Artist: Interweaving Poetic Code

Taeyoon Choi is an artist and educator based in New York and Seoul. He co-founded School for Poetic Computation in 2013, where he organised classes and taught experimental workshops. He is inspired by the poetics in science, technology, society and human relations. He works with computer programming, drawing and writing, in collaboration with fellow artists and community members. He believes in the intersectionalities of art, activism and education. He works with activists and scholars on disability rights, environmental justice and anti-racism.

He has presented at M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2020), and his projects, participatory workshops, performances and installations has been exhibited at the New Museum (2017), Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (2016), Van Alen Institute (2016) and Whitney Museum of American Art (2015) in New York, USA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, USA (2014) and more. He participated in Biennale Architettura (2021), Istanbul Design Biennale (2018), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2016) and Shanghai Biennale (2012). Through his diverse practices, he seeks a sense of gentleness, magnanimity, justice, solidarity and intellectual kinship.

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Photo: Joe Swide

Aarati Akkapeddi is an Indian-American cross-disciplinary artist interested in the poetics and politics of datasets. Their work explores how identities and histories are shaped by different methods of collecting, preserving and presenting data. They combine code, machine learning and analogue techniques (printmaking) to navigate these themes, and they often use family photographs and archival images as source material. They use algorithms designed for applications such as facial recognition with these images, creating performative rituals of information extraction. In working with family photographs, they contemplate the idea of intergenerational memory, loss and identity. Akkapeddi is currently based in New York.

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With a background in architecture, Angelidakis’s multifaceted practices engages with the analogue and the digital, virtual and physical buildings and ruins, and problems and solutions. Based and works in Athens, Angelidakis often metaphorically adapts historical narratives, etymologies and elements of Greek culture to address contemporary urgencies in the world. His recent series of interactive soft sculpture pieces titled DEMOS  is multifunctional and transforms from monuments to ruins and public furniture with people’s collective intervention. Angelidakis participated in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 14, Kassel/Athens in 2017, Biennial of Moving Image at Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva and OGR in Torino, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago, USA, Baltic Triennial of International Art, Vilnius, Lithuania, Berlin Biennale in 2014 and was invited by prominent institutions including The University of Queensland Art Museum , MOCA, Toronto La Loge, Brussels, Pac Milano, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Basel Unlimited and others.

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Laura Devendorf is an artist and a researcher who questions relationships between technology and culture by playfully subverting and reinterpreting categorisations of ‘machine’ and ‘body’. Her work presents alternative understandings of technology that draw heavily from feminist techno-science, trading notions of efficiency for engagement, control for humility, and individualism for cooperation and care. Her work takes the form of garments and tapestries with embedded electronics, open-source software and mixed-media systems.

Devendorf is an assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and she directs the Unstable Design Lab, where she works closely with artists, students and researchers to develop both provocations and software for textiles design with support from sponsors ranging from the United States National Science Foundation to the Center for Craft. She received her PhD at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Devendorf is based and works in Boulder, Colorado.

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Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim is known for her experimental practices that question the concept of sound through her performances, textual drawings and paintings. Integrating information systems such as music notation, body language and American Sign Language (ASL) into her practice, she composes her own playful artistic grammar for communication, exploring the intersection between the semiology of ASL and sounds.

She has been invited to exhibit and perform by prominent art institutions and biennales including the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, De Appel Art Center, Berlin Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, MoMA PS1, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Satomi Mika and Hannah Perner-Wilson have been collaborating since 2006, and in 2008 formed the collective KOBAKANT. Together, through their work, they explore the use of textile crafts and electronics as a medium for commenting on technological aspects of today’s ‘high-tech’ society. KOBAKANT believes in the spirit of humour technology, often presenting their work as a twisted criticism of the stereotypes surrounding textile craftsmanship and electrical engineering. KOBAKANT believes that technology exists to be hacked, handmade and modified by everyone to better fit our personal needs and desires. In 2009, as research fellows at the Distance Lab in Scotland, KOBAKANT published an online database to share their DIY wearable technology approach titled HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT. KOBAKANT is currently based in Berlin.

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Based and works in Mexico City, Munoz works across textiles, performance, drawing, sound and experimental electronics to explore the relationship between technology and society with a special interest in the interaction between material forms and social discourse. Munoz often invites peripheral communities for creative production of e-textiles, involving local employees and businesses. She was a resident of the 2014 and 2016 programme at Nordic Artists’ Center Dale, Norway, at Kultur Kontakt, Vienna, Austria in 2015, at the Bauhaus Dessau, Germany in 2017, and at the Google Arts and Culture Jacquard Artist Residency in Paris, France in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in various museums and festivals, such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA; 21 Haus, Belvedere, Austria; National Art Center in Tokyo, Japan; Mobilier National in Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León, Spain; XIII Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; OK Center/CyberArts Exhibition in Linz, Austria; Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, USA, among others.

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Sky Cubacub is a non-binary queer and disabled Filipinx artist from Chicago, Illinois. As a multidisciplinary artist and the creator of Rebirth Garments, they are interested in fulfilling the needs for disabled queer life, with an emphasis on joy, making a line of wearables that challenges mainstream beauty standards through centring queer and disabled people of all sizes, ethnicities, and ages. They are the editor of the Radical Visibility Zine , a magazine for queer and disabled people of all ages based on their manifesto. Sky Cubacub was named 2018 Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune .

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Photo: Ryan Burke