1.       One Zero, <Humans of Nowhere>

Humans of Nowhere is an interactive machine learning project that produces narratives around portrait photos. An AI trained based on the Humans of New York Instagram account will process photos submitted by participants, which are recreated as hybrid images and corresponding text. It thus encourages participants to upload the resulting content and create new bonds with others even in a world of social distancing. ​

▶About the artist:  One Zero, a duo of Yoo Dongphil and Chung Youjin, works in New York and Seoul. They utilize emerging technologies such as XR and AI to integrate art, technology, and science. ​

2.  Kim Dasom, Meta Ring

Meta Ring combines the words Metaverse and Annual Ring, referring to records in the virtual world. It is a life-logging application where you can consistently document and preserve everyday life through personalized conversation. Despite the importance of writing diaries in self-reflection and navigating the future, many people struggle to find time for it. Meta Ring remedies the problem by offering a sustainable, easy habit of documenting life in the form of natural conversation.

▶About the artist: At the dawn of new humanity through the posthuman or AI robots, Kim Dasom highlights technology’s transformation of the everyday, asking the question of what defines humanity and where happiness comes from. She hopes to emote with the audience through interactive art where meaning is completed by participation of viewers.

3.  Park Seol-ha, Self Conscious

Self Conscious is a first-person walking simulation game that shares the experience of anxiety from the perspective of those who experience it. It takes place in a room designed from the character’s memories, where you will explore repeating sounds, spaces, and objects relating to anxiety, as well as spaces, sounds, and meditations that the artist draws comfort from. ​

▶About the artist: Park Seol-ha is interested in "Serious Games" that mobilize social change. She has been researching games based on their potential for percepetual shifts rather than stimulation or pleasure. For this game, she aims to creat empathic connection to people experiencing anxiety, and to share actual processes of art therapy. ​

4. Art Center Nabi + Seoul National University ARIL, #GennieChallenge

#GennieChallenge is an AI project using a Multimodal Embedding-based deep learning model, where AI “Gennie” assists users to complete sketches with illustrators ㅇㅇㅇ, 25-il, and Leeloo. When users input a story in text, Gennie provides a base drawing, upon which you will be adding color and shapes to complete the comic. Also with the AI’s help, users can share and communicate the finished works on social media.

5.  Jang Yunyoung, Gaia

Gaia is a simulation game where you can experience the changes in Earth's environment in the Anthropocene based on everyday choices such as food system, electricity use, and virus infection. Individual players join through the website and its virtual Earth respawns multiple times based on choices of all multiple players. By visualizing mutual interactions between individual and individual, collective and environment, you can learn not only practical information but also personally feel the connection between human activities and other living beings. 

▶About the artist: Jang Yunyoung, a media artist seeking synthesis between visual arts, science, and technology. She is interested in human perception and ecology, producing works on communication between human and non-human and dilemmas that arise therein. She pursues new possibilities in between human and animal, human and environment, human and artificial intelligence robots, and highlights their mutual connection.  (Artist website: https://yunyoung.kr) 

6.  NaMinSu, Mung Mung

With COVID-19, pet abandonment cases have reached an all-time high, even referred to as the “Pandemic Puppy” problem. Through Mung Mung (dog barking sound in Korean), you can converse with an AI chatbot that speaks in dog  language, learning how to communicate with dogs and affirming the importance of our accountability towards caring for our pets for their whole lives. Also at the end of the conversation, you will receive a truly “non-fungible” NFT that symbolizes your pledge to the pet, adding cultural value to the investment-centered characterization of NFTs.

▶About the artist: Team NaMinSu, consisting of Oh Nayea (development, design), Song Haemin (development, storytelling), and Kang Jisu (curatorial), is an award-winnig team in Art Center Nabi’s 2021 Hello World! New Playground Hackathon. They explore a range of subjects from methods of discovering and presenting valuable artworks amidst new technologies and shifts in the social environments to realizing artistic significance through media art.

7.   Moram Moram, Space Summer

Space Summer is a 3D metaverse reminiscing memories of summer nights before social distancing where we enjoyed little festivities together. Interacting with users as a web environment instead of a built-up game program, it provides space for warmth and rest. Reflecting on the role of the Han River as a sanctuary within the crowded city, Space Summer contemplates with you the meaning of open space during an absence of physical contact.

▶About the artist: Moram Moram, a team of Kim Dasom, Jeong Seonghoon, and Kim Euna, is a winning team in Art Center Nabi’s 2021 Hello World! New Playground Hackathon. It is an art & technology collaboration between Kim Dasom and Kim Euna who have experience working together, and programmer Jeong Seonghoon, who has great interest in metaverses.

8.  Tim Mayo, Space Out

Space Out is a virtual space that encourages you to discover stories overseen by the hero’s journey motif that constitutes many existing games. Starting at the ending credit after defeating the final boss, you will be walking through a field with no enemy or puzzle towards the point where the game had begun and a new one will begin – it is a contemplative process of apprehending things that had been lost.

▶About the artist: Tim Mayo, a duo of Yoyojin and Kim Sima, is a winning team from Art Center Nabi’s 2021 Playmakers program. They hope to provide an experience where a new world emerges where the previous one ends. Yoyojin is a visual artist who has been showcasing unique characters with their own rhetoric across different media, and Kim Sima is a media artist investigating new forms and methodologies in sound, visual art, and 3D graphic.

