Your Holiday

Your Holiday is an exhibition exploring the new reality that extends, connects, and shares aesthetic experiences in contemporary art on the basis of XR (eXtended Reality). With the development of technology, we are on our way to realizing platforms that converge art and science. Such platforms comprehensively apprehend the complex cultural and artistic experiences of visitors based on the characteristics of new artistic practices. Since July 2020, the Seoul Museum of Art has been conducting the Telepicnic Project, a joint research and creation project involving extended reality with Rebel9 and Sogang University’s Research & Business Development Foundation. Your Holiday presents the outcome of the project in the form of an exhibition with contemporary artists Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, Nancy Baker Cahill, and Timur Si-Qin to build and experiment with a platform that further expands the interaction between the art scene and the virtual world. In particular, Rebel9 presents an extended reality platform Mighty Verse in collaboration with Nayoungim & Gregory Maass. The platform offers an opportunity to connect the real and the virtual, sharing and accumulating experiences taking place within the connected space. The exhibition envisions new connections within the world of extended reality. It seeks to evolve relationships rather than mere advance of technologies, imagining the museum to arrive in the coming years. There, within the extended reality, the exhibition seeks to facilitate the museum and its visitors to share the vision of extended reality, explore the possibilities of technology, and prepare a new cultural and artistic ecosystem. 

Your Holiday offers an opportunity to look back at reality through two words that have been faded in their meaning in the unreal world of ongoing pandemic–a personal pronoun ‘you’ and a conceptual word ‘holiday.’ In situations where ‘my’ life of security and safety is guaranteed by securing distance from ‘you,’ we have no choice but to rethink the meaning of others. In addition, the meaning of ‘holiday,’ which had been faded within our irrecoverable ‘everyday life,’ is actually an element that supports the grandiose capitalist world. It namely survives through hope that is absent. The exhibition explores the possibility of subjectivity that is free from the relationship with others against the background of the capitalist meaning and limitations within the concept of holiday. In the exhibition, holiday appears as a space of hospitality for the subject ‘you.’ The works crossing over the real and virtual world offer unseen thoughts, which realize hospitality by themselves and rediscover the space of ‘rest’ through the broad and keen reflections on the other side of contemporary culture.  

Your Holiday, You Are Holiday

Your Holiday explores new aesthetic experiences through extended reality. It seeks to ask what we achieve and where we are heading through technological advancement. When we dream of a ‘better future’ brought by technology, we can face the coming years more actively by reflecting on how it would change our lives and to which part of ourselves it would contribute. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution advances toward an era of hyperconnectivity and superintelligence by reshaping the world order, many people can now enjoy leisure with enhanced quality with more time available. Accordingly, taking good rest in an appropriate manner has become an essential process and goal of life for the contemporaries above all else. This exhibition observes that our freedom can be indefinitely reduced when rest operates as a product of the capitalist system. In an era where capitalism has even eroded our way of life and the horizons of thinking, we constantly save time to do more and create more meanings in order to live a successful life or enjoy a happier life. Here, holidays act as temporary spaces to work better and as a middle ground to create more abundant meanings. While capitalism consolidates and expands itself, holidays become a means to realize ‘a brief recharge for more efficient results.’ Ultimately, we keep ourselves going only on the basis of continuity and efficiency within the irony of being chased by time for the sake of securing holidays. Today, the connotation of the word ‘holiday’ or ‘rest’ is omitted with ‘as much as capital allows.’ 

It is undoubtedly not easy to restore the reduced freedom by escaping from rest under the enslavement of the capitalist system. Nevertheless, freedom begins with the suspension of the inherent capitalist mechanism within rest. In other words, the possibility of freedom lies in the very Act of suspending the subordination to capital and the attached meanings for the sake of holidays not operating as a means for continuity and efficiency anymore. This epitomizes the very ontology of the holiday that this exhibition intends to deliver. Rest is not a leap for moving forward, nor a space filled with meanings to bridge the past and the future. Rest is just an empty space. We cannot possess this ontological space. We can only glimpse the possibility of being a liberated subject by becoming the very space by ourselves. Therefore, this exhibition is not about possessing holidays but becoming them and restoring a being that has been lost in possession. And as a specific way to exercise such topics, the exhibition proposes a space of hospitality within the ‘Unseen Museum.’ 

The artworks presented in different spaces inside and outside the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art respectively contain the form and content of hospitality in their concrete contexts. Nayoungim & Gregory Maass presents a space that realizes double hospitality through the relationship between different artworks and with the extended reality platform Mighty Verse. Miss Shrimp and Mighty Mama are large statues inside and outside the exhibition space. The two artworks are derived from a scene in the history of art and respectively welcome the visitors in the lobby and the exhibition space. They deal with the possibility of reversal between the host and the guest, you and I. In addition, the complex installations of Luncheon on the Grass welcome the immaterial interventions that transform, combine, and reconstruct them on the screens of tablet computers. In other words, the artworks in the real world become a space of hospitality that is open to the intervention of the virtual world through the touch of their viewers in Mighty Verse AR. On the other hand, Mighty Verse VR transforms the real space into a virtual space, functioning as a storage that provides space for virtual objects created by visitors and accumulates them in one place.  The reversible structure between the host and the guest is expanded into the relationship between the inside out outside and that of the museum and its visitors. This is realized through the XR artworks presented in the space Heart Tank―which transforms the idle space of the museum building into an exhibition space― and the outside of the museum. Timur Si-Qin’s A New Protocol VR redefines our spirituality within the relationship with the ‘universe of pattern, matter, and energy,’ claiming to welcome the coming years and the planet on which we live. Nancy Baker Cahill’s AR work Legacy tells a story of a coming community through a formative language by reflecting on the side effect of development and environmental issues, which is materialized as a figure of a tree. The work is designed to be viewed 24 hours a day without entering the museum from all directions. As such, it embodies the museum without borders, which is another name for the unseen museum. 

The ‘extended reality of your holiday’ is a place for connecting with others, sharing experiences, and practicing new realities. At the same time, it is another social commons where we will discover that our lives on concrete and sensuous reality share another reality that is invisible to us. Through this, the exhibition reflects on the being of others that becomes stronger within the coming time and explores the possibility of rest that we can discover once again. The basis of the reflection and exploration are the strengths and limitations of our present reality. The space of art that the artworks reveal is a place to recover the empty space embedded in holidays. Whether it is visible or not, art by itself becomes rest and presents us with the possibility of free Act. Therefore, reclaiming lost holidays is possible in the space of hospitality that welcomes you. You are the holiday. 

* Exhibition Website: yourholiday.xyz

* The Telepicnic Project

The Telepicnic Project is a result of collaboration between the Seoul Museum of Art, Rebel9, and Sogang University’s Research & Business Development Foundation. The project presents a convergence of art and science through the medium of XR. It is supported develop a platform for creating and sharing next-generation cultural and artistic content where visitors can interact in real time in extended reality. The project was inaugurated in July 2020 with a workshop titled “2020 Teledrive.” In April 2021, the co-organizing institutions of the project held an international conference The Unseen Museum, which was held entirely online.