- Antes yo me figuraba el anverso y después el reverso; ahora, veo simultáneamente los dos.
- 베른하르트는 트위터를 하지 않죠. 죽었으니까요.
- 生死有無量 往來無端緒 求於屋舍者 數數受胞胎
2021
Ghost Walk
Ghost Walk
고스트 워크
Interactive Art Installation
고스트 워크
Interactive Art Installation
Interactive Art Installation
— VR arthouse game, approx. 20 min
— 4-dimensional interactive media wall, 5,000 ANSI lumens projectors
— Two-channel video (AI simulation), loop
— Meta Quest 2, Kinect V2
— 4-dimensional interactive media wall, 5,000 ANSI lumens projectors
— Two-channel video (AI simulation), loop
— Meta Quest 2, Kinect V2
Written, Directed and Developed by Haemin Song
Projection Mapping: Rimeo Lee
Soundtrack: Joyul
Projection Mapping: Rimeo Lee
Soundtrack: Joyul
Logo Design: Studio YOUHYO
Walking Behind the Veil of the Game
Ghost Walk is an XR-based, multi-layered media art project that combines a game environment, an interactive media wall, and a machine-learning video log. Each component complements—or collides with—the others, together staging a discourse on telepresence and the hidden labor of digital systems.
At its core, Ghost Walk asks: Are our choices truly ours, or were they scripted from the beginning? Within a simulated topology of game, AI, programmer, player, fate, and human, participants wander through layered realities. Wearing a headset, the player first sees their ordinary environment gradually distorted into a map that is both familiar and uncanny. Responding to AI-generated prompts, the player creates a virtual avatar, trained on datasets of Korean faces using StyleGAN. This avatar—eerily non-existent yet strangely human—accompanies the player through the map in a meditative “walk.”
The experience is extended into physical space via the interactive media wall, which visualizes the player’s path and overlays it with the trajectories of reinforcement-learning AI agents. These accumulated traces create a collective archive, juxtaposing human and machine presence. Meanwhile, the machine-learning video log projects fragmented, uncanny avatars and AI pathways, revealing how data-driven systems translate memory and motion into distorted images.
The work situates itself in the uncanny gap between virtual and physical layers of reality, exposing the slippages and illusions of telepresence. Viewers confront their own “ghost work” — the invisible labor behind digital systems — while recognizing that their bodies, movements, and decisions are continuously encoded as data.
Ultimately, Ghost Walk is both a game and a philosophical experiment, collapsing simulation and reality into each other. It frames the player’s walk as a ritual of discovery: a confrontation with fate, agency, and the invisible infrastructures that shape our existence.
At its core, Ghost Walk asks: Are our choices truly ours, or were they scripted from the beginning? Within a simulated topology of game, AI, programmer, player, fate, and human, participants wander through layered realities. Wearing a headset, the player first sees their ordinary environment gradually distorted into a map that is both familiar and uncanny. Responding to AI-generated prompts, the player creates a virtual avatar, trained on datasets of Korean faces using StyleGAN. This avatar—eerily non-existent yet strangely human—accompanies the player through the map in a meditative “walk.”
The experience is extended into physical space via the interactive media wall, which visualizes the player’s path and overlays it with the trajectories of reinforcement-learning AI agents. These accumulated traces create a collective archive, juxtaposing human and machine presence. Meanwhile, the machine-learning video log projects fragmented, uncanny avatars and AI pathways, revealing how data-driven systems translate memory and motion into distorted images.
The work situates itself in the uncanny gap between virtual and physical layers of reality, exposing the slippages and illusions of telepresence. Viewers confront their own “ghost work” — the invisible labor behind digital systems — while recognizing that their bodies, movements, and decisions are continuously encoded as data.
Ultimately, Ghost Walk is both a game and a philosophical experiment, collapsing simulation and reality into each other. It frames the player’s walk as a ritual of discovery: a confrontation with fate, agency, and the invisible infrastructures that shape our existence.
