Through glitches and loops, artist probes our senses in tech-saturated world

Installation view of the artist Kwon Ah-ram's solo exhibition, "Fever Eye," at SongEun Art Space in southern Seoul / Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artist

Day by day, we find ourselves drifting deeper into flickering screens, losing touch with the tactile contours of physical reality.

As our gaze sinks into the virtual, machines rise to replace our eyes in the world we leave behind: CCTV surveillance watches streets we no longer notice, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors map the roads for self-driving cars we no longer steer and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered vision learns to perceive on our behalf.

Artist Kwon Ah-ram, grand prize winner of the 21st SongEun Art Award, explores how these accelerated, tech-driven shifts fundamentally reshape our perceptual experience in her latest solo exhibition, “Fever Eye,” at SongEun Art Space in southern Seoul.

Fittingly, the show is saturated with digital screens and AI-generated soundscapes — blinking, glitching and deliberately unstable — that overstimulate the senses, thus conjuring the fevered online delirium within the gallery’s physical space.

Kwon Ah-ram's "The Backrooms" (2025) / Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artist

Filling the building’s cave-like basement is “The Backrooms,” Kwon’s own take on the popular internet urban legend that imagines a liminal space — a surreal alternate reality made up of infinite, eerily deserted rooms.

Here, as viewers watch the blinking screens, they’re pulled into a claustrophobic maze of rooms that repeat, distort and twist in on themselves. With no exit ever in sight, their eyes are led down endless corridors and spiraling staircases.

The artist visualizes the uncanny, hallucinatory sensation of being trapped in a loop, subtly reminding us that navigating the online world can feel much the same. It’s an enclosure shaped by invisible algorithmic feedback, where one is compelled to wander, never quite arriving.

Kwon Ah-ram's "Fever Eye" (2025) / Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artist

Meanwhile, the titular piece, “Fever Eye,” installed on the third floor, encircles viewers in a row of LED panels radiating an intense red glow — a visual motif instantly evocative of error messages and warning signals.

Unlike “The Backrooms,” the work offers no sound. Without an auditory distraction, one is drawn more deeply into the image’s unsettling estrangement. The piece thus forces a direct confrontation with illusion itself, urging viewers to recognize the constructed nature of digital reality.

Kwon Ah-ram's "Intercross (Xerox and Polestar)" (2025) / Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artist

Other works continue in a similar vein. “Hacks” features a glitching screen designed to appear as if it has been temporarily hijacked by an unknown force. In “Jinn,” semantically disjointed sentences read aloud by AI voices flood the room, creating a disorienting experience. The work stems from Kwon’s interest in the phenomenon of AI hallucination, in which large language models produce false or misleading outputs due to insufficient training data.

And “Intercross (Xerox and Polestar)” presents a virtual portrait of a newly imagined artificial species: a hybrid between Xerox’s first computer and Polestar’s futuristic electric car.

Kwon Ah-ram's "Nowhere Happiness" (2012/2025) / Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artist

Taken individually, each piece offers a fleeting glimpse into the tech-driven phenomena we know all too well but rarely have the chance to observe from a critical distance. Yet as a whole, the connections between the works feel tenuous.

Without prior context or deeper familiarity with the artist’s practice, the exhibition risks coming across as overly abstract and elusive — more a conceptual haze than a physical experience with emotional punch or payoff.

“Fever Eye” runs through Aug. 9 at SongEun.