Seoul Haemong
Client: DDP, City of Seoul & Refik Anadol
Role: Concept Development, Creative Producer, Writer
Year: 2019
Modality: Large-scale public projection mapping, AI-generated visuals
Overview
Seoul Haemong transformed the DDP building into a living canvas for Seoul's collective memory through machine learning-generated projection mapping. The public art installation synthesized thousands of citizen-contributed photographs, archival images, and documents, collected through a citywide public call—using AI to reveal connections between individual memories and generate alternative visions of Seoul's past and future. The performance explored the city as a living entity with its own consciousness, visualizing the otherwise imperceptible dance between people, place, and time through multi-dimensional spatial storytelling projected onto DDP's iconic architecture.
Challenge
How do you visualize a city's collective consciousness? Seoul exists as interlocking networks of individual memories, communal histories, and future aspirations—but this "soul" remains largely invisible. The challenge was developing a conceptual framework that could transform citizen narratives into public spectacle, making tangible the relationship between personal memory and collective identity. This required not just gathering visual data but articulating how machine intelligence could reveal hidden connections between disparate individual stories and generate alternate realities showing how Seoul might have evolved or could evolve differently.
Approach
As creative researcher at Refik Anadol Studio, I led concept development, production coordination, and narrative framework. I developed the core concept framing Seoul as a living entity capable of remembering and learning its own movements, with the installation revealing the city's otherwise uncontainable essence.
I coordinated a citywide public call for photographs and documents, inviting Seoul citizens to contribute personal and archival visual memories, individual narratives offering windows into past and future. Working with DDP and the City of Seoul, I helped structure the data collection to capture diverse perspectives across time, geography, and community, creating a comprehensive dataset representing Seoul's collective consciousness.
I framed the conceptual narrative around "topographic memory" - using DDP's architecture as both canvas and metaphor for exploring memory's structure. The building's form became the stage for revealing Seoul's layered histories, with machine intelligence synthesizing citizen contributions to visualize connections between intimate memories. I wrote exhibition materials explaining how AI mapping individual stories into collective consciousness, generating alternate Seoul realities based on interconnected narratives, and transforming the festival from something created for the city into something the city creates with its citizens.
Curatorial Text
A city is a living entity, a constantly changing whole that is capable of remembering and learning its own movements. As with any living being, it has its own unique rhythm, a certain ebb and flow, that is dependent on the relationship between its many networks and urban ecosystems . The interplay of its people, physicality and environment makes up its essence, an imperceivable dance that until now has remained largely invisible. For Seoul Haemong, Refik Anadol Studio collaborated with the DDP and city of Seoul to create a public art installation that showcased this otherwise uncontainable soul.
Using the DDP as a canvas, the performance collaborated with the mind of a machine to unearth the materiality of this structure and explore the architecture of memory itself. Upon unveiling DDP’s form, the building set the stage for the exploration of a new kind of topographic memory, revealing upon its face the city’s collective histories. Choreographing this piece began by collecting data from the city in the form of the citizens’ stories. These stories come in the form of archival and personal photographs and documents – individual and communal narratives that offer a window into the past and hopes for the future. Using the machine mind to see the connections between these intimate visual memories, the performance transported viewers from a limited sense of place into a multi-dimensional spatial journey that visualized an otherwise intangible understanding of space and time. Likewise, upon synthesizing those memories, alternate realities of Seoul were imagined, revealing the collective consciousness of the city based on the interconnectedness of those individual ones.
도시는 스스로 기억하고 학습 할 수 있는 끊임없이 변화하는 역동적 개체로 이해 될 수 있습니다. 모든 살아있는 존재와 마찬가지로, 도시는 여러 구성원들의 관계에 따라 생성된 자신만 의 고유한 리듬과 변화를 가지고 있습니다. 사람들, 물질적 특징 및 환경의 상호작용은 지금까지 보여지지 않았고 인지하지 못했던 본질을 구성합니다. Seoul Haemong은 다르게는 수용될수없는 도시의 혼을 보여주는 종합공연입니다.
이와 같은 작품을 안무하려면 우선 도시로부터 상상의 이야기들, 기억과 꿈의 데이터를 수집해야합니다. 서울 시민으로부터 수집된 이 정보들은 기록된 문서들, 개인의 사진등의 형태로써 과거와 미래에 대한 희망을 연결시키는 창이 되어 개인과 공공의 이야기가 될수 있습니다. Machine intelligence를 적용해서 이러한 다양한 관점들이 함께 엮여져 서울시만의 의 식을 구체화합니다. 이러한 의식이 구현되면, machine learning을 통해 무형상태로 존재했던 서울시의 미래와 기억들을 구체화시킬 수 있습니다. Seoul Haemong은 도시를 위한 축제가 아닌, 도시 자체가 시민들과 함께 만들어가는 축제입니다.