Details

An outstanding work that gracefully distinguishes from the othercontemporary works that are usually similar to one another!
22th-century type artists make a ‘human diss’ collage that aims right at your antiquated ‘love’ 

About performance

We aim to directly confront the bewildering reality of humanitywhich is revealing itself along with the dramatic development of science andtechnology. Solidified for centuries since Renaissance, Humanism is now nearingits expiration. Now it’s time to acutely analyze and rethink its validity.For this purpose, we bring post-humanism as anti-humanism to compare and alsoas an alternative for the future. AI that gets smarter and smarter withphysically strengthened body, highly effective arithmetic capacity and big datamining, and the robot as a post-human equipped with the communication abilityof the Internet of Things(IoT) which transcends time and space – these are presented to fight with the past.

Defeat the ROBOT, a series of performances since 2014, is based onthe concept of assessing humanistic values from the robot’spoint of view. Each version takes a different theme and involves variousartists to create the piece collectively. Following Part 1 ‘Acting’ and Part 2 ‘Justice,’ the piece presented at SPAF deals with ‘love.’ Neither the depressing dystopia ruled by machines nor the utopia oftechnology completing human happiness are close to our imagination. Rather,they constitute a naïve dichotomy of typical humanists, and future is atomorrow, and another tomorrow, that is calmly approaching. More precisely, itis a tomorrow, and another tomorrow, that we need to walk into.

Director’s notes

The 18th and 21st century

The dashing and speeding steam engine changed the world. Humans,now much closer thanks to communication technologies, got to think again andagain. They struggled to figure out what should be loved and what should bedisdained. Repelling the darkness of the Middle Ages, modernity establisheditself as our mighty spirit with its bright light. As the sublime spirit ofheroes flickered, humanism gained absolute power, which still stands proudly.

But the world has changed again. Robot ‘Baxter’ from Rethink Robotics makes a salad by ‘watchingand learning’ from the chef’sgestures. ‘Watson’ from IBM issupporting doctors by probing into an enormous amount of medical data. Andcheaper domestic robots such as SoftBank’s ‘Pepper,’ ASUS’ ‘Zenbo,’ and Mayfield Robotics’ ‘Kuri’ are soon to be released. Plus, with the accelerated development ofgenetic engineering and medical science, the paradigm of slow and ineffectiveevolution of the past tens of thousands of years is coming to an end. Equippedwith technologies that prevent and treat diseases at the level of genes, fosteranti-aging, and strengthen a specific physical ability, humans are evensuspected to overcome death. Computer graphics are so advanced that they arehard to tell from reality, and AI with deep learning technology is just gettingsmarter and smarter. A better intelligence, a stronger body produced by cutting-edgescience are everywhere.

Actor? Dancer? Are those roles any suitable for humans? What canan actor argue in this period? Honestly, isn’t it time they gave up? Cansomething new just replace actors? Like robots.

We’re in the era of excess of politics. As long asthere is no absolute rightness, the chaotic group fights won’t reach any agreement. The more people declare that ‘this is an unshakable justice,’ the more we payattention to their contradiction. Can be believe in ourselves? Aren’t we wandering without finding peace, justice or perfect love?Shouldn’t we ask: ‘humans areactually not great, we need something we can turn to’?To robots, you know.

Still, many people insist they cannot yield to robots yet. Theyare still living a modern era.

Credit

Writer  Creative team, in collaboration
Director  Subby Yoon
Choreography  Jae-mi Ryu
Robotic& Media Art  Kihunsen, Soyoung You, Hyun Ju Kim(ex-media)
Stage Manager Hae-yeon Shin
Assistant Director  Dong-seok Kim
Lighting Design  Hae-in Yoon
Planning CULTURE BUS
Cast  Young Che, Sei-seung Lee, Tae-yi Lim, Eun-ji Son, Moon-kyoung Yeum, Hae-yeon Shin, Dong-seok Kim 

Company

Yulhyul Arts Group

Founded in 2000 for creating performances as experiments and newchallenges, Yulhyul Arts Group is based on theatre and dance and creatinginterdisciplinary works, involving different art forms and technology, as wellas site-specific works.

Graduates of art colleges in different majors –theatre,dance, fine art, music, etc.- have gathered to experiment with multi-mediainterdisciplinary work. Romeo and Julietand Oedipus, site-specific theatrewhich was unprecedented in Korea, gained them recognition. And since 2009 withthe goals of developing a new performance form for the 21st century,they are focusing their resources on interdisciplinary works that translatebrain science, medical science, robotics and video technologies into thevocabularies of performing arts. Recently, they have been working on the Defeatthe ROBOT series, collaborating with artists from Expanded Media Studio led bymedia artist Hyun-ju Kim(ex-media). Yulhyul Arts Group tries to be a sword thatnever gets dull at the forefront of ‘art as experimentand challenge.’