2021
Written and designed by Haemin Song
— 2021 | Unity × ACFM | Busan Int’l Film Festival
Grendel 2021
그렌델 2021
Sound/Spatial Recognition-based Interactive Performance
Sound/Spatial Recognition-based Interactive Performance
— VR arthouse game, multiplayable, approx. 10 min
— Oculus Rift S, Oculus Quest 2, Microsoft Azure Kinect
— Oculus Rift S, Oculus Quest 2, Microsoft Azure Kinect
Written and designed by Haemin Song
Unity Engineer: Kim Jungho
Grendel 2021 is an arthouse game that embodies a journey traversing the memories of repetitive daily life and violence through a game-like format. Within the work, the player accompanies ‘Grendel’, an underground monster from Beowulf and wandering entity, walking through a world where each day seems to repeat identically. This is not merely a fantasy setting, but a metaphorical experience of the emptiness and repetitive pain we feel in our daily lives. The work confronts the player with an endless cycle of daily life and death, much like repeatedly facing ‘Game Over’ after a save point. The core of the work is “memory.” The indelible memory of violence remains etched somewhere in the body, even as the brain resists and attempts to forget. As Jung Hee-jin of <Very Intimate Violence> stated, healing wounds is not about re-cover, but about dis-cover. This game aims to make players experience precisely that process. Past trauma is not merely an obstacle to be erased; it is only when reinterpreted that the player is reborn not as a ‘victim’ but as a ‘survivor’.
During gameplay, the player confronts painful scenes and locations through flashbacks and must solve problems through deduction and cooperation. Here, the interface goes beyond mere visual elements. Through room scanning, it shares the field of view of the real space, and via voice recognition, the player's voice leads to interactions with NPCs. By shining light to recognize objects and pressing buttons to clarify the meaning of memories, the player reconstructs forgotten experiences and gains new meaning. Ultimately, this work poses a question: “What is the recurring death in your daily life? What memory must you hold onto?” Grendel 2021 proposes games not as a means to conceal pain, but as an artistic device to confront and reinterpret it. The journey of walking alongside a monster is a metaphor for a political and personal narrative—sharing past wounds to move forward into a new world.
During gameplay, the player confronts painful scenes and locations through flashbacks and must solve problems through deduction and cooperation. Here, the interface goes beyond mere visual elements. Through room scanning, it shares the field of view of the real space, and via voice recognition, the player's voice leads to interactions with NPCs. By shining light to recognize objects and pressing buttons to clarify the meaning of memories, the player reconstructs forgotten experiences and gains new meaning. Ultimately, this work poses a question: “What is the recurring death in your daily life? What memory must you hold onto?” Grendel 2021 proposes games not as a means to conceal pain, but as an artistic device to confront and reinterpret it. The journey of walking alongside a monster is a metaphor for a political and personal narrative—sharing past wounds to move forward into a new world.
— 2021 | Unity × ACFM | Busan Int’l Film Festival
— 2021 | Try Everything 2021 | The Shilla Seoul
— 2021 | Made With Unity | Best Immersive Award | Unity Korea
2021
Web-based Arthouse Game generating custom NFT
Web Developer: Nayea Oh
— 2021 | Party in a Box | Art Center Nabi
— 2021 | Hello! New Playground: Art-Tech Hackathon | 3rd Prize | Art Center Nabi
멍멍
MungMungWeb-based Arthouse Game generating custom NFT
— WebGL arthouse game, approx. 10 min
Written and designed by Haemin Song
Written and designed by Haemin Song
Producer: Jisu Kang
MungMung is an interactive NFT artwork in the form of a text adventure game that engages the audience in dialogue. The work addresses the issue of “pandemic puppies,” which became more severe during the COVID-19 crisis. While playing MungMung, the audience converses with an AI chatbot that has learned “dog language,” navigating a story that involves adopting a pet, illness, death, and the caregiver’s marriage. In the process, participants learn patterns of communication with companion animals, recognize the importance of lifelong responsibility in adoption, and ultimately make a promise regarding their future pets.
When the interaction with the dog character is successfully completed, an NFT and a “non-fungible promise” image are generated, uniquely hashed from the participant’s input. This NFT serves as proof of a personal promise to take responsibility for one’s companion animal. Through this, MungMung speaks about the responsibility of caring for life, the rejection of buying and selling living beings, and the significance of making such a commitment.
When the interaction with the dog character is successfully completed, an NFT and a “non-fungible promise” image are generated, uniquely hashed from the participant’s input. This NFT serves as proof of a personal promise to take responsibility for one’s companion animal. Through this, MungMung speaks about the responsibility of caring for life, the rejection of buying and selling living beings, and the significance of making such a commitment.
