From Algae to Algorithms: Constructing Futures

For me, reality is already
multilayered. The physical and
the virtual – or the digital –
are not dualistic opposites.
They are already in a state
of mutual negotiation.

Ayoung Kim

Ayoung Kim is currently developing her latest work for Performa in New York. The central digital character – originally scanned from a real actor who has since stepped away – has evolved dramatically. More than eleven dancers and performers have contributed to animating the avatar, transforming it into a truly hybrid figure: composite, multi-authored, and temporally layered.

When the original actor encountered the updated avatar, her response was deeply moving:

‘Even though I didn’t do those actions myself, it feels like I did… Watching my avatar, it feels like a memory.’

This unsettling yet profound reaction – what might be called a ‘fictional memory’ – speaks to a speculative space that is neither fully physical nor spiritual, but something in between. This liminal terrain is at the heart of Kim’s upcoming performance.

Her current work draws on the legacy of body doubles, surrogates, and feminist technology, particularly the history of body doubles in cinema – especially the often-uncredited women who stood in for stars like Betty Grable. In Kim’s hands, the surrogate becomes a site of rupture, speculation, and feminist reimagining.

One performer, reflecting on her experience in the Korean film industry, likened the act of watching her digital double to witnessing a scene in which her own body double was ‘brutally murdered’ on screen. The emotional weight of seeing her image manipulated without control surfaced urgent questions of authorship, agency, and consent:

‘It’s not the actor’s art, it’s the director’s art.’

As AI and digital tools increasingly permeate the field of performance, the physical actor risks becoming obsolete. The tension between presence and reproduction, ownership and erasure, opens a rich and complex terrain – one that Kim is boldly exploring through her ever-evolving practice.

DA

Ayoug Kim, At the Surisol Underwater Lab, 2020 (film still). Single-channel video, approx. 17 min. Image courtesy of the artist

Defne Ayas: Looking back at the work you created five years ago, how do you feel the vision of a post-pandemic, eco-technological future resonates differently today? I’m thinking specifically of your work At the Surisol Underwater Lab (2020). In that work, the city is both a stage and a living system.

Ayoung Kim: Back in 2020, right at the height of the global pandemic when everyone was feeling uncertain and anxious, I created At the Surisol Underwater Lab. It was for the Busan Biennale. Everything was in chaos – schools in Korea delayed their semesters by a month, and even the Biennale was postponed. It was before vaccines or treatments for Covid-19 were available, so people were genuinely scared.

In that atmosphere, there was a big wave of interest in renewable energy and Environmental Social Governance, especially among younger people. Of course, people had been talking about the eventual depletion of fossil fuels for decades, and there had been all kinds of alternative fuel ideas floating around. But I think that was the first time those alternatives started to feel really tangible. Around then, I got obsessed with this speculative idea: what if kelp – those massive, towering seaweeds that grow off the coast of Busan – could be seen as a source of biofuel? That’s where it all started. In At the Surisol Underwater Lab, there’s a female scientist named Sohila who came to Korea after fleeing the war in Yemen (which reflects the real issues in Korea). She collaborates with an AI named Surisol that runs the underwater lab. Surisol is in charge of everything – from managing kelp farms to fermenting the kelp and developing biofuels. They talk about things like reducing carbon emissions, selling carbon credits, and using that revenue to build new bioplastic facilities. The surrounding sea is imagined as a place called ‘Biomass Town’.

There’s a place in Busan called Marine City. It’s right on the beautiful East Sea coast, full of ultra-high-rise luxury apartment towers – it looks so futuristic it almost feels unreal. But the funny (or scary) thing is, it floods every few years because of typhoons or huge waves. There are even memes online of fish and octopuses flopping around on the roads and underground parking lots. It’s this surreal clash between high-tech human ambition and the unstoppable forces of nature. I find it both dangerous and strangely enchanting – the place feels like a symbol of our times.

That’s when I started expanding on these ideas and imagined At the Surisol Underwater Lab using extrapolation as a method. It was a simulation of a possible post-pandemic future. Around that time, I also became increasingly curious about geoengineering – especially things like CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage). You know, when they drill for oil or gas and leave behind empty, porous underground zones, and then inject CO2 into those cavities to store it permanently. The technology itself is real, but to me it felt almost like science fiction. So strange, so powerful – it kind of haunted me.

