Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom

Overview
On the evenings of September 19–21, 2025, the forest of Bundang Central Park in Seongnam, South Korea, was transformed into a living open-air theatre through a large-scale media performance. In association with Korea Media Symphony and directed by media artist Jinjoon Lee(Director of KAIST Art & Technology Center), Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom turned two hundred metres of living trees, leaves, and terrain into a breathing, sentient stage. The forest became a media canvas where projection, sound, and myth converged into what Lee calls a “Media Symphony,” as ultra-high-resolution projectors bathed the landscape in cascading light and harmonies co-created by AI and humans intertwined with a seventy-piece orchestra and a thousand-voice civic choir. In this environment, every footstep, breath, and rustle formed part of an unfolding narrative; on those autumn nights, visitors encountered a moment in which reality and illusion blurred, feeling a quiet kind of magic as nature, humanity, and technology converged. 

Forest as a living media canvas
Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom presents the world’s first attempt to transform the dense woodland of Bundang Central Park into a vast open-air media theatre. The performance deployed sixteen ultra-high-resolution projectors (40,000–45,000 ANSI lumens each)—the same class of technology used at Olympic opening ceremonies—to create large-scale projection mapping across two hundred metres of forest. Advanced 3D Gaussian splatting, together with VR-based simulations, was used to reconstruct the forest digitally. Every tree, leaf, and contour of the terrain was captured and scanned as-is, allowing the land’s forms and the delicate textures of foliage and bark to become the living canvas for moving images. The technical apparatus also included lasers, fog machines, environmental sensors, and drones, further shaping the woodland into an immersive space of augmented perception.

Yet this was not merely a technological spectacle. Through these means, the forest ceased to be a passive element of nature and emerged as a living, sentient entity. Our work operates at the threshold between the natural and the computational, proposing a terrain in which technology intertwines with nature in organic balance. In this vision, the forest moves beyond the role of backdrop and steps forward as the protagonist. The result was a liminal theatre—what the director calls a “sansui media panorama”—where image and object, screen and stage, merge seamlessly into one another.

Polyphonic soundscape: the chorus of human, nature and AI
The performance introduced an entirely new form—the “Media Symphony”—extending beyond the boundaries of the traditional classical concert. At its sonic core was a layered composition combining a live seventy-piece orchestra, a thousand-voice civic choir, and AI-generated harmonies. AI agents augmented these layers to form a chorus of coexistence and resonance, at once deeply local and radically distributed. Field recordings—from wind through leaves and insect hum to the crackle of underbrush, together with the everyday sounds of Seongnam’s parks, stations, streets, and roads—were woven into the composition. These interlaced with variations on beloved film soundtracks, producing a narrative in which past and present, humanity and technology, city and nature intersect. The result was a polyphonic tapestry that shifted in response to audience movement and weather—what we describe as a ‘media symphony’ of woodland, city, and audience. 

Fallen titan: a collaboration between human and AI
At the heart of Cine-Forest lies a fable: a giant steals stars to return light to a darkened city, only to become stars himself. Drawing on the myths of Pangu and Prometheus, this narrative—deliberately chosen for a family-frequented park—carries quieter currents: sacrifice, generosity, hope, and lost innocence in an age of hyper-acceleration, where the grand cultural drama of God and humanity, death and resurrection, unfolds almost imperceptibly. The emotional core of the performance is Fallen Titan, an original composition that gives voice to the giant’s journey. Composed by Director Lee with the use of AI, the piece translates the fable into music and proposes a new paradigm of creation.

A new cultural prototype in the age of AI
In an era increasingly shaped by AI, Cine-Forest poses a critical question about the role of public art. Rather than unfolding inside exclusive, ticketed venues, the work was staged freely in a municipal park, open to everyone as a shared civic festival, even as it employed cutting-edge technologies typically reserved for elite cultural institutions or corporate spectacles. Light, sound, the human voice, and the breath of the forest resonated in unison, and audiences became not mere spectators but integral participants in the unfolding narrative. Every act of walking, breathing, and sensing was absorbed into the performance itself, yielding a one-off experience that can never be repeated. Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom is more than a performance; it is a prototype for a new model of cultural production that dissolves traditional boundaries between art, technology, ecology, and civic life. Living in the age of AI, we stand between awe and anxiety towards technology. With Cine-Forest, we sought to offer a brief pause between those emotions—a space to breathe. Our hope was that, through this multisensory experience, people might find comfort and encouragement, savouring the new forms of art that technology can reveal. 

 Beyond spectatorship: augmented empathy
We describe the piece as “an invitation to linger and stroll”, transforming the fixed seating of conventional theatre into a nomadic experience of wandering, listening, and breathing. Ultimately, the purpose of this work is not to demonstrate technology but to cultivate what we call augmented empathy—a state in which art and technology fuse to heighten our shared sensibility. Within this transitory performativity, where nature, humanity, and technology continually emerge and dissolve, audiences may recognise that they too are part of a living world. 

About the Art Director
Dr. Jinjoon Lee FRSA is internationally acclaimed as a leading scholar and media artist exploring the convergence of AI, philosophy, and multisensory environments. Drawing on East Asian philosophical traditions and the literati artist-scholar lineage, he creates liminal frameworks where perception and data-driven systems intertwine. A Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 artist in the UK, his work has been shown at MMCA Korea, ZKM Germany, Korean Cultural Centre London and BB&M Gallery Seoul. He is Associate Professor at KAIST and Director of the Art & Technology Center; has served as Visiting Fellow at Exeter College and Visiting Scholar at St John’s College, University of Oxford; Visiting Senior Researcher at Tokyo University of the Arts; and Affiliate Professor at New York University. Educated at Seoul National University and the Royal College of Art, he holds a DPhil in Fine Art from Oxford. He integrates artistic practice with emerging technologies to advance global media art. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he continues to shape international dialogues on AI and creativity.