무인공장 (Dark Factory) unfolds through the flickering rhythm of projected videos and site-specific installations, shaping an ecology of media inhabited by enigmatic entities. These presences emerge and recede through circuits of data, offering a choreography of transmissions and interruptions that suggest forms of communication bypassing human comprehension.
Often located out of sight, so-called ‘dark factories’ (or ‘lights-out factories’) are automated production sites seemingly operating without human intervention, at times slipping beyond their predetermined prompts. Taking its cue from such sites, this exhibition populates the darkened galleries of MMCA Changdong with works that shimmer of their own accord, leak between galleries, and switch on and off without warning. 무인공장 (Dark Factory) is a space where archives breathe, signal overtakes speech, and absence pulsates with activity.
The rise of lights-out factories in South Korea and elsewhere signals a seismic shift in perception, labour, and control. Thermal imaging, computer vision, and machine sensing displace the human eye and hand, potentially fuelling anxieties of a future in which strange intelligences eclipse our agency and contravene our expectations. In encouraging us to relinquish control and attune ourselves to these intelligences, the works in 무인공장 (Dark Factory) open onto a less ominous horizon which, if embraced, can release us from such paranoia.
Theodoulos Polyviou’s We Are Still in Open Circuits (2025) and Minha Park’s Shadow Planet (2023) respectively engage with museum and planetary archives to subvert dominant frameworks of perception, containment, and knowledge production. In Polyviou’s installation dormant vitrines and exhibition ephemera from MMCA’s collection host environmental data gathered from Seoul’s Museum of Shamanism. In the painting storage room, sensors record humidity, air pressure, and airflow, not as scientific measurements, but as affective traces of 신바람 (shinbaram), the hallowed breeze of spiritual presence.
Park, on the other hand, reinterprets the extensive collection of JPL NASA Mars Image Archives. These images of Mars, captured over nearly two decades by rovers, drones, and satellite cameras, constitute data designed to map the planet. Her focus is on the anomalies that disrupt these images. Do Martian dust storms create blind spots to shield the planet and evade our terraforming gaze?
The inquiries of Serin Oh, Eunhee Lee and 업채eobchae extend this critical engagement with systems of control and interpretation into the domains of extractivism, planned obsolescence, and hybridization. Oh’s Forest Temperature Bunker (2022) and Silvery Trail (2024) imagine the unseen dwelling of the Lenok fish, long believed extinct due to mining pollution and habitat collapse but which recently returned to the Nakdong river. Her sculptural environments function as hybrid habitats composed of ceramics and 3D-printed elements, contaminated yet generative.
Meanwhile, Lee’s Machines Don’t Die (2022) explores the afterlives of minerals and metals from discarded electronic devices which, much like the Lenok, persist and return to us in unexpected ways. Lee’s work obliquely registers human labour and closely follows the material afterlives of high-tech gadgets, both marginalised in discussions of the digital. Now reminiscent of lunar regolith, now Martian soil, the residues left behind by technological devices endure in alien configurations through cycles of extraction and production.
업채eobchae’s ROLA ROLLS (2024) imagines yet another mode of survival grounded in mutation. Set in a post-petroleum future, the work fuses transhumanist aesthetics with Boys’ Love tropes. Through a speculative first-person script, ROLA, a collective of ecologists, undergoes a process of becoming, transforming into bio-energy hybrids capable of withstanding ecological collapse. Here, mutation is a strategy of endurance, a form of speculative intimacy in response to planetary exhaustion.
무인공장 (Dark Factory) is an invitation to cede control and to perceive otherwise. What if the scattered signals from strange intelligences are not errors but messages in a language we cannot understand?
We Are Still In Open Circuits, 2025
Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul (KR)
Changdong Residency Halls
Part of Dark Factory, a group exhibition
curated by Giulia Colletti & Andrew Cummings
Minha Park, Serin Oh, Eunhee Lee, Eobchae, Theoodulos Polyviou
Supported by MMCA Changdong Residency
Artist’s Note :
[...] The work brings together two sites of storage: unused vitrines and exhibition ephemera from the MMCA collection, and environmental data recorded inside the Museum of Shamanism in Seoul. Sensors placed in the Shamanic collection’s storage record fluctuations in temperature, humidity, air pressure, and airflow. The data is understood not as scientific evidence, but as a way of listening to the collection, with a focus on its shamanic paintings. These environmental traces, evocative of “shinbaram”, the divine breeze of presence in Korean shamanic practice, are used to animate the lighting of dormant museum cabinets. The installation reflects on the fluctuating status of the paintings, as they move between sacred function and museological containment, to consider how spiritual agency may remain active across different contexts of display, where gods may consent to or withdraw from visibility, and where they might, in turn, act as curators themselves. [...]