A Wall That Simulates the World: Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul and World on a Wire

Step inside Hyundai's brand-experience venue on Eonju-ro in Gangnam, Seoul, and at the back of the car showroom an enormous LED wall, some fifty feet across, rises up. Ordinarily it carries messages about new models and brand films. But in the summer of 2021, what filled that surface was not an automobile: it was a hundred imaginary creatures. A digital aquarium whose inhabitants writhe as they lend one another colour and movement. This is Tabor Robak's Butterfly Room: Special Edition.

For roughly three months, a screen built to sell products was surrendered to a body of born-digital work curated by a New York museum. A "brand experience" space run single-handedly by a carmaker turns, for that span alone, into an apparatus for exhibiting contemporary media art — this is the tenkei this essay takes up.

The Wall That Carries "Hyundai's Message"

Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul opened in May 2014 as the first brand-experience venue Hyundai Motor Company had built. A five-storey facility at 738 Eonju-ro, in a corner of Gangnam, it was designed by the Korean practice Suh Architects. It was conceived less as a place to sell cars than as a facility in which car culture, art and lifestyle are experienced across a single continuum.

One of its central devices is a media wall composed of 121 LED screens. Hyundai's own description has it that visitors experience, through this wall, "the message from Hyundai Motor Company." The surface, in other words, exists to amplify the brand's manner of speaking. It is not advertising as such, but as a large screen through which a company conveys its own worldview, it stands on a commercial motive.

TENKEI takes up this wall precisely because that commercial surface was, for a certain span, opened to a different logic. The sheer mass of 121 panels is the scale of a brand's self-expression and, at the same time — for a contemporary artist — an enormous canvas of a quality quite unlike a museum's white wall. The question is who edited the switch.

An Exhibition Borrowing Fassbinder's Title

In 2021 Hyundai Motor Company entered into a partnership with Rhizome, the New York non-profit devoted to born-digital art and culture and affiliated with the New Museum. Its first outcome was the touring exhibition World on a Wire.

The exhibition's title is taken from R. W. Fassbinder's 1973 television film of the same name, World on a Wire, whose subject is a simulated world (its source is Daniel F. Galouye's novel Simulacron-3). What the exhibition set out was exactly that: a vantage from which simulation is grasped as a practice of making. It was an attempt to gather the work of artists confronting technologies that are digital by birth — augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI).

World on a Wire explores artistic practices engaged with emergent born-digital technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI).

— Hyundai × Rhizome プレスリリース(FAD Magazine 所収)source

Curation was led by Michael Connor, Rhizome's artistic director. In Beijing, Baoyang Chen of the Central Academy of Fine Arts was named as co-curator; in Seoul, Taiyun Kim from the Hyundai side — a programme in which each stop was organised together with a local institution. The exhibition toured three cities in 2021: Beijing (28 January – 5 April, with the Central Academy of Fine Arts), Seoul (7 May – 8 August), and Moscow (September, with the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art). At the same time, a website, worldonawire.net, was launched as a third venue independent of the physical ones — a web work by Yehwan Song that behaves generatively in the browser. Three surfaces — wall, smartphone, browser — were run through by one and the same exhibition.

Six artists showed at the Seoul venue: Mariia Fedorova, JooYoung Oh, Tabor Robak, Rachel Rossin, Theo Triantafyllidis, and ZZYW (Zhenzhen Qi and Yang Wang). All of them work in idioms whose mother tongue is digital — moving image, simulation, games, AR.

An Ecosystem on the Wall, a Virtual Studio in the Showroom

Tabor Robak's Butterfly Room: Special Edition, mentioned at the outset, belongs to the lineage of Butterfly Room, originally made in 2015–16 as a small hundred-channel piece driven by a hundred Raspberry Pis. This special edition reworks the imaginary creatures that appeared there and re-renders them at 8K/60fps for an LED wall some fifty feet across. The same work was shown on the media walls of three cities — Seoul, Beijing, Moscow — each time fitted to the dimensions of the wall in that place. The sheer mass of the apparatus is translated directly into the scale of the ecosystem.

Theo Triantafyllidis's Studio Visit handles simulation another way. The artist rereads the exhibition space as his own virtual studio and, wearing the avatar of an Ork, produces three-dimensional forms with digital tools. The process of making is recorded by DIY motion capture and played out on screen. The audience sees, at once, the forms produced and the gestures of the artist producing them.

