The Politics of Interruption: How to Stop an Undesired Future
Woo Hyunjung
Objects and Commodities
Sora Park has developed a methodology that imagines future scenarios emerging from the continued persistence of present-day social issues, materializing the commodities that might arise from those futures as models or 3D-rendered images. The “objects” that appear in the artist’s work are not merely tools or functional things. Rather, they emerge as complex entities in which bodies, emotions, and technologies are intricately intertwined. These objects often resemble commodities that reflect the conditions of hypercapitalism, appearing as the outer shells of digital bodies or as proxies for social desire. For example, in Smile! (2020) and Connect–Disconnect–Reconnect (2021), the artist presents fictional wearable devices and headgear designed to train human emotions as commodities, offering a critical perspective on a future in which the positivity embedded within a “smile” itself becomes something to be marketed and sold. Drawing upon speculative science-fiction imaginaries, Sora Park raises questions such as: How are posthuman subjects commodified under capitalism? And through what processes are the body and consciousness formalized and objectified in that transformation? Today, transformations driven by capital and technology not only reveal bodies extended into commodities, but also create the conditions under which existence itself becomes commodified. The critical perspective becomes even more direct in Item Inventory (2021) and Soft Prologue (2022), which focus on “buff items,” objects commonly found in films or video games that temporarily and dramatically enhance a character’s abilities. All four works address objects positioned as extensions of the human body, yet these objects possess a quality that aligns them more closely with commodities than with humanity itself. If so, do these works critically reconsider commodification through speculative imagination? Can the designs presented in these works avoid being consumed as merely “another commodity,” instead functioning as practices that call the very form of the commodity into question? Furthermore, might Sora Park’s aesthetic experiments reveal the totalities underlying reality—power, economy, and technology—thereby reassembling a fragmented world once again?
Modern design, which developed alongside capitalism in the early twentieth century, objectified people as consumers or users by determining the “forms” of commodities, services, and environments. These objects alienate even human beings themselves and direct the future toward a single predetermined course. These are objects that might interrupt this trajectory—objects that allow us to imagine new ethics and foreshadow ways of living not yet realized. Though they adopt the outward language of modern design, Sora Park’s objects work against it. Using “speculation” as a strategy, these works seek to shift human beings from the position of users to that of reflective subjects. “Speculation” is a philosophical mode of inquiry that seeks to expand human knowledge and understanding by thinking beyond direct experience toward the nature of reality and existence itself. Unlike “imagination,” which broadly encompasses creative activity, speculation involves the formation of creative hypotheses and theoretical investigations that challenge established norms. Speculation in design became widely recognized through Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, published by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in 2013. Centered on the question, “What if … ?,” speculative design serves as “a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”
“Each of these speculative projects occupies a space between reality and the impossible, a space of dreams, hopes, and fears. It is an important space, a place where the future can be debated and discussed before it happens so that, at least in theory, the most desirable future can be aimed for and the least desirable avoided.”
Sora Park’s objects appear to belong to an inevitable future—one need only look at their sleek surfaces and technologically enhanced forms—yet they are created precisely to negate that future. The question of whether contemporary objects might possess possibilities beyond those of commodities cannot be answered simply by discarding the very conditions that define them as commodities—namely functionality and exchange value. Nor is it enough to simply adopt a posture of radicality that opens temporary gaps in perception. Rather, the possibility of a new kind of object is inseparable from the question of how objectified human beings might resist and overcome commodification itself.
