2021 Showcase: Persona Society

<Persona Society> is a special exhibition organized as part of Young Convergence Artist Creation Program, the cooperative program between Art Collider Lab (K-ARTS’s affiliated institution) and Seongbuk Young Art Space (Seongbuk Museum of Art’s branch) in its 3rd year of collaboration. This program suggests a topic to think about in contemporary art and technology society. 2021’s theme was “Persona,” a Latin word which refers to the “mask” that stage actors/actresses wear and from which the English words “person” and “personality” originated. The psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung once said, “Human has a thousand personas so that they wear an appropriate mask depending on the circumstances and make relationships.” Humans create their persona as a compromise between their individuality and society and here, the persona serves as a medium that helps humans adapt to the situation and environment they face. The “multi-persona” has gained attention due to the increase of the media platforms that link individuals and society with advanced media technology and online spaces. These platforms, the so-called metaverse, provide spaces where we can remain anonymous and in environments more appropriate to reveal diverse identities. In this space, we create personas different from reality and build a society.

Eight teams from diverse fields and genres spanning media, performance, and discourse research were selected in the 2021 open call. The final outcomes were exhibited in the exhibition halls on the 1st and 2nd floors at the Seongbuk Young Art Space. In the exhibition hall on the 1st floor, works by Harin Song and Jaeyi GongXMinjae Im were installed. <Chamber Dance, Dance Chamber> by Harin Song is a media performance composed of two sections. One is a duet performance by media and performers and the other is a virtual quartet performance incorporating visitors’ participation in the media installation. It tells stories about human action (dance). Jaeyi GongXMinjae Im’s <uncanny symmetry> is a media installation work using AI. It is an interactive sound work which questions the gap between us and personas reconstructed with our data.

On the 2nd floor, the exhibition started with Sein Lee’s sound work <Central Dogma: Real me>. Prior to forming a persona, this work deals with the fundamental question “Who am I” and explores it through DNA chromosomes. In the center of the hall, there was a VR experience work <Liquidis> which accommodates two visitors. The artist, DUDOWAVE, intended to visualize the interactions in the course of conversation in the virtual space. Studio Full Option’s <Holiday in Moscow> is an art game in which players navigate Moscow tracking down the criminal named Domyeong Lee who went missing. It invites players to investigate what forms their identity in the various personas they acquire in the game. <"meet me at 1.048596 :)">, the biggest room in the 2nd floor exhibition hall, is an interactive work by UNIT, which changes the music based on the information a visitor fills out before entering the room. It was created to interpret and express the experience of the time lag that occurs online due to the difference in internet speed in a fun way. Alter Kim was selected in the discourse research section and presented the research on the persona in the metaverse space through video and text. In the last part of the exhibition, Persona-L’s <Persona Processing> lastly welcomes visitors with documentary work. This video illustrates how the three female documentary directors have built up their documentary world living in Korean society as women born in the 1990s by reference to the video production process, <Importing>, <Editing>, <Exporting>. The message Personal-L delivers in this work is that they hope for personas to be formed as an act of courage to open up personal stories, free from someone else’s standard.

Though a variety of outcomes were created under a single theme, this exhibition greeted visitors, featuring active experiments and suggestions to find personas that fit each of us. While advanced technology brought us the possibility of a new environment connecting the reality and virtual world, we are still in confusion between the established order and the expected transition of the future. We hope this exhibition served as a contemporary “social” landscape reflecting the perspectives of individual artists dealing with multi-persona phenomena.

Dayoung Lee (Researcher / K-ARTS, Center for Art Convergence)