A festival that questions the landscape and meaning of relationships generated within technology that has become part of daily life is set to open. From December 9th to 21st, Culture Station Seoul 284 hosts the 4th Seoul Convergence Arts Festival, Unfold X. Unfold X, which has formally adopted the artistic director system this year, has placed Kimchi and Chips (Mimi Son and Elliot Woods) at its center. The efforts invested by this acclaimed duo, known for their solid standing on the global art scene, into this festival are immense. Kimchi and Chips endeavors to uncover diverse potentialities at the intersection of technology and art as they permeate our daily lives. The anticipation for this innovative approach is increasing, as it strives to transcend the existing symbolism and trust inherently tied to their name.

When asked for their initial thoughts on taking on the role of artistic directors, Kimchi and Chips expressed their passion: “Unfold X has historically played a pioneering role in the convergence of art and technology. It serves as a gateway platform for artists working with both fields. Many artists have debuted and developed here, using this as a springboard to become global figures.” Director Mimi Son previously served as the artistic director for “DaVinci Creative” festival, the precursor to Unfold X, in 2014. Now, a decade later, she returns as the artistic director of Unfold X together with Elliot Woods, this time under the name Kimchi and Chips.

The question first posed in 2014 has now evolved in 2025 into a new inquiry: “What significance can the structure of a festival hold within art?” While respecting the evolving identity of Unfold X, which has steadily developed since its inception, Kimchi and Chips sought a different direction from existing frameworks. “We considered the role that a festival’s format could play in art, such as its ability to create focus, excitement, and social energy. Historically, festivals have served as containers for various works, but this time, we wanted to view the festival itself as an entity, an artwork.”

They devoted significant time and effort to the overall composition of the program. While they crafted the festival with technical precision, they also focused on transcending mere technological approaches. As a result, this year’s festival offers numerous additional elements for visitors to enjoy and experience. “We deliberately shook up the conventional structure of festivals. Breaking away from the traditional format that was purely exhibition-based, we introduced performances and cinema programs, aiming to create a ‘living site’ where new happenings unfold daily for 13 days.”

Kimchi and Chips strived to create an environment where the artist’s experimental spirit and on-site sensibility could intervene more actively. Drawing from their extensive experience and networks built over the last two decades, they dedicated themselves to every stage of the festival. “Our mindset was to ‘create it through our own eyes,’ just as we create our own art. Every artist puts their all into creating a piece, and we wanted to apply that same attitude to this festival.”

In addition, they aimed to transform Unfold X into a “space founded on respect for artists.” A core value that permeates this festival is to create an environment where artists can have positive experiences, and the relationships established here can endure over time. “We understand the anxieties and stresses that artists might experience. Therefore, we believe our role as artists and hosts, inviting artists with empathy and understanding, can be executed more effectively. Our top priority is to ensure that each participating artist’s work is showcased to its best potential.” They thus committed all their accumulated expertise to Unfold X.

While maintaining their creative mindset, the duo was fully aware of the responsibility that comes with being artistic directors. “It’s more challenging than directly creating individual works,” they admitted. “As a public institution project, we often encounter differing priorities, and reconciling these differences is more difficult than anticipated. The role of the artistic director inherently requires creative decisions, and with those decisions comes responsibility. We went beyond selecting works and designing spaces to oversee production processes and spatial coordination, ensuring each piece reaches the highest quality. This includes meticulously adjusting performance equipment and acoustic qualities of the spaces.”

“It is easy to make something look good, but much harder to make it feel good.” Kimchi and Chips wanted to evoke emotional resonance and create experiences unique to the festival site. To achieve this, they focused on spatial experimentation, particularly sound design. They collaborated with an acoustic consultant to reduce reverberation and installed sound panels. “If previous events were ‘good to look at,’ this one will also be ‘good to listen to.’ We want to test the limits of the venue and demonstrate the possibilities within it.”

They also improved the viewing flow. “Maintaining the visitors’ energy until the end is always a difficult challenge. We tried to strike a balance, considering that some works energize the viewer while others require concentration. Culture Station Seoul 284 is a great space, but its layout can make visitors tired from moving back and forth between rooms. To address this, we blocked off certain corridors to create a more cohesive flow, ensuring that no one misses a single work.”

This year’s festival theme, “Let Things Go: The Relationship of Relationships,” begins with the premise that “nothing in this world can exist alone.” “As the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour once said, society is not a finished entity but a ‘flexible net constantly being altered by its members.’” Following Latour’s actor-network theory, the festival sees not only humans but also objects, institutions, laws, animals, and plants as “actors” within a network of relations. It draws attention to the variability and ethical implications of these networks. Kimchi and Chips hope that Unfold X will become both “an ecosystem where works move and form relationships organically” and “an experimental ground for relationships.” “All elements such as humans and non-humans, artists, artworks, spaces, and objects are intertwined, giving rise to unexpected experiences.”

At the core of this year’s project lies the fundamental question: “What is a festival?” By deeply researching this question, Kimchi and Chips focused on “collective joy,” a concept found in anthropology and sociology. “Even before language existed, people expressed joy together through dance, movement, and breath. Over time, those acts evolved into the form of festivals, sometimes as rituals to praise deities, sometimes as a means to confront crises. Today, with technology and capital deeply involved, festivals can easily turn into political or biased tools, but we hoped Unfold X would not head in that direction.”