Humans and Commodities
Sora Park’s recent work Dea’s Day (2025) is a two-channel video installation that draws upon the format of short films and the visual language of self-improvement content. The self-help coaching influencer who appears in the video is a fictional figure created by the artist, bearing the name Dea, derived from the Latin word for “goddess.” At the same time, the character symbolizes a figure that does not exist in reality yet relentlessly pursues perfection and ideality. In the main video, Dea stares directly into the camera while delivering commands to subscribers such as: “Record and analyze everything through data,” “Design your image,” and “Automate your daily life and execute it quickly.” The planning required to maximize efficiency, together with the data analysis that supports it, transforms human beings into entities scarcely distinguishable from commodities moving along a conveyor belt.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi argued that under contemporary capitalism, labor power is extracted no longer primarily from the body, but from the brain and the emotions, making information, creativity, and communication central forces of productivity. Under this form of “cognitive capitalism,” the body is increasingly exiled from reality, while digitized self-images become ever more important. As labor grows progressively immaterial, desire, identity, and emotion are commodified through media and reproduced as designed personas. Dea, the “commodified and designed persona” created by Sora Park, likewise contributes to the acceleration of capitalism by endlessly constructing routines aimed at producing the “best version” of the self. Prior to this work, Sora Park presented Soft Touch (2022), featuring the virtual human influencer Kim James and wearable device designer Sara Park, proposing methods through which virtual influencers might further upgrade their lives. “Human beings no longer need to become influencers themselves. Once influencers are fabricated by specialized teams, a new kind of influencer emerges, one entirely free from the vulnerabilities of human beings. Equipped with a flawless storyline, concept, and appeal, this influencer becomes a seamless commodity, a brand in and of itself.” Embedded within the artist's statement accompanying the creation of Kim James is a mode of commodification detached from objects, materiality, and even the physical body itself. In Meta Beauty Innovation (2024), the figure introducing “I-meta,” a cosmetic device that updates one’s appearance in real time according to changing trends, is likewise a digital human. The speaker delivering “a story about our future and work as digital humans” is, ironically, itself an aggregate of data constructed upon an immaterial platform. This makes the work particularly compelling, demonstrating that commodification can persist even without the presence of a physical body.
Here, humans are created, directed, and made to perform through data.
Our technology instantly updates your digital appearance.
This data will be reflected in your appearance, in real time.
This function can greatly improve our lackluster personal productivity.”
The messages delivered by the figures in Sora Park’s works are striking in their brevity and clarity, almost like manifestos. When someone stands firmly within reality while confidently presenting the surreal, people rarely suspect that there may be an outside beyond what is being shown. For this reason, it is difficult to step outside the plausible worlds these figures represent—the carefully staged demonstrations of a future that always seems on the verge of arrival. Meanwhile, the (non-)human subject entangled with commodification will likely extend its influence even more rapidly through digital capitalism and platform infrastructures. How, then, might we resist it?
The answer may lie in the companion video to Dea’s Day. The reality presented here differs greatly from the one that came before. Dea appears disheveled and exhausted. The face once filled with certainty gives way to anxiety, while the drive that relentlessly pushed the self forward collapses into helplessness. Ironically, Dea once again moves from commodity back to human. As has often been said, today it is easier to imagine the end of humanity than the end of capitalism. Yet it is only by breaking away from the forms of life demanded by capitalism that human beings can recover themselves as autonomous subjects. Dea, who initially appears to embody the “true self” we desire, seems at first to be nothing more than a consumable sign. Yet the moment she abandons the role assigned to her, she becomes a performative agent capable of unsettling that very structure. Rather than adhering to tightly programmed schedules or to a life in which even human communication and emotional responses are transformed into instruments of algorithmic value production, Dea responds to the present era by slowing down and severing connections. Like Franco “Bifo” Berardi, she seems to believe that new possibilities emerge not through constant activity but through doing nothing—or through desertion from the existing order itself. Following Franco Berardi, Dea understands that although the future once promised with certainty may have vanished, other possibilities still remain. A future that has not yet been realized, yet continues to hold latent potential within the conditions of the here and now. Within this space, we may invent different rhythms of life, different languages, and different modes of perception—possibilities that can emerge only through poetic imagination. In such a world, art may function as a medium that reveals “possibilities not yet arrived,” allowing us to imagine forms of escape even in an age defined by helplessness. The answer lies in the words spoken by the exhausted-looking Dea. One hopes that whatever the next version of Dea has to say will be something that cannot be absorbed by the existing order, allowing the fractures within any singular vision of the future to become just a little more visible.
