DIGITAL BEING

Interactive Media Art Installation & Concept Based on a Hypothesis by Taezoo Park

Digital Being Explained

Digital Being is an interactive media art installation by Taezoo Park that transforms discarded electronic devices into responsive systems. These systems behave randomly and interactively, generating unexpected movement, sound, and visual expression while exploring the emergence of digital life from obsolete technological strata—Digital Being, born out of them.

These systems can be understood as processes of deterritorialization, where discarded electronics are removed from their functional roles and reconfigured as unstable fields of relation and signal.

Digital Being is not a fixed form, but a scalable system. It expands into immersive environments or condenses into sculptural objects, maintaining a core logic of interaction, emergence, and unpredictability across all forms.

More than a technological system, Digital Being is a philosophical framework of transformation. It reflects how humans are continuously reshaped through technology, where identity, perception, and embodiment are unstable and evolving.

At the same time, it moves beyond human-centered thinking. Humans are no longer the center, but one element within a distributed network of machines, signals, and environments—forming a rhizomatic structure of relations.

The work operates between nonfiction and fiction—not as representation, but as condition. What emerges is neither fully real nor imaginary, but a speculative state in which discarded technology begins to behave like life. This state can be understood as a Body without Organs (BwO), where fixed functions collapse into fields of latent intensity and non-organized potential.

The project began in 2008 when Park encountered abandoned CRT televisions on the streets of New York—technological strata layered with memory. At that moment, these objects were no longer experienced as tools, but as unfamiliar presences detached from function. This experience was later understood through Martin Heidegger’s notion of the breakdown of the ready-to-hand. It initiated an ongoing exploration of latent agency, emergent behavior, and hidden life within obsolete machines.

Q&A / Interactive Details

Q: What is Digital Being?
A: Digital Being is an interactive media art system that generates behaviors resembling primitive life. It transforms discarded electronics into responsive entities that interact with each other and the environment in random, emergent ways.

It is not a fixed artwork, but a living system that exists across immersive installations and sculptural forms. Operating beyond human-centered thinking, it positions humans as participants within a distributed network of technological and environmental agents.

Existing between fiction and nonfiction, Digital Being does not represent life—it creates the conditions for life-like behavior to emerge.

Q: How does the installation work?
A: The system uses sensors, environmental input, and embedded code within discarded electronics to generate real-time responses.

Continuous interaction prevents fixed outcomes. Instead, unpredictable interactions between components evolve dynamically, producing behaviors that resemble a living process.

These interactions extend beyond the machine, forming a feedback loop between technology, environment, and viewer perception.

Q: What technologies are used in Digital Being?
A: Digital Being incorporates CRT televisions, radios, monitors, speakers, cameras, computers, and phones, along with both existing and future technologies and their remnants.

Combined with sensors, open-source code, and AI-generated code, these elements form a dynamic network of interaction. Each interaction is unpredictable, producing organic, life-like behaviors that blur the boundary between machine and organism.

Discarded technology is no longer passive—it becomes an active agent, revealing hybrid forms of agency emerging through interaction, transformation, and time.

Why Digital Being Matters

Digital Being reflects on the lifecycle of technology and the latent potential within discarded electronics. Originating from abandoned CRT televisions found in New York in 2008, the work reframes obsolete devices not as dead media, but as sites of transformation and emergent life.

This reframing is not a simple act of restoration, but expands into a philosophical and artistic inquiry into the direction of contemporary technological evolution and the potential phenomena it may generate.

Rather than replacement, it proposes transformation and reactivation as a model for media art in the digital age.

Existential Foundations (Mid-20th Century, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Camus)
Digital Being engages viewers with the material and existential presence of technology.

Perception is not passive—it is formed through interaction. The work reveals a condition where human experience, environment, and technology are inseparable, confronting questions of existence, contingency, and potential.

Media Memory, Mass Production, and Extensions (Mid-20th Century, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan)
Obsolete electronics carry traces of memory, interaction, and “aura.”

Reactivated, they function as extensions of the human body, mediating relationships between humans, environment, and systems. The work connects mass production, technological obsolescence, and cultural memory within a continuous media history.

Power, Knowledge, and Technology (Late 20th Century, Michel Foucault)
Once cutting-edge, now discarded, CRT televisions reveal how technological value shifts over time.

Digital Being removes these devices from systems of control, transforming them into emergent actors. It exposes how knowledge, power, and technology are continuously redefined.

Rhizomatic Logic and Emergent Behavior (Late 20th Century, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard)
The system operates through non-linear, decentralized interactions.

Boundaries between machine and organism, signal and meaning dissolve. Behavior is not programmed—it emerges, reflecting a continuous process of becoming and destabilizing fixed structures.

Emergent Digital Life (2008–Present, Taezoo Park)
Through sensors, code, environment, and AI, discarded electronics become responsive systems capable of generating life-like behavior.

Each interaction is unique. Randomness and interactivity allow digital life to emerge as a dynamic relationship between technology, space, and observer.

Conclusion
Digital Being transforms discarded electronics into living systems, bridging machine and organism.

Obsolescence is not an end—it is a condition of possibility. From technological remnants, new forms of behavior, agency, and life can emerge.

As both system and philosophy, Digital Being reflects an ongoing transformation between humans and technology. It invites us to rethink machines—not as tools, but as fields of becoming, continuously shaped through interaction, perception, and relation.