New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced ITP Faculty member Yeseul Song as one of the recipients of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program for Digital/Electronic Arts, which it has administered for the past 41 years with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). NYFA has awarded a total of $903,000 to 132 artists (including 6 collaborations) throughout New York State, whose ages range from 25-90 years, in the following disciplines: Craft/Sculpture, Digital/Electronic Arts, Nonfiction Literature, Poetry, and Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts.
Digital/Electronic Arts Fellows are utilizing interactive systems, immersive environments, and hybrid analog-digital processes—among other technologically innovative applications—to explore themes including identity, artificial intelligence, surveillance, migration, and ecology. Strong applications demonstrated that technology was central to the meaning and structure of the work rather than purely functional or stylistic.
Yeseul Song is a South Korean-born, NYC-based artist who uses technology, interaction, and participation as art media. Her work uncovers creative possibilities of non-visual senses through inventive sensory languages that advocate for imaginative and inclusive views of the world. Her work questions how we normally perceive, think, and interact through novel perceptual experiences. Yeseul’s work redefines the relationship between art and participants—in her work, the audience becomes participants and performers. She explores and occupies non-traditional public spaces as well as institutions to challenge commonly held ideas about access and accessibility of art. Outdoor public spaces, where she shares work-in-progress and ready-to-show work, become extensions of her studio.
She’s best known for Invisible Sculptures (2018-2021), a series of non-visual experiential sculptures made of sound, warmth, air, smell, and thought. The series was shown internationally, and a book about the series was published (Invisible and Existent, ISBN 979-11-90401-32-6) in 2021. One of the works in the series is recently acquired by Middlebury College Museum of Art for its permanent collection.
