Niklas Kleemann
One of my earliest memories of experiencing euphoria and curiosity is exploring the “natural sciences” section of my hometown library. Flipping through dozens of books, looking at pictures of galaxies, equations, and more, a new world opened up to me. The authors reached across oceans to ignite a spark in me that would always lead me toward hope and wonder. When I first logged on to the internet, I could participate in communities that were inaccessible to me and felt truly connected. So to me, media are the biggest enablers, with the ability to change the inner and outer worlds of everyone.
Laila Kamil
I grew up in a household with a more traditional approach to media. My mum used to read books to me, I listened to cassettes and CDs, and TV was pretty restricted.
I didn’t read much as a child, but there was a magazine I really loved. During class breaks, I often went to the school library and read Geolino, which could be described similar to a children’s version of National Geographic. In each issue, there were a few pages that introduced the everyday lives of three children from all over the world. I loved reading that because I was curious about what hobbies and lifestyles other children had, and what kinds of environments they lived in. The first social media account I had was on a platform called SchülerVZ. It was similar to Facebook, but made specifically for school kids. The platform only existed from 2007 to 2013, but during it’s peak it was very popular. When I got a older, I registered on Tumblr: a blogging platform where users can have their own blogs and repost other people’s posts. Tumblr still exists, but in the early 2010s it was especially popular. The platform introduced me to different subcultures and had a huge influence on my interests and identity during my teenage years. One feature I especially loved was that users could install, create, and share custom themes for their blogs using HTML and CSS, so you had complete control over how your blog looked.
Big social media platforms today dictate how your profile looks in terms of layout and appearance. On Tumblr however, every blog had a very unique and personal look. Curious of how this works, I tried out HTML for the first time.
The internet has always felt like a magic window into people’s lives all around the world, and I think nowadays it feels very corporate and not as quirky and personal anymore.
I created my Instagram account in 2018 and spend a fair amount of time on the platform. There is a lot of inspiring content, but there are also clear limitations. The search mechanism is very bad, so I don’t have as much control over the content I can access. In the past, using a platform felt more like exploring – now it feels more like being fed, which means platforms have huge power on what we consume. Also, with all the AI generated content, I have to keep in mind that everything I see might be fake. It can feel a bit depressing, but at the same time, I’m curious to see how that will influence how we navigate the internet in the future. It’s an issue we will have to deal with, and I have a small hope that more personal and individual corners of the internet will become popular again.
– Laila Kamil, December 2025
Hyeyoon Lee
The form of media I have been most passionate about throughout my life is undoubtedly comics. I consider myself an anime kid, and I believe that much of the way I think has been shaped by the comics and animations I grew up with.
As a child who loved fairy tales and worlds of imagination, I gradually became immersed in the diverse universes depicted in comics. Like fairy tales, the worlds within comics were beautiful, orderly, and just; good always triumphed over clearly defined evil. Growing up in such worlds, I became an idealist who believed that life, too, would follow the natural order of justice. I have always tried to live righteously because of this belief.
Yet, as one inevitably learns, the real world is chaotic—full of contradictions, injustices, and countless grey areas. The tension between this confusing reality and my ideals generates feelings of anger, resignation, sadness, and contradiction, and these emotions have become a source of creative inspiration for me. I also believe that when someone who grew up with comics becomes an adult and continues to live with strong convictions—much like the characters they admired—they can in turn become a source of inspiration for others.
I create artworks by engaging with media. Can these media, in turn, reach someone else with their own influence? And can people, as a medium, pass this influence on to yet another someone?
Hyelim Jeon:
The new cognitive system; Mediatic / Cinematic Mechanism
The way I perceive and accept the world is quite cinematic and mediatic.
When I stroll alone through the night streets, I often feel a curious fear that anyone who has experienced it would understand. My surroundings seem dangerous, yet I’m captivated by the aura of that space, imagining the things that might happen.
It all began in my early childhood. When the holidays came, my family used to go camping. Usually there was no specific destination, we would just drive around and whenever we came across a beautiful spot we would set up our tent there. Later on, we would spend the night under the stars. Sometimes we packed up and moved to another location, even after nightfall.
The landscape outside the window of the car was pitch dark, there were spooky trees in the distant forest and the dim street lights went by like in a panoramic view. I sometimes felt a strange fear, as if a monster was about to come out from the deep forest and chase me. However, I obviously was with my family, and the robust body of the car made me feel safely separated from the outside world. I kept gazing into the outside world, without taking my eyes off it.