For this festival, Kimchi and Chips did not focus on specific artists. Instead, they structured the works and programs to be understood within a unified context and concept rather than consumed individually. However, a few works serve as key examples illustrating the exhibition’s theme and philosophy. Upon entering the main hall, visitors are greeted by pieces that visually express the festival’s curatorial intent.

Anouk Kruithof’s Universal Tongue (2018?21) connects gestures from different cultures and time periods through music. This 8-channel video installation, based on over 8,800 online videos (including more than 1,000 dance styles) collected from 196 countries, uses dance as a medium to showcase the fluidity and connectivity of the digital age. “The work gathers dances from people across diverse cultures, countries, and eras. Each body language is connected through the music, threaded together like beads on a string. Different rhythms and gestures synchronize, showing both flow and similarity within repetition and difference despite the diverse cultures. That entanglement itself is fascinating,” the duo explained. Kimchi and Chips identified a universal human sensibility within this work.

“This work can be called a sort of ‘physical internet.’ It transforms what we usually encounter on phone or computer screens into a sensory experience within the exhibition space. Watching the vivid movements of people around the world, joyful, awkward, and everything in between, you realize that dance is truly a universal language. You can feel how people move their bodies to express themselves, and that energy spreads contagiously. When people around you move, you naturally feel the impulse to move as well. We hope visitors can have that kind of experience at the festival.”

The work of Dries Depoorter is placed within this same context. His current piece is a satirical video installation based on footage capturing politicians using their smartphones. If a visitor uses their phone for too long, an image recognition program detects it and automatically sends out a tweet with the message, “pay attention.” “This work intuitively demonstrates the national situation we currently face and the conditions placed upon technology.”

As illustrated, the participating artists each contemplate the impact of technology on society and the individual in their own way. Kimchi and Chips expand the direction of this inquiry to a more fundamental question. “Typically, when people hear ‘Art and Technology Festival,’ they imagine images like people wearing robotic arms or scenes with flashing lasers. But those formal images are no longer novel or inherently interesting. We focus on the actual impact of technology on humans. We are more interested in the symbols and messages embedded within it and how they alter emotions, politics, the future, and life.”

Ultimately, the artistic directors are concerned with what meaning technology creates for humans. More specifically, they focus on raising “‘technological literacy,’ helping people understand the symbols in technology, while simultaneously fostering the ability for people to more clearly articulate the form of life they desire.” Consequently, they explain, “Instead of worshipping or mystifying technology itself, we focused on people and places that find meaningful ways to understand and use it. That perspective guided our selection of participating works.”

This viewpoint is also connected to their creative attitude. Kimchi and Chips have consistently worked under the principle of “sharing the technology we create with others.” They released their developed software for free and sought to contribute their technical achievements back to the entire art ecosystem. Yet, they simultaneously note that the era of foregrounding technology itself has passed. For them, technology is not a special tool but rather a natural environment that enables artistic work.

“Today’s artists live in a post-technology era. We avoided art and festivals that treat technology merely as a tool for spectacle or flashy images. The phrase ‘art and technology’ is a convenient label, but it does not fully define a work. While we enjoy science fiction and fantasy, we wanted to avoid that kind of narrative. Since technology already occupies such a large part of our lives, that approach is unnecessary. As creators, we focused more on how to use and critique technology, and how cleverly we could capture its power or hidden mechanisms to pose questions to society.”

This year’s Unfold X includes various media, such as conceptual art, performance, and interactive art, and is structured to encourage visitors to break free from rigid frameworks. “The world of technology-based art cannot be defined by a single standard; it is diverse. Therefore, it is more important for visitors to personally experience what is happening in this world through multiple contexts and practices.”

Kimchi and Chips emphasize that “the visitors are the ones who make the festival shine the most; they are the protagonists,” adding that, in addition to exhibitions open to everyone, they have specially prepared evening performance programs on December 12th and 13th, as well as a cinema program running from the 16th to the 21st. “The idea that someone is more important than someone else doesn’t align with our values. We want to create a space where all visitors and artists can celebrate together.” They have also prepared programs like “Director’s Tours” to facilitate communication with visitors.

Meanwhile, while preparing for Unfold X, their own experiments as artists continue. They are holding a solo exhibition, Visual Load, at Gallery Shilla in Seoul until January 1st of the following year and will participate in the Beijing International Art Biennale from December 31st to February 1st, 2026. They are also currently developing a technology that can draw three-dimensional images in the sky on a large outdoor scale, and they are also preparing a long-term project set to debut in 2030.

Throughout the conversation with the two artistic directors, Mimi Son and Elliot Woods, their deep consideration and effort to create a platform that can be fully enjoyed by both visitors and artists were profoundly felt. The sincerity built up during this process is, in fact, the most important viewing point we recommend for this year’s Unfold X. It will be exciting to see how the newly structured festival connects with visitors and the directions in which Kimchi and Chips’ work will continue to evolve.