"Ah... there's a person moving inside that narrow box?"
This is the first thing visitors say when they enter the exhibition hall. Some think it is a performance, others believe it is a video created by AI. Occasionally, a visitor waves a hand and asks, "Is that a real person?"
Inside the box, a masked figure dances in silence. The surfaces of the box are surrounded by mirrors engraved with a medieval confessional. As reality and the reflections in the mirrors intermingle, a single holographic scene unfolds. Someone gazes for a long while and then asks:
"Who is that person?"
At that moment, we do not merely stop at asking who that person is. Before wondering what they are seeing, the visitor first asks whom they are now facing. What is interesting is that the question has no correct answer. Perhaps what the visitor confronts is not a stranger but an as-yet-unnamed version of themselves.
Not long ago, the British daily The Guardian reported on the record-breaking heat waves and large-scale disasters that struck Europe, diagnosing that "extreme heat waves reveal the extreme inequalities that exist in our society." The climate crisis is no longer a problem of nature alone. It is a fracture in the ecosystem and, at the same time, a fracture in human civilization. AI, too, has become both a technological innovation and a mirror that once again questions the boundaries of what it means to be human.
The same holds for the abrupt changes brought about by the pandemic, war, and AI. They may appear to be different crises, but in the end they converge on a single question. In what manner have we built our civilization, and what kind of world will we create going forward? Modern society is becoming a vast tribunal that demands humanity reflect once again on the way of life it has built for itself.
Last April, I gave a special lecture in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. In an age of crisis, human beings become connected to more and more, yet strangely they grow deeply isolated. Information overflows, but conversation disappears. The denser the network becomes, why does our heart experience such deep alienation? The art and architecture project combining AI, "Future Transformation: Digital Confession," began from precisely this question. It proposed a new image of humanity needed in the posthuman era and the meaning of "Refugia." Should not modern people cease to remain beings who merely adapt to their environment, and instead become "architecting subjects" who newly design the relationship between technology and space and build their own lives? That was the question I posed in the lecture.
This problem consciousness is also the philosophical starting point that runs through my long-standing works, "Future Transformation of Urban Architecture: Digital Confession" and "Malleable Bodies: Flusser, Foucault, Plasticity, and the Corset." These projects have been presented in the form of installations and performances at the themed exhibition and opening performance of the Korea Architecture Culture Festival, at Walt Disney Concert Hall's REDCAT, and at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.
Among them, "Digital Confession" is an architectural installation and philosophical device that redesigns the medieval confessional with AI.
Designed to confront the alienation and oppression of the present era, this work begins from a paradox. The visitor first puts on a 3D-printed mask. We usually think of a mask as a symbol of falsehood. We regard it as a tool for hiding the face and concealing identity. But in "Digital Confession," the mask plays the opposite role. It is not worn to hide the face, but is a philosophical device worn to temporarily set aside the countless faces that society has placed upon us.
Age and gender, occupation and role, achievement and failure, others' expectations and gazes. We live bearing too many faces. Ironically, a person becomes more honest only when the face is covered. This is the first paradox of the work.
The masked participant stands before a camera. The movements are converted into real-time data, and the data is reborn as a semi-transparent hologram avatar inside the "Confessional" at the center of the exhibition hall. The body of reality does not disappear. Rather, another body is generated. The masked figure who at first danced silently inside the box temporarily dismantles the self of reality and, through data and holograms, gives birth to a "cyborg body."
Then what is it that we experience?
The visitor crosses the boundaries of human and machine, reality and virtuality, the real and the illusory, and experiences a mode of being different from before through the body. The work does not display technology itself, but newly designs the way in which humans confront themselves again.
At the philosophical starting point of this work lies the thought of Michel Foucault. He read modern society as a "regime of confession." We continuously explain, prove, and are evaluated at schools and hospitals, in interview rooms and on social media. Confession no longer remains a religious ritual. It has become a mode of control by which modern society understands and manages the individual. So I wanted to ask the opposite.
"Is a confessional without judgment or evaluation possible?" "Digital Confession" is an artistic and at the same time technological response to that question. Here, AI is not a being that analyzes or judges humans. It does not score emotions either. Rather, it becomes a mirror that reflects the trembling of the human interior. The cyborg within the hologram helps the visitor confront emotions of their own that they had failed to see. Here, confession becomes not oppression and control but reflection and liberation. Wounds become not deficiency but material for creation in shaping a new self.
My earlier work "Malleable Bodies" extends this idea into the concept of the "variable body." A human being is not a completed being but a being that is endlessly transformed and reconstituted. What matters is not erasing wounds. It is transforming even the form and memory of wounds into possibilities for shaping a new being. A scar may be not a record of failure but the shape of time survived.
"An age of climate crisis, pandemic, and disconnection. How will we survive together?" This question has long run through my work as an artist and architect.
Architecture is not simply the technology of erecting buildings. It is a sensibility for reading the wounds of the times, and the work of imagining and building a refuge (Refugia) where humans can once again dwell even within a collapsed world. It is not difficult to diagnose modern society as an age of alienation. But diagnosis alone does not change the world. What is needed is to redesign what new relationships humans and technology, space and sensation can form in order to live together.
The Refugia I speak of is not merely a safe space for avoiding disaster. It is a place where humans and technology, nature and society learn a new relationship without pushing each other away. It is not a place to leave the collapsed world, but a space to experiment with ways of living together again upon it.
My past work, which realized Slavoj Žižek's "thinking body" through projection mapping, also began from the same question. How can invisible philosophy be experienced through the body? Studying Eastern thought, art philosophy, and media philosophy, what I ultimately confirmed was that no matter how abstract the thought, it returns to the space and the body in which we live.
I still do not know the answer. But I do not want to stop asking questions. Art, technology, and architecture are for me not tools that present answers but ways of experimenting with possible futures. The refuge we must build together upon a fractured world is not an already-completed building. It will finally be made in the process of posing questions to one another, imagining together, and responding each in our own way.
The question that "Digital Confession" poses to us is, in the end, one. Upon this collapsed world, what relationships will we architect and live by?