To look through the car window during a drive at night was like watching a movie screen for me. Since then, I have been living in a cinematic world, as if I was on the center of the stage. I feel a kind of aura stemming from uncanny and surreal landscapes in daily life and immerse myself in my imagination. It led me into delusion, as it were.
As a person of the generation that has been under the influence of advanced media at every stage of their life, I made a fictional world inside which I am the protagonist, thus making a second version of myself. In this place resides my past, present and future.
This is an ongoing experience. As an adult now, where I live is a so-called new town, a planned city. In that area, everything, even nature, has been removed and artificially rebuilt. There is an artificial lake, and sometimes when the night comes, fog emanates from the lake and covers the whole city creating a mysterious aura. The atmosphere of it is not like nature in reality, but like a film set without any traces of human beings. The bleak and spooky sight of this place stimulates my fearful curiosity. I am completely captivated by it, and I feel like I am a protagonist in a movie. I live in reality, but what I see within it is a combination of fiction and reality.
I have left myself in a delusion.
Chawechong
The sun went down as I sat with the TV I couldn't turn off, even as it was time to head to the academy. By midnight, my mother would return from work. To check whether I had earnestly completed my homework sheets -or merely pretended to- she would place her hand on the CRT screen. The static electricity would snap and crackle—tak-tak, tadda-dak—proving my lie.
The child who once watched [Jjanggu] and [Pororo] -most famous children's animation in Korea-eventually found themselves in random chats on the computer, and experienced early forms of cyberbullying and digital extortion through anonymous guestbook messages.
At school, I took notes on cheaply laminated paper textbooks that barely held any graphite. We passed around erasers and markers to write our names, and I carefully wrapped my books in protective plastic to keep them from getting damaged. I began to experience the “rapid progress of technology” not as something I had only heard about, but through my own body. In some competitive school districts, language academies began requiring iPads for enrollment. Handwritten notes had been replaced with PDFs and I, too, had grown skilled in using such tools.
As someone who has fully passed through this transitional phase, I live with a doubled sensibility -between digital and analog, between familiarity and alienation, without being able to fully settle into either. This hybridity is not merely tied to a single generation. It shapes how I remember, how I construct narrative, and even the emotional texture that emerges in my work.
This “hybrid media cognitive system” always reflects tactility and sensory experience. The dual nature
of media perception reappears as immaterial interfaces that reflect memory -and this becomes
especially evident in my practice, which primarily uses video as its medium.
I translate deeply emotional, analog experiences into user interfaces (UI) through the language of video.
The noise and glitches produced by the experience of being “in-between” are translated into pixels, drifting endlessly through gaps in information -until they are encountered by a viewer, thus acquiring user experience (UX).
One of my previous works, <Gong-sul Urban Site>, deals with aged or idle architectural spaces. I approached these sites metaphorically as data centers—spaces that hold traces of residents’ everyday lives.
This forms the UI -the user interface- of the central characters and lived narratives within the video. The process of converting these into digital video is an act of documentation. The work becomes a pixelated form of emotion, and the Seonji installation (a traditional Korean food made from coagulated blood) placed within the exhibition space becomes the UX -the user experience- that reconnects the viewer with the work outside the screen.
Ultimately, my work begins with a question: how can coarse, personal fragments of memory be stored and later re-experienced? I’m interested in structuring emotional experiences through the digital medium of video, and in how those structures are sensorially perceived when encountered by an audience.
To me, an interface is not simply a tool for control or manipulation -it is a conduit, an access point into the layered strata of life.
Anina Göpel
Perception, Tactile Systems, Motor Skills, and Their Connection to playboard and Mobile
Touch is one of the earliest forms of human perception. Even before sight or hearing develop, the skin, as the largest sensory organ, mediates contact with the environment. It responds to temperature, pressure, pain, and subtle tactile stimuli, forming a highly differentiated perceptual system. Fast A-beta fibers enable the immediate transmission of sensory information, while the later-discovered CT fibers are particularly sensitive to gentle, interpersonal touch, allowing a slower, affective form of tactile perception. The skin thus functions not only as a physiological interface but also as a communicative medium, shaping social, emotional, and spatial experiences.
