Introduction

A single light flickers to life in the darkness. A laboratory unveils itself. On the workbench lie disassembled anatomical models, mechanical components, an inscrutable tangle of wires. The researcher remains absent. Alone, you step into this space that someone has only momentarily vacated.

Busan MoCA Performing Arts: Body, Under Experiment is, as its title intimates, a narrative that probes the other body in humanoid form. The bodies addressed here do not simply denote the corporeal bodies that we know; rather, they encompass somatic sensation reconstituted from the ground up, hybrids fused with the machinic, and entirely novel assemblages constructed as the shadow of the human itself, thereby redrawing the very boundaries of what a body might be. 

The progressive tense embedded in the phrase under experiment is no mere rhetorical flourish. Divided into three separate experimental chambers, the exhibition adopts a sequential structure in which each experiment is activated month by month. The introduction of such temporality positions the viewer as a witness to the experimental process itself. Entering a newly illuminated laboratory, one encounters the absent researcher’s traces: instruments, working tools, unfinished prototypes. On certain days, one may even happen upon the very moment when a body is being assembled or a sense recalibrated.

The first experimental site is Geumhyung Jeong’s Studio/Storage.

The second experiment may be found in Hoonida Kim’s Fine-Tuning Training Room. 

The third laboratory hosts Byungjun Kwon’s Robotic Sound Workshop.

Protocol

Of particular note is the premise that, at the point when all three experiments reach completion, every laboratory goes dark. This situates the exhibition within a distinctly performative temporality; the gallery ceases to serve as a site of permanent installation and is instead transformed into a laboratory where transient and contingent events unfold. Rather than presenting the exhibition as a finished outcome, the work shares its ongoing process with the audience.

Discussion

The three laboratories within Busan MoCA Performing Arts: Body, Under Experiment each operate as independent inquiries. Through the machinic body, they collectively interrogate the essence of the human condition.

The machine-bodies revealed in Body, Under Experiment inhabit a place far removed from the utopian promise of Megalopolis. In Matsumoto Reiji’s 1970s manga Galaxy Express 999, there appears a planet called Megalopolis, where the affluent obtain mechanical bodies and enjoy eternal life while the impoverished suffer discrimination. The mechanical body was a promise of perfection and permanence; gleaming, frictionless machine-flesh was the future that humanity had long coveted.

However, the robots here are not perfect; they move haltingly, are ceaselessly assembled and readjusted. Sensation is extended, yet what results is not a clear-cut enhancement but an unfamiliar redistribution. The machine neither replaces nor completes the human; rather, it illuminates the peripheries of the human—the vulnerabilities and latent possibilities of the body that had hitherto escaped our notice.

Conclusion

Perhaps the perfect mechanical body we once dreamed of was unachievable from the start. What lies before us, instead, are bodies perpetually under experiment, forms in the midst of process, beings that refuse completion. And it may well be that this—precisely this—is the more profoundly human shape of any future to come.

※ Please Note

‐ Unexpected movements may occur during the experiment.

‐ When all three experiments reach completion, every laboratory will go dark.

‐ The visitor serves as both a witness to and participant in the experiment.