— 2021 | Party in a Box | Art Center Nabi
— 2021 | Hello! New Playground: Art-Tech Hackathon | 3rd Prize | Art Center Nabi
2018
Interactive Multimedia Installation
Created by Haemin Song, Huh Hyunjung
Painting / Installation: Huh Hyunjung
Video: Song Haemin
Sound: Huh Hyunjung
Design: Huh Hyunjung
Technician: Lee Hak
Text: Song Haemin, Son Hyosun, Huh Hyunjung, Seo Hyejeong
Voice: Kim Gahyeon, Seo Hyejeong, Son Hyosun, Song Haemin, Yoo Jeoungwon, Lee Hajung, Heo Yoonsoo, Huh Hyunjung
Assist: Lee Hajung, Kim Siyoen
— 2019 | DYSPHORIA, DIASPORA, PARADISE | SEOUL QUEER SECESSION
— 2019 | PROGRAM #1 | ONE AND J +1
— 2018 | PORTAL | Unnimited
부동산
Unmoving AssetsInteractive Multimedia Installation
— Single-channel Video, Projected on silk, 13 min 41 sec
— Spraying on acrylic, each 200cm x 90cm x 40cm
— Infrared distance sensor, Arduino Uno, Stereo Speakers
— Apartment landscaping frame, personal collection
— Infrared distance sensor, Arduino Uno, Stereo Speakers
— Apartment landscaping frame, personal collection
Created by Haemin Song, Huh Hyunjung
Painting / Installation: Huh Hyunjung
Video: Song Haemin
Sound: Huh Hyunjung
Design: Huh Hyunjung
Technician: Lee Hak
Text: Song Haemin, Son Hyosun, Huh Hyunjung, Seo Hyejeong
Voice: Kim Gahyeon, Seo Hyejeong, Son Hyosun, Song Haemin, Yoo Jeoungwon, Lee Hajung, Heo Yoonsoo, Huh Hyunjung
Assist: Lee Hajung, Kim Siyoen
Those who escape from the households in which they grew up often find themselves moving endlessly from one person’s property to another’s, living a life perpetually lodged within someone else’s real estate. For such people, the only immovable assets they may claim are the comforting memories of family or hometown. Yet even these turn out to be fragile, diminished belongings—assets subject to fracture and erosion.
Home and family now appear as values no longer to be trusted, rules no longer applicable. Those who have fled from them both fear and long for return, endlessly replicating the memories that remain. To copy fragmented recollections. To imagine a whole out of something minute. Yet these attempts inevitably falter: they turn the very idea of the “original home” into a grotesque place. Everything that was once there ought, in principle, to be here as well—but certain problems and circumstances that were present there should exist nowhere. Out of this contradiction arises a profound cognitive dissonance.
The installation stages this paradox through an interactive sound-and-video environment. Using an Arduino ultrasonic distance sensor and the media art software vvvv, the work amplifies the volume of multiple recorded voices—fragments of scripts—whenever the audience approaches the piece. These layered voices are interwoven with video footage containing memories of family, excerpts from long-kept diaries, and collected texts of friends. What emerges is a fragile architecture of remembrance: a living palimpsest in which intimacy, estrangement, and repetition co-exist. The closer the audience comes, the louder the resonance of memory becomes, until the act of approaching home is revealed as both a longing and a rupture.
Home and family now appear as values no longer to be trusted, rules no longer applicable. Those who have fled from them both fear and long for return, endlessly replicating the memories that remain. To copy fragmented recollections. To imagine a whole out of something minute. Yet these attempts inevitably falter: they turn the very idea of the “original home” into a grotesque place. Everything that was once there ought, in principle, to be here as well—but certain problems and circumstances that were present there should exist nowhere. Out of this contradiction arises a profound cognitive dissonance.
The installation stages this paradox through an interactive sound-and-video environment. Using an Arduino ultrasonic distance sensor and the media art software vvvv, the work amplifies the volume of multiple recorded voices—fragments of scripts—whenever the audience approaches the piece. These layered voices are interwoven with video footage containing memories of family, excerpts from long-kept diaries, and collected texts of friends. What emerges is a fragile architecture of remembrance: a living palimpsest in which intimacy, estrangement, and repetition co-exist. The closer the audience comes, the louder the resonance of memory becomes, until the act of approaching home is revealed as both a longing and a rupture.
— 2019 | DYSPHORIA, DIASPORA, PARADISE | SEOUL QUEER SECESSION
— 2019 | PROGRAM #1 | ONE AND J +1
— 2018 | PORTAL | Unnimited
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