andscreenshots of video work on a flat surface.

The exhibition Chaos Kong represents a process ofreproducing incomplete data by summoning data thathad been forgotten even by the artist herself for a while.This forgetting is also a metaphor for relying onelectronic devices and the data stored in them in theaftermath of the interpenetration of data and technologyinto our life world. Chaos Kong provides an opportunityto think on this entanglement together.