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.
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