World on a Wire

“HYUNDAI x Rhizome of the New Museum: World on a Wire” transforms the gallery space into a hybrid-reality vivarium of vivid, artist-made synthetic life forms, exploring the possibilities and poetics of simulation as artistic practice. In a technological sense, simulations can be thought of as efforts to model dynamic processes or situations. As designer Francis Tseng has pointed out, such simulations go beyond the neutral description of an underlying reality: they often project forward in time, and they may embed certain belief systems in a particular model of the world or its future. In particular, Tseng argues, simulations are often defined by “perceived rigor, correctness, and mathematical infallibility.”