Closely linked to tactile perception is motor skill development. Through purposeful movement—grasping, touching, turning, and holding—children explore the world physically. Motor activity structures perception by allowing children to experience forms, weights, textures, and spatial relations firsthand. Sensory input and movement form an inseparable system: movement generates perception, and perception guides movement. This dynamic loop is central to the development of body awareness, spatial cognition, and cognitive structures more broadly.
playboard and Mobile operates precisely at this intersection of perception, bodily experience, and cultural objects. The series examines the forms that surround children in early life, which act as primary “perceptual media.” Historically significant Fröbel toys, whose geometric simplicity continues to influence educational design, serve as a starting point. They structure both visual and haptic-motor experience: their clear shapes, edges, and proportions act like didactic grids that guide how children grasp, build, organize, and categorize the world.
playboard and Mobile challenges these idealized and binary form systems. By referencing digital glitches—such as errors in 3D scans—it generates new, non-ideal, non-binary, and hybrid objects. These “disruptions” unsettle familiar perception and motor patterns: they demand new ways of grasping, introduce unexpected tactile stimuli, and defy conventional form-function expectations. In doing so, they shift the usual coupling of perception and movement and open alternative, less normative ways to engage with objects and the body.
At the same time, the integration of different cultural toy traditions—such as combining Korean and German forms—interweaves diverse perceptual cultures. Perception is thus revealed as a medial and cultural process: it is not only physiological but also historically and socially conditioned. Just as the skin differentiates between stimuli, the hybrid forms in playboard and Mobile combine multiple aesthetic systems into new spaces for meaning and experience.
Overall, playboard and Mobile connects the biological foundations of perception and motor skills with a media-critical perspective. The works demonstrate that playful forms are not merely childhood objects but formative media that shape how we see, touch, move, and understand the world. By disrupting and expanding familiar patterns, they create a space where perception becomes more diverse, bodily, and culturally permeable.
Kim Nayœng:
On My Media Perceptual Ecology
I have been surrounded by digital media since my elementary school years. From installing games via CD-ROMs to today’s environment—where smartphones instantly connect us across the globe—the digital sphere has evolved in parallel with my everyday life. As a child, I was deeply absorbed in games and online communities. Revisiting those early experiences now, I recognize that media functioned not merely as channels for information, but as structural system that subtly reproduced gendered power and social norms.
Gendered hierarchies often operated even more explicitly within digital environments. In online games such as League of Legends or Overwatch, revealing my gender frequently resulted in harassment or dismissive reactions. To avoid this, I used male-coded usernames, turned off voice chat, or relied on voice-modifying programs to lower my tone. Performing a masculine-coded identity became a strategy for survival in these spaces. Looking back, it was also a process of unconsciously adapting to an environment that pressured me to suppress or disavow my identity as a woman. The media continuously disciplined me into specific modes of visibility through idealized images of femininity, gendered stereotypes, and heteronormative narratives. My perceptual framework was shaped within these long-standing habits of binary gender performance and self-censorship.
At the same time, the rapid digitization of Korean society—and its swiftly shifting cultural landscape—produced a media environment where analog sensibilities coexist with digital logic. Real-time connectivity and algorithmic distribution systems structure sensory experience itself, regulating what I see and how I respond within predetermined frames. Visual experience in digital spaces increasingly demands smooth, flat, refined images that circulate as standardized units of “visual information.” I feel resistant to these polished formats, repeatable styles, and consumable image templates. Within them, the materiality of sensation disappears, and resolution and format become new forms of regulation.
Painting is the central medium of my practice. As a traditional, material medium, painting inherently conflicts with the conditions of the digital. It retains qualities that resist digital reduction—surface irregularities, physical scale, the density and unpredictability of paint. While working, I continually return to a single question:
“In a society where technology has advanced so dramatically, why insist on making paintings—here and now?”
I relate this question to the perceptual system shaped by my own media experiences. Ultimately, I continue to paint because, in a world where my senses and information are increasingly translated into algorithms, and where technological systems routinely anticipate human behavior, painting allows me to hold on to what remains uncertain, unprogrammable, and not fully predictable. This desire—to stay with what escapes calculation—is what anchors my practice.
Yoonju Shin
I believe that for humans, who are born into a state of nothingness, it is media that initiates and guides thinking. People define media differently because the sources that shaped their thoughts vary.
In my case, the absence of parental guidance left a gap that was filled by media. I learned how to think, speak, and understand the world through others' stories, emotions, and forms of stimulation.
