Subtitled NYC, New York
June 12–August 23, 2026
We’re all familiar with liquidity as the signature aggrandizing metaphor of the contemporary internet: endless flows, instantaneous transmission, a structural affinity to capital. The ideal model of a global internet is the model of globalism exceeding itself—infinite access, infinite interconnectedness that goes where even the most mobile bodies can’t. Just as nationalisms puncture neoliberal visions of the global and its attendant universalisms, the technocratic imaginary of a seamlessly open web—which the “liquidity” metaphor captures so vividly—continues to undergo fragmentation.
Yehwan Song is interested in challenging ideologies that fixate on the flow. Linguistic and geographic disruptions to open transmission of material—state-imposed firewalls or the over-representation of English-language material, for example—are baked into the programmatic dimensions of today’s web. Rather than render the internet’s splintered territories through the motif of internet-as-infrastructure—a well-trodden style of expository, substructural artistic critique that discloses how circulation that feels immaterial remains deeply physical and sited (think deep-sea internet cables)—Song’s “The Other Internet” traces the surface effects of our collective, interminable web surf.
Song’s ambitious exhibition at Subtitled NYC, guest-curated by Brian Droitcour, dismantles the vision of a “liquid” web through a dense yet playful sculptural proposition. The exhibition’s central installation positions a cascade of smartphones, screens on, right under the flow of multiple streams of water. An elaborate system of hydraulics causes water to fall onto the phone screens at varying rates. Each phone is paired with an individual fountain source able to activate its touch screen, substituting for the contact of a human finger. The falling water gradually scrolls across large text graphics that unveil sentences in different languages. The screens with English, for example, move steadily, signaling greater circulatory traffic. The screens with more algorithmically peripheral languages are glacial or simply motionless, their images dry or spattered with intermittent drops.
Framing this irregular, illiquid machine, the sculptural underbelly of The Other Internet’s (2026) eponymous installation is ordered and detailed. Built in a large, cube-like shape, the installation fully exposes the underlying architecture of its interrupted transmissions. This backdrop is striated with distinct layers of material. Thin bars of wood line the central phone tableaux; these in turn border a series of pipes and valves at the back of the work. When viewed from the reverse side, one can watch these valves move in an unpredictable choreography, tied to the rates of the respective fountains’ languages. Some twitch and turn at speed, others are still or show mild shakes.
Song’s project required extensive engineering (undertaken by the artist herself), and what she has accomplished is a real feat. A project this ambitious can naturally appear labored, because it is—the mechanical complexity is impressive, if also somewhat disorienting. As though certifying the sheer extent of the processing power, large networks of cords, not fully hidden, extend out of the installation and collect together in a trunk-like mass that remains visible on the gallery floor. The piece is working through multiple layers of cultural sedimentation, not only technological but symbolic—the liquidity metaphor, the touch screen scroll, the data center in miniature—and geopolitical: state-level internet controls, linguistic and regional biases in contemporary programmatic systems.
As much as they might be explained away by a desire to expose the internet’s infrastructural residues, it’s hard not to see the work’s technical spillovers as a byproduct of handling a deeply symbolic argument (about ideology and cultural metaphor) through spatial and sculptural means. Though structurally self-contained, The Other Internet is (partly by design) taxed by its multiple metaphors as it enacts them—and because of its size relative to the comparatively compact gallery space, the project inherently risks creating the feeling of a Rube Goldberg–like machine, in which technical elaboration overtakes artistic intention.
Yet one might compare it to Shigeko Kubota’s River (1979–81), another work in which actual water is central to an installation’s vision of the moving image (albeit analog rather than digital). In a white cube environment, River’s huge CRT monitors loom large over its most elegant gesture—the mirroring of the videos’ images onto an open basin of water, creating the impression of liquid transmission. When River was subsequently shown in an intentionally dimmed, black box environment in MoMA’s 2021 exhibition of Kubota’s work (titled “Liquid Reality”), however, the result was much more seamless, keeping the eye focused on the material specificity of the projection-like effect of River’s water, more than on the technical bulk of its machines.
By making circulatory flows into literal water, “The Other Internet” implicitly positions sculpture as a corrective to the digital. What could disappear into automated slickness is incommensurate with analog mass; through this friction, Song’s sculpture metabolizes the internet, off-screen. As in Kubota’s work, there is a theatrical dimension at work here—even a fourth wall of sorts. We know we’re watching an enclosed process; this is a scene, and the artifice is part of the point. The detailed, densely architected structure of the installation feels like a deliberate staging, even if it doesn’t conceal its apparatus from the audience.
What’s exciting about this project is that Song’s approach feels both genuinely fresh and cheekily attuned to the longer historical arc of video art. Countless theories of the image have taken the metaphorical liquidity of the internet as the “bad object” of a critique, and the rejection of algorithmic logic is common enough in contemporary practice. Rarer is a direct artistic engagement with these themes that avoids either parodic appropriation or a grave documentary tone. With its energetic fusion of technical design and aesthetic experimentation, The Other Internet charts a distinctive course through our media-saturated present.
