Geumhyung Jeong: ‘Under Construction’

Bodies lie splintered, shattered, in pieces on the floor in Geumhyung Jeong’s installation at the ICA. Skeletal appendages – ribs, femurs, spines and skulls – are abandoned on the concrete, wires and motors and batteries left half connected to tibias and hips.

Tables along the walls are littered with mechanical scraps and body parts. This robotic graveyard is a work in progress, the artist comes into the gallery periodically to try and desperately assemble a functional robot out of this detritus.

She’s part-roboticist, part-choreographer, part-artist, on a quest to somehow make a living being out of the scraps of everyday technology.

In the back room, screens show CCTV images of her welding, soldering, screwing robot pieces together. Now that spinal column twitches, a leg flexes, a head turns, but never successfully, never well.

These things she builds flail and fall and fail

You could ask, legitimately, why is it more interesting or better to watch an artist build a robot than, you know, a roboticist? Jeong is obviously less good at this than a robotic scientist, and the results of her work are tangibly less advanced, less useful, than anything coming out of literally any robotics lab anywhere in the world. These wouldn’t have been impressive robots 20, 30 years ago. So why should you care?

In the end, it’s not about the robots, or the technology, it’s about the failure. It’s about Jeong trying to build a functional body - one that moves and dances and interacts - but constantly coming up short. These things she builds out of everyday materials flail and fall and fail, no matter how hard she tries to perfect them. Geumhyung Jeong hasn’t created something robotic or mechanical here, but something wholly human: desperation and failure.