Yeseul Song

2020 FIC Fellow

Yeseul Song is a South Korean born and New York based artist and educator. She examines the fluid nature of human perception and its relationship with the culture, environment and the future by creating artwork that challenges how we normally perceive and interact with the world. Her work combines digital technology and analog materials to create interactive experiences that invite viewers to be part of the work through bodily movements and creative expressions.

Her on-going project, Invisible Sculptures, subverts the visual dominance in the art world and our culture to enable more inclusive and creative views of the world. The project was recently presented as a solo exhibition at the Clayarch Museum in South Korea.

Yeseul is the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design residency, the MAAF Grant by Wave Farm and New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), the Six Foot Platform residency by Brooklyn Arts Council and Dumbo, the Future Imagination Collaboratory (FIC) Fund fellowship, the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy fellowship, ITP Research/Teaching fellowships, and Mana Contemporary’s new media program residency. She was a member of the Art & Code track of New Museum’s NEW INC in partnership with Rhizome. She is the winner of iF Design Award and Communication Arts Interactive Annual. She teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' ITP/IMA.

She is an alumna of NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), and Yonsei University.

Projects

Invisible Sculptures #9

Invisible Sculptures is a series of artistic experiments that studies human perception with sculptures that are invisible to eyes and can only be “seen” by engaging through senses other than vision. The sculptures are made of sound, heat, airflow, and smell. The audience is invited to incorporate various sensory abilities to feel the sculptures and make physical versions of the sculptures using clay. The clay sculptures become the audiences' collective perception of the invisible sculptures, celebrating individual differences in human perception. Read more about the project here.

A new work-in-progress piece in the series, Invisible Sculptures: #9, is a large and fluid invisible sculpture that can only be visualized through a collaborative performance of participating audiences whose movements are guided by sound feedback.

Slow Dimming Study

Slow Dimming Study is a set of artistic physical interfaces that enable audiences to control light bulbs through a meditative and cultural experience. This on-going project takes a deeper look into the moment of everyday interactions that we usually do not pay attention to, such as switching on and off a light, and turns them into meaningful experiences by intervening the moment.

Educational/Research Projects (Collaborations)

ITP Weather Band: an experimental band creating music with weather data collected from a DIY weather station. The group built a weather station system that collects and posts weather data to the web, and created experimental instruments that turn the environmental data into music and visuals. The band uses sound and music as mediums for delivering information about our immediate environment through the auditory sense. This project is a collaboration between faculties, alums, and graduate students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (NYU ITP), and Yeseul has been co-leading the group as a creative director/producer. ITP Weather Band is a part of the ITPower, a research group that explores ways to contribute to a sustainable future with creative uses of technology.

6FT Project: A collaborative research project that attempts to intervene into our current social dilemma caused by the pandemic where maintaining physical distance from each other is a way of keeping each other safe, but this isolation could come at the cost of mental health. The project aims to positively influence individual’s attitudes and feelings towards the 6 feet rule, which can lead to behavioral changes, while reminding us that social experiences remain valuable and are our source of hope. The project is a collaboration with a hardware engineer Amitabh Shrivastava and supported by Sharon Chang.