Talk1
April 16
7pm
Offline / Post Territory Ujeongguk 1F
Korean Only
ForkingRoom Research Lab Talk :
It Does Look Like It Is Left
Forking Room Research Lab 2025 Researchers
(Sooah Kwak, Hyunchul Kim, Dahyun Ryu, JEONBIN, Led by Seungbum Kim)
Four participants will present their research conducted during the Research Lab. Kwak will discuss biometric authentification and resistance, Kim will talk about the interfacing of large language models with the commons, Ryu will introduce her research on the current landscape of the online feminism-reboot movement, and Jeongbil will cover how the topic of AI voice technology is connected to the concept of copyleft.
Talk2
April 17
7pm
Offline / Post Territory Ujeongguk 1F
Korean Only
Semicoductor Industy and Justice
- Labor health and Environmental Issues
(Supporters for Health and Rights of People in Semiconductor Industry)
The production of semiconductors—the rice of the digital industry—involves a highly unsafe working environment. Thousands of toxic chemicals are used in the process, and workers are consistently exposed to physical risks, including radiation. These factories run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and their laborers work from morning to night, destroying their biological rhythms and exacerbating health concerns. In addition to the high rates of leukemia, brain tumors, cancer, and rare diseases among these workers, the semiconductor industry accelerates the climate crisis. In this talk, we discuss whether there is a possibility of justice in the semiconductor business.
Jongran Lee is a full-time activist and labor attorney at SHARPS (Supporters for the Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry). SHARPS was founded in protest of the death of Yumi Hwang, a Samsung semiconductor factory victim who died of leukemia in 2007. For 18 years, the organization has been working to promote labor health rights in the industry.
Talk3
April 18
1pm
Online /Zoom
Korean/English
Strange and Unknown Spectra
Xiaowei R. Wang
In this talk, Xiaowei looks at how digital technologies are a form of geologic, 'metabolic' media — media that does not exist outside of nature, but one that blurs the boundaries between living and non-living. She will discuss AM radio, and her project "An Archive of Witch Fever" which uses textiles as both data storage and data transmission, in trying to imagine alternative forms of computing, as well as the history of AM radio as a feminist practice that locates radio as a place based, geologic phenomena. In contrast, she looks at industrial scale, metabolic media like conventional forms of computing (smartphones, semiconductors). How can these ideas of metabolism and geologic time help us better understand this moment of digital saturation?
Xiaowei R. Wang, PhD is an artist, writer, organizer and coder based across the Pacific. Their multidisciplinary work over the past 15 years sits at the intersection of public art, tech, social and environmental justice. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China's Countryside which examines the social and environmental impacts of technology on agriculture and rural communities.
Talk4
April 18
7pm
Offline / Post Territory Ujeongguk 1F
Korean Only
Tools Upside Down
Dowon Yoo
Tools form our world. The invention of the camera has changed the way we see and perceive the world, and the moment a horse jumps or a cat falls is no longer a moment, even though it is not captured by the human eye. The advent of the smartphone has also made it easier to capture and share the image, and OIS(Optical Image Stabilization) has made capturing the world smoother, but the real is being replaced by representation, the body is disappearing, and Western ways of seeing are becoming more familiar. <Tools Upside Down> is an artist talk based on Yoo, Dowon's tool experimentation that attempts to reveal the geographical bias and referentiality of the viewing tools (camera, found footage, Adobe software, 3D scanner, and zoom) that reassemble the world.
Yoo, Dowon explores form from tool’s perspective. He moves between the physical and digital areas through various apparatuses of image formation, perception, and analysis, from analog to digital tools, in order to explore the sense of body and authorship in the flatness of screens and images. At the same time, he deconstructs and reassembles the strong bonds between the two realms, the Western bias and colonial elements represented in digital space based on East Asian ways of seeing.
Talk5
April 20
5pm
Online /Zoom
Korean/English
Revealing the Landscape
Sonya Isupova
Ways of Mapping Cyclical Histories of Soviet Colonial Infrastructures and their effects on the landscape. Infrastructure remains invisible until it fails—like the Kakhovka Dam, destroyed on June 6, 2023. Heidegger describes technology as a "mode of revealing," a process through which truth emerges in the realm of unconcealment. In her practice, machine-building becomes a ritual for exploring space, memory, and affect. Combining practice and research, she investigates the materiality of grand infrastructure projects and their role as knowledge systems shaped by epistemic violence and disciplinary frameworks.