Dongdaemun Design Plaza Becomes a Giant Canvas

The Seoul Metropolitan Government and Seoul Design Foundation has announced plans for “DDP Light,” a new annual festival of lights that will take place at year’s end and us this landmark facility as a media facade. The goal is to put the event on the map as a nocturnal destination for tourists from around the world, and as a platform for media artists, both domestic and international.

This year, the theme for the new event is “Seoul Haemong (dream interpretation),” which will showcase the evolution of Dongdaemun over time and visually interrogate relevant details of the greater city of Seoul. The images to be projected on the facade of the building will be created via artificial intelligence and machine learning, and as source material rely on historic photographs of Seoul and Dongdaemun culled from social media. It is a project driven by public efforts to engage with the voluntary participation of citizens to tell their stories on a public screen.

Min sey, who participated in the 2018 Seoul Mediacity Biennale: Eu Zen with her work ‘A.I, Entirely on Us’, will be taking the helm of DDP Light as director, and Turkish media designer Refik Anadol, whose parametric data sculptures are internationally acclaimed, will be featured as the main artist. Famous artworks of Anadol include ‘WDCH Dreams’ (2018), a cutting-edge mapping of Frank Gehry’s magnum opus, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and ‘Legorreta Alive’ (2012), which was cast on the surface of Ricardo Legorreta’s Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Rafik Anadol claimed that he was ‘grateful for the opportunity to participate in a project on such a scale unprecedented in Asia and on the architectural legacy of Zaha Hadid’, and that he ‘(is) creating a dream-like image with an algorithm that was fed more than six million images, in the hopes that this project will organically speak to the people of Seoul’. Min Sey commented that ‘we are looking for ways to facilitate the data-driven creations of new media artists, for which the archives centre that is set to be completed next year at the DDP will help to sustain the continued production of media contents’.

Director of Seoul Design Foundation’s DDP operations, Park Jinbae explained that the proposed festival that ‘DDP Light will operate not only for private/internal profit but also with an eye to creating synergistic effects between the shared interests of the Dongdaemun commercial district and its local merchants, and we are coordinating, among other things, bright light, methods of drawing tourists over the winter season and the operation of designer markets to that end.’

DDP Light will illuminate the Dongdaemun area from 20 December to 3 January of the next year. <by Kim Yeram>