Now, five years after the pandemic, it’s strange to see that fossil fuels haven’t disappeared at all. In fact, they seem more in the spotlight than ever. And the excitement that once surrounded alternative and renewable energy seems to be fading a bit, mostly because of concerns about productivity.

I still remember being shocked when I first came across eco-modernist thinking during my geoengineering research. Their argument was pretty counterintuitive – they were saying that by actively extracting resources, pushing nature’s development, accelerating technology, and making cities denser, we could actually protect more wilderness from being unnecessarily developed. I haven’t kept up with how eco-modernism is evolving today.

Ayoung Kim, The Underwater Response, 2021 (film still). Two-channel video, approx. 12 min. Image courtesy of the artist

DA: How do you envision the future of cities – as sites of extraction, spaces for resilience, or something more mythic and fluid? Could you speak to the dramaturgy of urban space in your own practice?

AK: I think it’s probably both. Human beings are so diverse, and all kinds of conflicting desires are constantly playing out. For eco-modernists, cities are supposed to be dense spaces sustained by even more advanced science and technology – they believe cities need to evolve further. It reminds me of the vertical imagery of the fictional city called Novaria in my work Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024).

Novaria is an isolated city that, for some reason, has cut itself off from the Earth’s surface and formed a civilisation deep in a canyon between surface layers covered with a gigantic glass dome. It controls its climate, daylight cycles, lighting, and energy through highly developed technologies. The city is interconnected by countless skypasses – elevated pathways that crisscross like a spiderweb. Delivery riders in Novaria use these skypasses to constantly move between different zones: from the customs area at the very bottom to the middle residential levels and up to the high-rise business districts. Their navigation routes are like the bloodstream of the city, keeping it alive.

These riders are portrayed as both dancers and techno-precariats. I once read a philosopher who said logistics isn’t just a means, but a world in itself.

Ayoung Kim, Surisol: POVCR, 2021 (film still). VR experience, approx. 17 min. Image courtesy of the artist

DA: How do you imagine the relationship between the ‘real’ city and its digital double? Can digital cities become sites of resistance, or do they mainly function as spaces for escapism? Do you see the city as a platform for collective imagination?

AK: For me, reality is already multilayered. The physical and the virtual – or the digital – are not dualistic opposites. They are already in a state of mutual negotiation. Events and phenomena occurring in the virtual realm interfere with, or even become indistinguishable from, the real world. The separation between them collapsed long ago. That’s why a fictional space also exists between the layers. I’m particularly interested in that in-between fictional domain.

A few years ago, when discussions about the metaverse were at their peak, one study suggested that contemporary individuals possess at least eight selves. The claim was that people form different identities depending on the social network they are on. I think there’s some truth to that. Don’t we all reveal slightly different versions of ourselves depending on the character of each platform?

Back when I studied photography a long time ago, a good portrait was considered one that captured the subject’s innermost essence. A photo was expected to express a unique, singular inner self. But people no longer expect that. Now we live in a world that admires versatility – people with multilayered selves that shift from moment to moment, adapting fluidly to different situations. It’s also a society that increasingly demands sub-characters – multiple personas tailored for different roles or contexts.

I don’t think digital doubles or digital urban spaces can be separated from physical cities anymore. On platforms like VRChat, people form communities and pursue all kinds of meaningful and creative activities. These types of platforms will only continue to grow.

We already live by navigating countless layers of reality, and things will likely become even more complex. What concerns me, however, is that while human stamina and the 24-hour day are finite, the things we are expected to know and act upon are increasingly exceeding those limits.

DA: Do you think a trans-cultural future is possible, or, as you suggest in your 2022 text on Techno-Orientalism, does every culture maintain its own unique image of the future? How does this work? Wouldn’t a trans-cultural urban future erase our identities as well as our differences? How might an intersectional, feminist future look within the digital abundance of the world?

AK: I’m reminded of something someone recently said – that today’s younger generation of art collectors, regardless of region or nationality, exhibit almost perfectly identical tastes. In the past, collectors’ preferences varied widely depending on region and individual character, but that no longer seems to be the case. This homogenisation of taste among younger collectors may be because they grew up within the framework of globalisation, sharing similar information and consuming cultural content through common platforms.

