국립현대미술관

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“A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better mod - el than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.” ― Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

At a time when artificial intelligence is expected to carry out computations and respond instantaneously, this project names those who observe the world over long durations—certain individuals, artists, and children—as “detectives.” Today, few remain who scrutinize someone else closely and puzzle over the traces they leave behind, apart from detectives. Such tenacious observation is not merely about the gathering of information. In fact, it carries within it a complex gaze: the belief that secrets and truths may be uncovered; the resolve to sustain a fundamental faith in humanity even while being suspicious of another human being; and the desire to foresee an approaching future through the act of tracing the past.

The detectives invoked in this year’s MMCA Performing Arts: Deep Time (the literal translation of the Korean title is “Detective’s Time”) diverge slightly from classical sleuths and are entangled in two distinct currents of change, the first of which is the collapse of the detective’s “sense of privilege.” To begin, an external, privileged position is no longer possible in this field of work. So too is the belief that an individual can definitively solve complex problems, or firmly define oneself as the agent of such problem-solving. In today’s world, there is no single fixed truth—no specific perpetrator, no definitive answer—and the instability of identity, perpetually subject to fluctuation, transforms the position and perspective of the “detective” into something fundamentally different from before. Second, observation and inference are not only visual and logical acts, but thoroughly bodily and temporal ones as well. To watch another person deeply demands an immense amount of time and physical effort. Excessive devotion, endurance, and the repetition of near-identical gestures gradually alter the tempo of the detective’s own life, slowing it dramatically beyond the object of observation. Within this deepened time, everyday trivial things—such as the path of sunlight, a strand of hair on someone, and the sound of one’s own breathing—take on a different meaning. “Deep and slow” time, which is distinct from mechanical speed and unique to human experience, is the theme of this year’s MMCA Performing Arts series.

I have rendered this title in English as “Deep Time.” The concept, proposed by a geologist observing the stratified formations of Scotland, refers to vast geological time beyond the scale of human measure—a temporality that refuses fixation and completion, that is itself the very process of ceaseless change and flow. I would like to place this “long and thick” time in contrast with the “deep learning” of artificial intelligence, which acquires data to minimize error and swiftly produce optimal answers in a rigorously goal-oriented manner. Deep time is a temporality approaching the infinite; yet within its strata, traces of transformation and energy accumulate layer upon layer. This is also why deep time is interested not only in artists but also in children; the temporal strata of children have not yet fully hardened. Indeed, responsive to external influence, children retain the capacity to transform themselves and to rise anew, demonstrating a plasticity. In this sense, the creative observation of children and the inexhaustible labor of artists harbor the potential to unsettle fixed strata and established orders.

Ultimately, the detective of MMCA Performing Arts does not pursue fixed truths or definitive outcomes. Rather, within deep time, this detective reveals other meanings through rupture, expansion, and accumulation. As a result, their work may be understood as contemporary art’s response to the instantaneous computation (answers)—that is, accelerated agency—of artificial intelligence. Intriguingly, the detective’s method of problem-solving (induction–abduction–deduction) and the response-generating mechanisms of a large language model (LLM)—massive-scale induction and deduction through chains of thought—seem to share a similar logical structure. However, the time of goal-oriented artificial intelligence externalizes fatigue through a disembodied, non-corporeal mode of observation. A detective’s time, by contrast, begins only after leaving the scene of the event: it is a time of reflection, of mentally and emotionally reconstructing what has already occurred, and of patient waiting until even the most trivial traces acquire meaning. It resembles a re-viewing that suddenly arises one night after leaving the museum or the theater. This re-viewing reconfigures the viewer’s thoughts and emotions. Thus, the detective, while walking, reconstructs time—gazing at mountains, trees, machines, the sky, the cosmos. In this process, the detective is not merely a machine that produces answers, but a being who weaves relations among entities in the interstices of events—or at times, an agent who fails to come up with any answers. In that deep delay, the detective wrestles with the self, persists in response, and tails the arrow of time.

The act of prolonged observation can never be neutral. As demonstrated by Christopher Nolan’s film Following, which serves as a bridge between Chapter I and Chapter II of MMCA Performing Arts: Deep Time, observation that appears purposeless intervenes in the world of its object, shaping new relations and materialities between the two, that is, between the observer and the observed. Each draws the other into their own temporality; time, like an index, gradually leaves its traces upon bodies and objects. Intense immersion displaces both the observer and the observed from their original positions, transforming them in unforeseen ways. Between plasticity and permanent transformation, fierce longing and irreversible creep emerge. It is precisely at this threshold that the deep time accumulated in Chapter I, “observation and pursuit,” advances into Chapter II, “Slow Creep .”

The following is my explanation... well, my... my account of... well, what happened.

— Following (1998), directed by Christopher Nolan

To be continued in Chapter 2