»Delivery Dancer Codex«

In recent years, South Korean artist Ayoung Kim (born 1979) has been one of the most highly regarded voices in digital art: with the help of AI and video game engines, she developed an urban labyrinth based on the city of Seoul for her video installations in the Delivery Dancer trilogy. Her speculative narratives raise questions about reality in the face of modern technologies and the challenges of capitalist systems, but also about belonging and queerness. The trilogy is being shown in one place for the first time in the exhibition Delivery Dancer Codex at MoMA PS1 in New York: Delivery Dancer's Sphere (2022), Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver (2024), and Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse (2024) are monumental video installations that critique motivations for self-optimization in capitalism. The exhibition runs from November 6, 2025, to March 16, 2026.

The idea for Delivery Dancer came about during the COVID-19 pandemic: like many other people, Seoul-based artist Kim was reliant on delivery services during lockdown. Fascinated by the drivers, who were among the most mobile people at the time, Kim accompanied a female delivery driver on her motorcycle to research her new project. In Delivery Dancer, delivery driver Ernst Mo rides her motorcycle through a futuristic Seoul with her doppelganger En Storm, going from job to job. In the process, she loses herself in an algorithmic labyrinth of fictional universes governed by their own laws of space and time.

In February 2025, Kim received the LG Guggenheim Award, which is endowed with $100,000 and presented to artists for groundbreaking achievements in technology-based art. The artist exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and this year showed her work in the MACHINE LOVE exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and in the solo exhibition Many Worlds Over at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.