9.  Yun Hayan, MY Universe

MY Universe is a musical project based on astrology charts symbolizing the uniqueness of each individual. An astrological chart consists not only of the sun sign - what we colloquially call our 'signs' - but also other planets like the moon, Mercury, and Mars. MY Universe matches the movement of these planets to corresponding musical elements, layering them to create a harmony that represents your individuality. At offline workshops, you can receive astrological readings then experience how they are translated into music with djing devices, or view online the algorithm the artist uses as well as the musical pieces and visual notation created using the algorithm.

▶About the artist: Yun Hayan (Shirosky) is a prominent woman producer-DJ in Korea’s Lofi-Jazz Hip Hop scene. She strives to make music that benefits people in the real world, where the listeners can be the main characters.

10. aardon(Nam Kiryung), MemeME

MemeMe is an AR-based game that deconstructs boundaries in familiarity with digital media by generation, status, and individual, as they surface in meme culture. When you enter a sentence to create Hangul (Korean characters) signages, they are placed in the MemeMe website or in a specific location. Then, other players discover the sculpture and rearrange it, transforming language from means of communication to a play of tactile, experienced participation. Also, the GPS element of MemeMe creates opportunities for collectively creating memes as a means of better communication.

▶About the artist: Arrdon(Nam Kiryung), a producer and creator, observes reality and expresses fantasy on it by encompassing various media, technologies, genres, and forms. By reflecting the appearance of contemporary individuals in his works, he aims to create a new movement that ultimately triggers the interactions between them.

11.  Brand-new Bremen, Doong Doong Club

Doong Doong Club is a metaverse orchestra where you can interact with others through music without meeting in person. When a player approaches its abstract, flat objects, they emit unexpected sounds. In Doong Doong Club, these sounds combine to form a concert, which you can play a direct part in or watch previous results. When you connect to Doong Doong Club, the view is projected onto monitors in a physical exhibition space, which is then live streamed to audiences.

▶About the artist: Part of Sogang University’s 2021 Art & Technology Conference, Brand-new Bremen, consisting of Oh Chae-ryung, All Zero, Cho Yejin, and hcot, realizes ‘Bremen’, a land of freedom in the story of the Musicians of Bremen. Anybody can be part of Doong Doong Club’s concert where rabbits create sound and space, raccoons inhabit it, and frogs and elephants make objects.

12. Party People, Partycle

Partycle is a VR Metaverse platform where each visitor transforms into a particle unrestricted by material form. When you speak a sentence or note with your voice at the start the information is translated into a particle, enabling free expression of your self that lies beneath the everyday guise – much like how streaming platforms enabled virtual communication during social distancing. Also, each particle is minted as an NFT, highlighting its uniqueness and unrepeatability.

▶About the artist: Team Party People, consisting of Kang Jiho, Kwon Haram, Kim Tae-hee, Yang Dong-seok, and Choi Byeol-I, is a winning team in Art Center Nabi’s 2021 Hello, World!: new playground Hackathon. They wishto open a space for individuals to meet, memorialize, and celebrate encounters in the virtual world.

13.  Park Yena, To Artiarlizm: Unknown Invitation

To Artiarlizm : Unknown invitation is an online tour event that embarks from an “unknown invitation” from a faraway future where all beings have moved to a world of data. In that world where bodies have vanished lies the “Island of Memories” made of remnants of data from manmade objects. We, as current humanity, enter the island in the guise of future humanity called “Observers” and will be encountering various “Big Babies” who each carry fragments of memory-data on humanity. You will be collecting these fragments to learn about this unknown world bit by bit. Why has future humanity sent us an invitation, and what is their world like? This world is known to allow entrance only on specific dates, so receive a personal invitation through the above link to visit it in the future. There are only eleven “Observer” seats, so run don’t walk.

▶About the artist: Yena Park works in Korea and the U.K and examines forms of relationships between humans and objects across material and digital worlds. With a conviction towards circulation, she reuses and reconstitutes artificial objects that have lost their original use and value, creating contemplative landscapes that may or may not exist in an uncertain place and time. (Artist website: yenap.org |

Instagram: : @yenaprk)

14.  Shin Hara, Swell.O.ER

Swell.O.ER is an interactive VR game where you gradually mutate while seeking optimal habitat upon a futuristic landscape. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s cyborg that deconstructs boundaries, you partake in this game in first-person perspective, not able to see your own mutating self, instead imagining it through interactions with surroundings. You can therefore experience the fissure between artificial and natural worlds, and the uncertainties and inevitabilities at play. At the end, are given the choice to return to the real world or to remain in your virtual habitat, so we hope you make the right choice.

▶About the artist: Shin Hara works between Seoul and Berlin, utilizing mainly video and installation to explore the fragmented self and replaced reality. In the process, she presents narratives deconstructed through both control and spontaneity, a view of a community facing an uncertain future. (Artist website: https://shinhara.net/)

15.   Art Center Nabi, Butterfly's Dream 

Butterfly's Dream is Art Center Nabi’s exhibition and event space in the Metaverse platform Cryptovoxels, a space in between human dreams of technology and technology's dream of the human. The archive exhibition located on the first floor is entitled Nabi Tomb. Using materials from Art Center Nabi’s 20-year archive, Nabi Tomb challenges the timeless aesthetic of today's Metaverse by highlighting the mortality of technology. It asks the question: how do we properly memorialize media art projects fromthe past in a way that affirms their changing connection to personal memory and cultural contexts?