How does non-cognitive corporeality transform into a new aesthetic condition?
The Transparent |Adolescent| Machine of Western Seoul imagines a new ontological terrain in which adolescents, machines, artificial intelligence, moving image, nonhuman beings, and planetary matter are entangled, with non-cognitive corporeality as its central axis.
Non-cognitive corporeality is the foundation of distributed cognition that operates prior to conscious judgment. The concept is not confined to the brain; it functions across multiple registers, from the environmental responses of bacteria to bodily sensation, the non-conscious processing of the human mind, and the computation of artificial intelligence. From this perspective, the material realm shares non-cognitive corporeality, and the human and nonhuman constitute a single network as equal agents. Within this network, human flesh, machine code, and material flows intermingle, generating a heterogeneous and composite corporeality that exceeds the individual self.
Adolescents can be understood as the liminal bodies through which this complex network collides and connects. At the non-cognitive level, these bodies are in constant mutual feedback with contemporary algorithms and artificial intelligence, forming hybrid identities in which the human and the machine are intermixed within a state of plasticity. At the same time, the adolescent body is at risk of being easily instrumentalized or alienated by social structures such as the state, capital, platforms, and artificial intelligence.
Seo-Seoul Museum of Art seeks to understand adolescents as in-between beings who mediate between the human and nonhuman, the present and the future, and as figures of possibility capable of reconstituting agency within a technologically dominated society. To think through adolescents is not to represent a particular generation but to become a point of departure for “ontological politics” through which we sense that we are already entangled with machines, artificial intelligence, the earth, and the body.
The exhibition takes shape as two responses to these questions.
The first response is presented through the museum’s collection (Gallery 1). This includes works that explore a posthuman ecology in which machines, algorithms, and nonhuman beings are entangled and operative beyond human-centered thought; works that treat the body not as a physical entity but as a medium onto which social data is inscribed and translated; and works that make visible the seams that emerge in the process through which bodily action is converted into mechanical existence.
The second response unfolds in the Youth Studio established in Galleries 2 and 3. The Youth Studio calls on adolescents as agents and interfaces, and serves as an experiment in new forms of exhibition. Five participating artists propose works in a workshop format that continue to operate throughout the exhibition, expanding the participatory process into a sculptural field.
In these workshops, adolescents experiment with the processes through which they constitute themselves: platforms, online labor, technological anxiety, bodily performance, play, and the act of making. As latent agents, they introduce discrepancies and latency into systems that demand total synchronization, exercising the right to reassemble and perceive their own bodies.
Adolescents are already contemporaries who sense and interpret the present world, and at times disrupt the very logic by which it operates. Like Frankenstein’s creature, to make the traces of what has been stitched together openly visible; to discover new affect and bodily resonance within what falls away and goes off course. This will be the first step toward the adolescent posthuman’s aesthetic life.