The way I think is thus not rooted in a single origin. Different contexts and fragments of information are combined and sometimes clash. Although I am a survivor of violence, I often find myself becoming disturbingly desensitized to others' violence. Surrounded by excessive images and information, the pain of others is consumed quickly, and my own memories become entangled and distorted in the process.
Even though the texts in my work are drawn from my own experiences, they often end up being consumed from a third-person perspective, like: 'Yoonju apparently went through something like that.' At that moment, my memory no longer feels like my own. It is approached in the same way we consume media stories of others—with empathy, suspicion, or indifference.
The images presented alongside my texts each hold their own stories, but to viewers, those stories may seem unimportant. The images overlap, intrude, and instead of forming a coherent narrative, they leave only sensory traces. Audiences sit, absorb, and consume. These images, severed from their original context, begin to drift without meaning.
People piece together these fragments, reinterpreting and remembering in their own way. But these interpretations are always incomplete, sometimes expanding, sometimes forgotten, leaving no absolute truth behind.
My work traces this distortion and scattering of memory and meaning that arise from consuming others' stories. The violence I depict may be mine, but it is no longer mine alone. It remains in a state of distance, shaped by the gaze of others.
Jeonghyeon Shim
Back in elementary school, my language academy teacher, Eliot, once played an animated film about environmental pollution. But instead of focusing on the lesson, I became fascinated with the platform itself—YouTube. That was the moment I first discovered what media was. Using English practice as an excuse, I began spending every day watching dopamine-loaded prank videos, encountering people and situations I would never see in my everyday life. Half my day was spent plugged into the online world, chatting with pen pals, and my sense of time sometimes drifted—aligned not with Korea, but with Mexico, South Africa, or Poland.
Morning to afternoon, my reality was soaked in the chaotic, typo-ridden KIN-scared, OTL- collapsed language of early internet Korean culture; night to dawn, it shifted into a life drenched in LOL and slay. Hours melted away as I absorbed new cultures, slang, Hollywood gossip—yet this state of sleepless excitement wasn’t a story unique to me. It was an ordinary, shared rite of passage for my generation.
When I spend long enough living inside a culture where fun must prove itself within ten minutes—or less—my teenage mind gradually feels thinned out, stretched across too many speeds and expectations. I enter spaces hoping someone will understand the context that makes me who I am, yet in the end, I was read through a narrow frame-as a teenage girl from South Korea, regardless of the context I tried to share.
Once, a friend who liked BTS messaged me, and I decided I would introduce her to Korean classical literature. I sent a thirty-minute audio recording of myself reading aloud—thinking about how to make the character Heungbu sound even more Heungbu-like—and, unsurprisingly, she disappeared. When you present fragments of yourself as images and text on a profile, people often arrive with expectations shaped by popular representations of Korea—k-pop, anime-adjacent aesthetics, and fast, cheerful content—only to encounter long-form seriousness and slow-burn sincerity instead. So they ghost—vanishing quietly, without explanation.
Recently, long-form vlogs and ASMR videos have become trendy—slow, calm content. The irony is that these, too, are treated like background noise: something to fast-forward through or leave playing while folding laundry. The content itself fades; only the act of consumption remains. We reach a point where we don’t remember what we watched—only the swipe, the dilating pupils, the stiff turtle-neck posture, and the growing swell of emptiness expanding quietly in the background.
One of the newest ways people try to fill that emptiness is by talking to AI. These models, effortlessly mimicking a user’s language and thought patterns, satisfy emotional needs with uncanny speed. And as communication becomes simpler and more frictionless, it sometimes feels as though we drift toward a form of intensified individualism. A friend who doesn’t immediately “understand” us is kept at a distance, or we suit up in shallow knowledge learned from AI or short-form videos and wield it as a measuring stick to judge one another. (Of course—this is a matter of choice, attitude, and responsibility.)
What is easy, fast, and convenient often carries poison. In this ecosystem where everything is replicated, resold, reposted endlessly, perhaps what we need is a disruptive presence—something that doesn’t blend in easily, something that resists optimization and smooth consumption. Something that resists assimilation. Something unmappable by language—difficult, inconvenient, hysterical, embodied. (Including themes of hysteria and somatization that I critically engage with in my work.) And yet, I hope such outsiders do not become another gated cartel of meaning and power. Just as removing toxicity isn’t the same as healing—the goal isn’t purity, but coexistence. We need a new wave where things are allowed to exist as they are and still survive.
Sometimes, I secretly wish the internet would slow down. I hope for errors. I want to experience an AI having a glitch—its own kind of hysteria.