Room of the Humanity – City2City Exhibition, Kosice, Slovakia

In 2023, due to the remarkable development of technology, mankind has found a new possibility of humanity as an augmented humanity. However, the concept of augmented humanity is still vague. Rather than an accurate answer to whether it is a new evolutionary form of mankind or simply a conceptual term of superior technology that develops with mankind, it asks us numerous questions. The exhibition a Room of the Humanity explores various questions arising from the concept of ‘augmented humanity’. With an attempt to find each unique characteristic of humans and machines and to find the possibility of combination and evolution in between, It presents a review of the present and future of augmented humanity.

The Art & Tech Days festival will bring an opening and public presentation of the outputs of the Mediaart Collaboration project. Within the framework of this project, media artist Martina Jarinová, who is based in Košice, is collaborating with artist Mingu Kang from Gwangju, South Korea. Both are representatives from cities that are members of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the Media Arts cluster. Gwangju and Kosice cooperate in the 2023 City2City edition.

Martina’s work involves data analysis, which she transforms into new visual forms associated with interactivity. She explores the relationship between photography as a medium and the observer – and its impact on photography itself. Mingu is a film director and media artist who thinks about the construction of the world people see through the lens in his artistic work, and through the camera – as an extended part of his body – he searches for answers about human beings.

During the opening of the exhibition, the artistic couple will present three of their works:

Point.humanism
Humanity is a part of each one of us. (There are over 8 billion people in the world, and we differ in our religion, skin color, and behavior. But what we have in common is humanity.) The work includes every one of us regardless of differences in skin color, religion, etc. Each person represents one imaginary pixel and thus becomes part of a large ecosystem that grows every second. Just as the universe expands, arises, and disappears, so the black surface of infinity is filled. At the same time, it equalizes humanity, and this creates a certain cohesion, transforming into an abstract image.

The heart beats
The heart beats. The heart is made up of cogwheels and steam engine, not only the heart itself. This heart symbolically represents the development of a mixture of humanity and technology. The way the heart beats and makes the sound suggests the past we went through, the present we are going through, and the future we will go through in terms of the development of humanity and technology at the same time.

Words
What is the most familiar technological advancement we can experience in our daily lives? There might be cars, computers, TVs, cell phones, etc. This screen presents four changing numbers, the amount of cars produced this year, the amount of computers produced this year, the amount TV sets sold worldwide today, and the amount of cellular phones sold today. Each number changes based on real-time data, which symbolically shows the development of technologies that are developing together during the development of humanity.

The opening of the exhibition is on 19. October 2023, 18:00-20:00, Kunsthalle, Rumanova 1, Kosice, Slovakia.

Supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council. Slovak Art Council is the main partner of the project.