On-demand labor is a twenty-first-century phenomenon. Algorithms prioritizing employee flexibility and adaptability result in low-wage jobs where the laborer has no control over their own time. Emotional compensation comes through online fantasy worlds, video games, and manga. But resistance emerges: labor actions by Amazon delivery drivers and Starbucks workers in the United States, the tang ping (lying flat) movement among Chinese slacker youth, “quiet quitting” on a global scale. Both desperate fantasizing and a rebellious spirit permeate Ayoung Kim’s exhibition“Many Worlds Over.”
In the video Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2022, Kim introduces her main character, Ernst Mo. She is a humble driver whose work is controlled by an app called Delivery Dancer, and her dreams are governed only by the need to satisfy the Dancemaster, a faceless dispatcher who communicates with her exclusively through the app. A smartphone mounted on a flexible arm, Stipulation, 2022, shows viewers the control app that allows riders to check in, sync their helmets, and select and navigate rides. Mo and the other Delivery Dancers wear white-and-gray uniforms and black motorcycle helmets as they ride around a fictional Seoul cityscape that shifts from live-action set to animation to 3D environments crafted from lidar scans.
Here, the desperation of the laborer tied to an algorithmic clock is embodied by a young Asian woman whose life is reduced to these managerial targets. She sees no way out of grueling, low-wage labor despite the technological advantages that surround and shape her. As Mo is less and less able to meet the Dancemaster’s narrow delivery timetables with its optimized routes, she encounters a nemesis: En Storm, who first appears as another driver and later as Ernst Mo’s shadow twin. Both characters’ names are anagrams of monster, reflecting the Frankensteinian condition of postindustrial reanimation that characterizes their lives.
Kim describes her work as “pandemic fiction,” attuned to the changes to daily experience, such as increased isolation and reliance on delivery drivers, which the Covid-19 quarantine accelerated. Principles of physics also factor into the work, which proposes Ernst Mo and En Storm as entangled entities who can affect one another across time and distance. Here in the Hamburger Bahnhof, blue carpets, mirrored walls, and gridded fluorescent lighting evoke the darkly futuristic spaces seen in Kim’s videos. Sculptures bring the audience theatrically into her virtual world. Ghost Dancers B, 2022, for instance, depicts two life-size delivery dancers wrestling, while videos play in their helmets—their capacity for external vision consumed by an endless void. Broken glass surrounds them, their deliveries cast temporarily aside as they struggle, or embrace. In Ghost Dancers A, 2022, the helmets, pulled from their bodies, are suspended in the gallery space with dangling “spines” of cable that stretch down and across the floor. The roadway runs onward in their helmets as the two decapitated dancers face off against one another in perpetuity.
Kim’s aesthetic originates in popular art forms. Her wallpaper installation Evening Peak Time Is Back, 2022, references Korean Girls Love comics and highlights the erotic potential of the two dancers’ altercations. Here we see the girls with their arms around each other, grasping with intent, their helmets off. Their intimate dance is born of the scarcity of human contact in an optimized lifetime. Kim’s work also invokes the gamification of labor, allowing us to navigate a playable Delivery Dancer Simulation (Game), 2022, built from 3D lidar scans of the physical sets that she built for the films.
The centerpiece of “Many Worlds Over” is a recent video work in three channels, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver, 2024, with live-action footage, game-engine animation, and generative AI. In this work, Ernst Mo and En Storm, enemies and lovers, align to escape the technologically optimized dystopia that engulfs them by breaking through into different planes of existence. Their challenge is ours: to conquer the algorithm and regain control of our time.
