MIN YOUNG KIM

Installation

Sugar Engine 슈거 엔진
Disaster Studies 재난 연구
Giant Whisper 자이언트위스퍼
Companions 곁
Yesterday’s Today 어제의오늘

Performance

Alain 알랭
Holymotors 홀리모터스
Hide and Seek 숨바꼭질

Research

+

Info / CV

Installation view at Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2024

DISASTER STUDIES

2024

AI-Generated and Synthesized photographic archives

‘Disaster Studies’ presents fifty AI-generated photographs documenting a flood that exists everywhere and nowhere, transforming disaster from event to algorithmic spectacle.

These synthetic images possess all the visual markers of authentic crisis documentation—the grain of urgency, the composition of catastrophe—while their referent remains purely algorithmic. Assembled from countless media fragments, emergency broadcasts, and climate anxiety dreams, they reveal how presence no longer requires physical reality.

The work probes how disasters circulate through social media as interchangeable events, where floods in Seoul become indistinguishable from those in New York, yesterday's crisis merges with tomorrow's prediction. The AI mirrors our pattern-recognition systems, extracting and recombining the visual language of disaster until original events dissolve into spectacle. In the contemporary media environment, disaster operates simultaneously as warning and entertainment, trauma and noise—collective memory shaped more by algorithmic reconstruction than direct experience.

‘Disaster Studies’ ultimately reveals disaster imagery as currency in the attention economy, where spectacular catastrophe generates value through circulation regardless of correspondence to physical events. The work reflects our permanent state of disaster, mediated through images that no longer need reality as their referent.

supported by ZER01NE

Exhibition Link
ZER01NE day2023
Art Center Nabi
Forkingroom2024