Beings whose Replacements can be found Anywhere

Ahn Gayoung | 2021 | 6 min 20 sec | Machinima | FHD Color | Korean Subtitles
Located in a desolate area no longer visited by people, the “KIN Shelter” is a refuge where beings unwelcome in the city can stay for a while. May, Jun, and July, who reside there, are NPCs (Non-Player Characters) in a game as well as marginalized neighbors left behind by a rapidly changing technological culture. Their species, appearances, and life trajectories could not be more different, yet they share one thing in common: each was pushed out of their original place when a better replacement appeared.
Initially wary of one another, the three gradually begin to respond to each other’s actions and compensate for one another’s shortcomings as they spend more time together, slowly forming a relationship of their own. In this way, the KIN Shelter becomes a space where three displaced and replaced beings experiment with ways of living together. Bringing humans, animals, and machines into the same space, the artist asks what those deemed obsolete in a rapidly changing technological culture might become to one another, and further, how they might become “kin.” 

KIN online

Ahn Gayoung | 2021 | 20 min 13 sec | Machinima | FHD Color | English Subtitles

Having lost their freedom of movement in the physical world, people begin migrating online one by one. Their new home is VRChat, a metaverse platform. Yet just as in the real world, the virtual world also produces those who struggle to adapt to new environments or are pushed to the margins by its rules and culture. Hyeji, Minji, and Jihye each drift through the virtual world for different reasons before eventually gathering at the online refuge known as the “KIN Shelter.”

〈KIN online〉 shows, through the experiences of these three artists, how discrimination, hierarchy, and alienation from the real world recur in altered forms within virtual space, contrary to the expectation that it might offer freedom from real-world constraints. The ease with which identity can be copied and possessed in digital environments, the marginalization of those unable to keep up with rapidly changing technologies, and sexual objectification ultimately converge on a single question: who is welcomed into the virtual world, and who is excluded? At the same time, the work explores the possibility that those pushed to the margins may find one another, form solidarities, and create rules of their own.

The Children of Hiion: Receive Our Souls

Ahn Gayoung | 2023 | 15 min 15 sec | Machinima | QHD Color | Korean & English Subtitles

In the near future, artificial intelligence and androids have replaced human labor, and no new human children are being born. Humanity chooses the colonial planet “Hiion” as a new place to live. 〈The Children of Hiion: Receive Our Souls〉 takes the form of an orientation program designed to help Earth migrants understand the “Children of Hiion” and coexist with them. The audience assumes the role of migrants from Earth awakening from hibernation and follows the explanations of Cheong, a guide on Hiion.

While the orientation program introduces basic rules of everyday life, such as food consumption and the use of fire, it places equal emphasis on protecting Hiion’s existing ecosystem rather than merely ensuring human safety. What is required of humans arriving on this new planet is not to reshape the environment to suit themselves, but to listen to the ways of life of the nonhuman beings who have already been living there. By placing the audience in the position of migrants soon to arrive on Hiion, the work asks whether the social rules and values humans have long taken for granted remain valid in a world shared with other species.

Near the end of the film, an artist robot performs a “dance of symbiosis,” proposing a new language through which different beings might form relationships beyond words and logic. In doing so, the work invites us to reconsider what it means to share a world with unfamiliar forms of life.