(Dis)Obedient Code: When Refusal Becomes Form

Gwangju Media Art Platform presents (Dis)Obedient Code: When Refusal Becomes Form, a one-day forum investigating how artificial intelligence reshapes ethics, authorship, and resistance in the age of algorithmic governance. Taking its conceptual departure from Disobedient Objects (V&A, 2014), the forum shifts the question of disobedience from the object to the system, from physical gestures of revolt to invisible architectures of code and computation.

The event opens with welcoming remarks from Joana Miranda, Director of the Media Arts Center Braga, UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts, who reflects on how this forum serves as a shared space for artists, curators, and directors to experiment with the ways in which the ethics of artificial intelligence can be thought, debated, and practiced.

Two keynote lectures follow: Park Guyong, Professor of Philosophy at Chonnam National University, examines the moral tensions between human autonomy and algorithmic logic, while McKenzie Wark (The New School) situates disobedience within digital culture, exploring how systems of code simultaneously constrain and produce new forms of critical subjectivity.

Session 1—From Disobedient Objects to Disobedient Code
Moderator: Gimo Yi (Chief Curator, Asia Culture Center, Korea)
The first session traces how curatorial and artistic practices have redefined the relationship between technology, ethics, and resistance.

Catherine Flood, curator of Disobedient Objects (V&A, 2014), revisits the political aesthetics of protest and the materiality of collective action.

Blanca Giménez (Project Curator, UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts Karlsruhe, Germany) presents Open Codes: Living in Digital Worlds (ZKM, 2017–19), a landmark exhibition that reimagined the museum as a space for learning, coding, and rethinking digital citizenship.

From Korea, the curatorial Team Converter (Song Hyojin, Won Soyoung, Lee Jinseon, Ji Ha-un) introduces Pseudocode (Jungganjijeom II, 2025), their exploration of the ethical paradoxes of AI-generated narratives, while Jieun Seo, Senior Curator at the Hanwha Foundation of Culture, who curated Synthetic Fever (Coreana Museum of Art, 2025), discusses how the exhibition speculates on synthetic life and emotional computation.

Together, these voices outline how the curatorial field itself has become an arena for negotiating technological obedience and creative refusal.

Session 2—Disobedient Networks and Digital Resistance
Moderator: Eunseon Park (Director, Listen to the City, Korea)

If the first session examines institutions, the second turns toward communities and networks, the distributed infrastructures of digital dissent.

DISNOVATION.ORG (art collective, France) transforms refusal into form—exposing the social and ecological costs of technocapitalism and reimagining sustainability as an economy bounded by the planet’s annual photosynthetic income. Olia Fedorova (artist, Ukraine) and Clara Cheung (artist/curator, Hong Kong) reflect on how artists navigate the precarious politics of visibility in networked environments of censorship and surveillance.

CHE Onejoon (Artist and Researcher/AfroAsia Collective, Korea) and Ibanjiha (artist/activist, Korea) discuss how decolonial and queer practices articulate disobedience not as confrontation but as the creation of alternative forms of intimacy, care, and solidarity.

The session foregrounds disobedience as an affective and ethical stance—an act of repair within the machinery of power.

Session 3—Rethinking Digital Resistance Through Art & Tech Festivals
Moderator: Jaehan Ryu (Director, Asia Cultural City Forum, Korea)

The concluding session turns to the festival as a living laboratory where art, technology, and social inquiry converge.

Sabine Himmelsbach (Director, HEK Basel, Switzerland) reflects on curating ethical imaginaries of technology through exhibitions such as Entangled Realities and Real Feelings, positioning emotion as a critical interface between humans and machines.

Son Mimi (Artistic Director, Kimchi and Chips/Seoul Art & Tech Festival Unfold X 2025, Korea) and Nora O’Murchú (Director, Transmediale 2021–24, Ireland) discuss how festivals can act as responsive ecosystems that foster dialogue, critique, and collective experimentation beyond institutional boundaries.

Wu Dar-Kuen (Director, C-LAB, Taiwan) presents Future Media FEST—Singularity, highlighting how curatorial experimentation can reveal the philosophical and social dimensions of AI.

Finally, Dominique Moulon (Associate Curator, NEMO Biennale 2025, France) draws connections between artistic creation and technological ethics, reflecting on The Lost Illusions Rediscovered – New Utopias in the Digital Age.

Through these intertwined perspectives, the forum articulates disobedience not as negation, but as a method of thinking and making otherwise—a curatorial and artistic proposition for reprogramming the future.

Rooted in the Art & Tech Seminar Group, which brought together curators and artists from Asia and Europe—including Pingyi Chen & Monique Chiang (Taiwan), Luís Fernandes (Portugal), Klega (Germany), Clara Cheung (Hong Kong), and Honggyun Mok & Yejin Hwang (Korea)—the forum stands as both a culmination of these collective discussions and a prelude to upcoming exhibition of G.MAP in 2026, which will continue to explore the entanglements of AI, ethics, and artistic practice.

Hosted and organized by Gwangju Media Art Platform (G.MAP) / Directed by Heokyung Kim (Director, G.MAP) / Curated by Honggyun Mok (Curator, G.MAP) with assistance from Yejin Hwang (Exhibition Coordinator, G.MAP). Supported by the Institut français in Paris and the Cultural Service of the Embassy of France to the Republic of Korea