[Media Art Now] Sanghee’s gameplay revisits idea of interactivity and connectivity

Everything seems synchronized today, happening at the same time and at the same speed. You can connect yourself with the world, whenever you want and even when you do not want to. It is an age where a sense of being together is more easily obtained than a sense of being separated. But is this really true? Is the synchronicity a prerequisite or a preference when you seek to generate interactive togetherness?

Sanghee (capitalized as SANGHEE by the artist), who came to distinguish herself with her VR-based works in the media art scene, is less interested in the technological medium itself than a social bond of relationship, how it forms and how it feels in contemporary, super-connected society. Her "Oneroom-Babel (2022-2023)" is a single-play interactive VR work, inviting you to catch a glimpse of young people living in studio units. The Korean housing type called “oneroom" in Konglish indicates a studio flat where the major functional elements of a home such as a bed, bathroom and kitchen are equipped in one single room.

For this work, Sanghee interviewed more than 20 young people and captured their one-room spaces with a Lidar (light detection and ranging) scanner. The scan data was then processed into a dreamlike virtual architecture. She constructed it by placing one studio unit upon another. In every oneroom, you can discover jellyfish-like creatures, some of them obviously visible, others hidden, so that you need to bend down or move your head. When you unlock them via a controller, sentences pop up, extracted from the interviews and written by the artist.

The oneroom is for Sanghee an embodiment of suspension in terms of social maturity. As you explore a succession of rooms, you feel as if you are getting deeper or higher, becoming fathomless or weightless, nowhere or anywhere. The project leads to an indirect form of interactivity with oneroom residents who may be struggling with precarious, frustrating living conditions. Her design of virtual structure allows you to augment your sense of empathy with built-in emotional layers.

More taxing manual labor is required for taking part in "Worlding··· (2023)," a hand-tracking VR game. There is a dead giant in a swampy terrain and you are encouraged to pile up soil to bury the body with your hands. After the set amount of labor for the day is completed, you are led to a lodge to read a diary written by predecessors. The next day, you have to perform the same task again, with all the parameters reset to the start. At some point in the repeated labor, you realize that your virtual hands have become chapped and aged.

This work is characterized by another dimension of connectedness. When each player completes a session, the topographical data produced by the participant’s digging and heaping inside the game is printed out to become part of a collective map displayed on the wall of the exhibition. There is no real-time interaction between the players, but the monotonous, apparently endless, individual toil transpires to constitute a world collectively so to speak -- “worlding," always in the present progressive.

In Sanghee's world-making, the game engines are essentially in action and she even attempts gaming without employing any technological gadgets. Interactive Map for Encounters (2024) is a tabletop role-playing game (TRPG). There is an isolated, derelict village called a “hometown” and each player comes to the hometown as a character assigned according to their choices in the pre-game questionnaire, say, a biologist or a firefighter.

This gameplay is driven only by one-to-one dialogues, prompted by the artist’s questions and elaborated by the participant’s responses, personal and social, organized and improvised. The accounts and footprints of every player’s dialogue are engraved upon those of previous players. The cumulative map is a recording of participation history and it is also a testimonial of collective memory of those who played with and thereby crafted it. Sanghee's work is geared to foster an environment that makes players immerse themselves in the storytelling of the artist as well as other players, not simultaneously but interactively over time. They are all connected asynchronously, in a state of being truly together.

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Kim Seong-eun, managing director of the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, is an anthropologist in art and technology. She was previously the director of the Nam June Paik Art Center. -- Ed.