Wandering Sun, 2022.
Single channel video installation, Unreal Engine 5, AI algorithm, NASA Earth observation data, 3 x 5.5m 2.6pt, 03'09"
Wandering Sun, 2022.
Single channel video installation, Unreal Engine 5, AI algorithm, NASA Earth observation data, 3 x 5.5m 2.6pt, 03'09"
Wandering Sun is a Data Driven Artwork that utilizes NASA's extensive Earth observation data to facilitate real-time interaction between data and a game engine. This piece depicts the intervention and intrusion of humans in nature, illustrated through the atmospheric pollution that has occurred over the past 30 years in the artist's hometown. It presents the wandering sun as a bizarre, realistic yet unrealistic natural phenomenon induced by this human influence.
Rendered with the realistic graphics of Unreal Engine, this artwork visualizes human intervention through the colors and shapes of the atmosphere, referencing 30 years of collected SO2 concentration data from the coordinates of Masan, South Korea. SO2, a representative air pollutant and a primary cause of fine dust and acid rain, affects visibility through light scattering depending on its concentration. In this piece, the data alters the Rayleigh scattering values over a three-minute period during which the sun moves unrealistically, visually representing 30 years of atmospheric changes due to environmental pollution.
Artist Notes
Which sunrise remains most beautiful in the hearts of those who have experienced it: the one seen in real life, the one witnessed in a movie, or the one encountered in a game?
The sun rising over the sea in my hometown of Masan, South Korea during my childhood was always as intense as a scene from Camus' novel "The Stranger." My body still remembers the permeating crimson sun that filled the morning bus on my way to school. The twilight hours in the small coastal town, the time beteween the dog and wolf (L'heure entre chien et loup), with the sunset turning the sky and the streets into a vivid crimson, were at times majestic.
Wandering Sun now rises not from the sea but from the floor of this exhibition space. The entire space turns red due to the reflection of light, transferring the grandeur of the sunrise into the gallery. The sun rising from the floor, as if the floor were the sea, colors the space and disturbs us as we stand before it, inviting the audience into the narrative of countless sunrises and sunsets repeated throughout the Earth's time.
Deceived by the realistic graphics that seem like actual scenery, at the moment we consider this to be a real landscape, the sun absurdly begins to rotate slowly within the rectangular frame. The sun wandering in a clockwise direction, creating a scene that we could never see in real landscapes, remains realistic and even beautiful. This is because the changes in clouds and light reflections, based on data and simulated through a high-tech AI game engine, reproduce the nuances of the scenery so realistically.
How awake are we? As plausible fakes increasingly appear more real at an ever-faster pace. In this era of epistemic crisis, algorithms operate not based on meaning or value, but on the number of views and followers. Computer engines respond faster to anger and misinformation than to conversation or knowledge. Thus, the landscape of our time is being generated and interpreted. What is serious is that, as noted by François Jullien, in the landscape of "excessive reason," the false self is observed and perceived as another landscape, objectified.
The 1998 film "The Truman Show" tells the story of a man who unknowingly lives his entire life in a studio designed to look like reality, broadcasted to people all over the world. While we were the viewers observing the protagonist in the movie, isn't AI now in the position of observing us? AI is like a giant Earth-sized mirror. It collects all our individual tastes and kindly shows us not how the real world sees us, but how we want to see ourselves.
However,
this is not about the sun, but about the wandering stories of you and me.