DATA-VERSE Gwangju

Data-Verse Gwangju begins with Gwangju, a city deeply rooted in cultural richness and historical memory. By capturing and reorganizing vast amounts of video and data related to Gwangju from the internet and combining this with field data gathered on-site by the artists, the work constructs a virtualized data landscape. This landscape not only reflects the city’s geographic features and natural scenery but also embodies the creators’ subjective perspectives, interwoven with significant historical events tied to Gwangju.

Within this digital world, real-time internet streams—such as news, aviation updates, weather reports, trending topics, and web traffic—become the driving force behind thetransformation of various data objects. These objects interact and collide within the global network, forming a continually evolving digital ecosystem.

By merging visible and invisible data, the artists weave together historical events, cultural symbols, and the connections between contemporary life and the online realm, creating a dynamic performance that highlights the interplay between Gwangju’s history and its modern digital presence.

Viewers are invited to participate in real time, becoming wanderers within the virtual world and integral parts of it. Simultaneously, a virtual filming crew operated by the artists captures island-like landscapes in real time, projecting Data-Verse Gwangju’s imagery onto large-scale screens. On one side, the exhibition presents surveillance-style footage from the virtual cities, immersing viewers in data-driven urban daily life. On the other, it randomly selects participants and projects their reflections into the digital Gwangju, intertwining them with the real-time flow of space and time.