Rachel Rossin's I'm my loving memory (2020–21) is a sculpture: graphics drawn out of the abstract virtual environments the artist builds experimentally are printed onto life-size plexiglass panels, then heat-slumped into shape against the contour of her own body. The sculpture can also be seen with a further layer laid over it, through a dedicated AR app. A physical object; VR as the tool backstage; AR as a layer of viewing — several registers of the real fold over one another inside a single work. The work of Fedorova, JooYoung Oh and ZZYW likewise each offered its own handling of simulation and generation.

What these works share is the sense that there is no "depicted thing" behind the screen — that what appears on the screen is a calculated, generated, simulated world itself. The unease Fassbinder's film posed, that the world one inhabits might itself be someone's simulation, is no longer a science-fiction premise now that AR, VR and AI have become ordinary. It has become the material of the work.

A Ma Opened in a Commercial Wall

The significance of this exhibition does not lie in the quality of the works alone. What TENKEI attends to is rather the place where it was set — the wall of a corporate brand-experience venue.

A museum or a gallery is a space designed from the start on the premise of showing art. A work hung there is a foregone harmony; there is little surprise in it. The 121-panel wall at Hyundai Motorstudio, by contrast, is an apparatus with a commercial motive, installed to carry the brand's manner of speaking. That wall was surrendered, for roughly three months, to a body of born-digital work curated by a New York non-profit. Not advertising as such, but a screen belonging to commerce, opened temporarily to the logic of art — this is a phenomenon of the same family as the arrangement by which street advertising surfaces are yielded to art for a few minutes every night (CIRCA's globally synchronised screen network), or the case in which a commercial vision board is prepared, down to the specification of the apparatus, for one particular artist's work (WAVE at COEX K-Pop Square).

Seen through the paired concepts of ma (間), the interval, and tenkei, the point set into a landscape, the structure comes clear. Into the continuous time of the 121-panel wall — time filled end to end with brand messaging — an interval of some three months is opened. What rises in that opened place is a simulated ecosystem, an Ork's virtual studio, a slumped plexiglass sculpture: tenkei. A tenkei does not occupy the wall permanently. When the run ends, the wall goes back to the brand's manner of speaking. But the memory of an interval once opened changes what the wall means. For a visitor, it is no longer "a screen that only carries messages about cars."

Whenever a company takes up art, a question follows it: is this no more than an instrument of branding, or is a genuinely public cultural site being opened? World on a Wire earned a measure of trust, one suspects, because the initiative over programming was handed to a curatorial body outside the company — one with long accumulated experience in the born-digital field, at that — and because each stop on the tour was organised with a local art institution. The company supplies the wall, the budget and the sheer mass; the selection of works and their meaning are borne by the art side. Where that division of roles holds, a commercial wall can become an apparatus that sets meaning into the scenery of a city.

The characters in Fassbinder's film come to learn, little by little, that their world is a simulation running one level above them. What a person looking up at the enormous wall in a Gangnam showroom received was probably a similar sensation — the wall in front of them is a surface for showing products and, at the same time, a surface for raising an entire other world. The instant one notices that doubleness is the instant a tenkei is kindled on a commercial wall.

Sources

1. fig.001Butterfly Room: Special Edition — Tabor Robak(2021)
2. fig.002Studio Visit — Theo Triantafyllidis (slimetech.org)
3. [3]World on a Wire, Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul — Hyundai Artlab(2021-05)
4. [4]Now Live: “World on a Wire,” Online and Off — Rhizome(2021-01-28)
5. [5]Hyundai x Rhizome present International Digital Art Exhibition ‘World on a Wire’ — FAD Magazine(2021-01-29)
6. [6]Hyundai Motorstudio and Rhizome Present ‘World on a Wire’ — Ocula (Michael Connor interview)
7. [7]Rachel Rossin — Magenta Plains (biography)
8. [8]The reopened Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul shines in a new light — Hyundai Worldwide
9. [9]World on a Wire (1973 film) — Wikipedia

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Hyundai Motor Company (Hyundai Artlab / Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul)

LOCATION

Seoul

MODEL

Corporate programme — World on a Wire was led by Rhizome (New Museum)'s Michael Connor, co-organised with the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow

CADENCE

Permanent brand-experience venue; media art is programmed as temporary exhibitions (World on a Wire Seoul ran 7 May–8 Aug 2021)

SPEC

121-screen LED media wall across a five-floor brand-experience center; Tabor Robak's Butterfly Room: Special Edition shown at 8K/60fps on a c. 50-foot LED wall

SINCE

2014-05

STATUS

Active — World on a Wire Seoul closed on 8 Aug 2021; the venue remains in operation

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