JungAh Lee

This piece premiered at the <Six Humans> concert on June 17, 2022. It was composed by each composer after visiting the exhibition <Turing Test – AI’s Confession of Love> at the Seoul National University Museum of Art and selecting one of their favorite works. The overall theme is “two contrasting elements and the spectrum between them” and the intention is to further explore humans in this era of living with various machines and even AI.

Somewhere between a machine and an animal, Machinimal is a familiar yet bizarre object. Artist Dong-yeol Lim (1979-) puts a question mark on long-standing ideas about machines through the appearance of a new life form created based on the similarities between machines and organisms.

But I thought Machinimal is still a machine, because it is dead from the beginning.

Although there are some musical elements that symbolize vitality (such as concentrated strings and curvilinear movements), I wanted the main impression to be the rigidity and awkwardness of the Machinimal as a ‘machine’, which is its essence.

DongYeol Lim, Machinimal New Sena (2019). Photo by JungAh Lee.