This kind of homogenisation strikes me as a kind of anxiety- inducing phenomenon. It also brings to mind a sentence I’ve kept close to heart for a long time, a quote about modernity:

For it is the idea which thus develops, of the non-contemporaneousness of geographically diverse but chronologically simultaneous times, that, in the context of colonial experience, becomes the basis for ‘universal histories with a cosmopolitan intent’.

– Peter Osborne, ‘Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological Category’ in New Left Review, I/192, 1992

This non-contemporaneousness becomes a target of unification or consolidation within the neoliberal current pushing toward homogenisation across all domains – ideology, environment, aesthetics, sensibilities, emotions. And yet, even as many places are living through this wave of homogenisation, countless cultures and regions continue to retain traces of their rooted specificities. These residual elements can actually become a driving force for imagining alternate futures – ones where they themselves are at the centre. That’s why I’m deeply interested in ethnofuturism and indigenous futurism.

In a world where only universal histories and cultures are acknowledged, those who have been excluded from dominant narratives can too easily be erased from the stories of the future. That’s why speculation and fabulation are so necessary – both as a form of resistance and a methodology of survival.

We need stories. We need fiction. To imagine and construct the many futures that can blossom in their own distinct ways. When we’re surprised by how elements of futures imagined decades ago by sci-fi writers have come true today, it isn’t because those writers were prophets, but because they imagined first, and later generations had something to draw from. In this way, imagination and speculation can mould and shape the future.

Techno-feminists, speculative feminists, and ethnofuturists all used speculative fiction as a methodology to imagine futures of their own – as small but meaningful movements of resistance against homogenisation.

DA: Reflecting on digital cities, I’m also thinking of Cao Fei’s 2009 RMB City Opera, which stands out as a pioneering work in the production of reality within digital spaces. Considering that your work mostly features cities as settings, do you think we might drift away from techno-urbanism toward more ancestral forms of existence and parallel universes? How do portals function in this regard, or memory-keepers, as you call them? Could reconnecting with ancestral rituals become a way to reconnect with each other and ourselves?

AK: As someone who has always enjoyed imagining countless  possible worlds and multiple timelines beyond our own, I want to believe in a way of life that combines techno-urbanism with ancestral forms of existence and parallel universes.

In one of my past works, the Porosity Valley series (2017– 2019), the protagonist Petra Genetrix was a mineral cluster bearing ancient memories, a data cluster, and also a migrant. In Mongolia, there is a tradition that regards caves and rocks as sacred; rock crevices, like caves, are believed to purify human dirt. There’s also a belief that if you move a stone from its original place, the stone feels pain. Such ideas might be viewed as a kind of fetishism, but since humans are beings who live through belief, I don’t think such beliefs conflict at all with a technologically driven modern life.

Another interesting observation: after the pandemic, Korean youth – who have experienced a world where uncertainty itself became the prevailing condition – have immersed themselves in astrology, saju (four pillars), fortune-telling, and fate calculation at astonishing rates. During the twentieth-century wave of modernity, such practices were dismissed as primitive or superstitious, but they are now experiencing a vivid resurgence. There’s even a term now – ‘fortune tech’ – to describe the fusion of fortune systems with data science. In times of uncertainty, we all need belief. And I think the more diverse those beliefs are, the more tolerant a society becomes.

In my works Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024), worlds appear in which conflicting temporalities and calendar systems compete and collide. Events unfold where calendars from other worlds infiltrate or where ancient, long-forgotten calendars spread in secret and begin to be used again. In them, Timekeepers either try to protect their own time systems or attempt to implant their time and calendars into the surrounding world, thus occupying space through time. To dominate time is to dominate space. These fictions are, in fact, allegories for the homogenisation of modernity.

Among the many changes brought by modernity was the homogenisation of time systems across the globe. Time, once unique to each culture, began to fade as railroad time, regulated by official clocks, became the new standard. However, concepts of time – temporality– and calendar mechanics were, in essence, each culture’s own science and technology developed through observation of cosmic and planetary movements. The philosopher Yuk Hui collectively refers to such systems as cosmotechnics.

The starting point of these works was the act of imagining a world where all these vanishing conceptions of time and calendar systems could coexist – a world of temporal plurality and layered realities