Jinah Rho (b. 1975) has been creating interactive AI robotic sculptures and real-time interactive videos that combine sculpture and new media, allowing audience interaction. She is interested in the redefined relationships between humans and non-human entities within the development of technological civilization.
 
The artist raises questions about the definitions of machine and life by exploring the philosophical implications of these relationships in an interactive manner within the exhibition space.

Jinah Rho began working on interactive robots that engage with the audience around 2002, during her studies in Chicago. In 2004, she introduced her robotic works in Korea through her solo exhibition “envious cyborgs” at Ilju Art House.
 
The artist observes that, in a world where countless machines like cell phones and cars have deeply permeated human life, humans are increasingly becoming mechanized, while machines are becoming more humanized. Her work begins by looking at the 'hybrids' that emerge as the boundaries between human and non-human blur due to advances in science and technology—from the perspective of these hybrids.

The life-sized female cyborg device You Type, I’ll Talk (2004), showcased in the exhibition, interacts with the audience by moving its eyes and mouth to engage in conversation. Connected to a computer via a wire attached to its navel like an umbilical cord, this cyborg recognizes questions typed by the audience and searches for data to respond.
 
In this interaction, the cyborg, a machine, speaks through its mouth—a human bodily organ—while the human audience can only engage by operating the machine with their hands. This creates a middle ground where the cyborg, striving to resemble a human, meets the human who, amidst advancing technology, forgoes their own bodily organ (the mouth) and engages in conversation through typing in cyberspace, thus becoming cyborg-like themselves.

Jinah Rho creates narratives around these hybrids—entities born of the human species and designed to resemble humans—within a framework where they aspire to emulate humanity out of envy. Her representative work, Geppetto’s Dream (2010), draws inspiration from Pinocchio, the story of a wooden puppet created by Geppetto, who wished for a child resembling himself, and who eventually becomes a real person.
 
In Geppetto’s Dream, audiences interact with Rho’s marionette, a human-like puppet, through a keyboard, prompting reflection on the existence of both humans and machines. As science advances, the human body is equipped with increasingly mechanical systems, while the creations we craft grow progressively intricate and natural in their resemblance to us—just as Geppetto's dream of having a child became reality.

Starting with An Evolving GAIA (2017), Rho’s interactive robots transitioned from text-based conversations through typing to a voice-based approach, where the audience speaks directly into the robot’s ear.
 
In this work, the machine doll GAIA, who wishes to become human, responds to questions from the audience by processing the voice information through sensors. This piece simultaneously addresses both the expectations and fears surrounding artificial intelligence, which is still far from perfect.

To achieve this, Rho developed a new question-and-answer (QA) system for GAIA, tailored to her personality and form, based on extensive data accumulated from conversations with audiences in previous works. Although GAIA's QA system broadly falls under artificial intelligence, it does not utilize deep learning. GAIA has yet to acquire self-replicating abilities, but her responses are often more philosophical and nuanced than the human questions, evoking an element of unexpected wonder.

Two years later, in 2019, Rho unveiled an interactive robot artwork using deep learning, titled Mater Ex Machina (My Machine Mother). Modeled after the artist’s own mother, Mater Ex Machina is a robot that learns expressions over time through machine learning, attempting to manifest what emotions might be. In the exhibition space, the machine mother learns expressions by observing those of the audience, then reproduces natural facial expressions and gestures suited to various situations, fostering interaction.
 
Through this work, the artist questions whether even concepts like 'motherhood' can be learned. If expressions and emotional displays developed through learning could eventually convey a warmth that feels emotional to the artist or the audience, would it be fair to say these are not real emotions?

The video work featuring Mater Ex Machina intensifies this inquiry into machine emotions. In the video, the robot’s mechanical structure is revealed beneath its silicone skin, and it speaks in a mechanical voice, making its robotic nature unmistakably clear.
 
Despite this overtly mechanical appearance, the machine mother speaks in a gentle tone, as a human mother might, expressing concern for her ‘daughter’ throughout the interview. Through this, the artist poses the question of whether empathy and emotional transfer are possible through machines.

Jinah Rho’s recent work, The Velocity of Hyperion (2022), is a large bust robot designed to interact naturally with audiences, blending ChatGPT with an AI program created by the artist. With the advancements in AI technology, Rho’s conversational robots have achieved even more refined and adept conversational abilities.

Another large bust robot work, Transcoded Mind (2022), features bust robots that respond to each other’s words, illustrating how distortion can arise in the communication process. Here, the audience witnesses how information originating from their own statements expands and distorts in a confusing way.
 
These interactions between the large bust robots reveal the limitations of AI learning technology. As vast data from an indefinite number of sources accumulates during the basic data learning process, biased and distorted data may be included, causing the AI to reproduce incorrect information or unethical statements.
 
By presenting these issues experientially, the artist prompts us to reflect on the necessary attitudes we should adopt while living in a highly advanced technological environment.

In her solo exhibition “Algorithm of Evolutionary Time,” held until November 4 at Oil Tank Culture Park, Rho presented new works that reconsider various issues in human-machine encounters from a macro-temporal perspective.
 
Among these works, Evolutionary Chimera-GAIA (2024), created as an extension of An Evolving GAIA (2017), is both an organism-like Earth that self-regulates and interacts—like Gaia, the mother goddess of the earth in Greek mythology—and an evolutionary chimera that has learned the time and history of the Earth.
 
Behind the massive robotic head is a tangle of various species of flora and fauna—humans, animals, branches—interconnected to create a strange and unsettling atmosphere. This could be seen as a fear or warning about technology, but Rho goes beyond that to propose a new language for co-evolution between humans and machines.

Through works like these, Rho has continually explored the relationship between humans and non-human entities like machines. Humans becoming more machine-like may find themselves feeling an uncanny sense towards machines that are increasingly human-like or may confront these entities as equal beings. By presenting this process in the form of experiential art, Rho encourages awareness and imagination around the deepening co-evolution with non-human entities.

"In reality, they wouldn’t desire to be like humans. However, created by humans and suited to survive better when they resemble humans, these beings communicate naturally with us, conveying a continuous desire to become human. Perhaps, designing them to resemble humans stems from our own desire to become gods or from the human instinct to create beings in our own image.
 
Humans show no mercy to other species or even to the new species we create. The 'hybrids' I create in my work, which crave life, represent all the exploited species, asking for compassion from humanity." (Artist’s Note)

Jinah Rho studied fine arts at Seoul National University and earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and PhD in Art & Technology from Sogang University. She is currently an assistant professor at Kyunghee University.
 
She has held her solo exhibitions at various institutions and has consistently showcased her works in major museums including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul Museum of Art and Nam June Paik Art Center. Jinah Rho has her works housed in several prominent institutions such as Nam June Paik Art Center, Gwangju Media Art Platform (G.MAP), and Iron Museum.

References

• 노진아, Jinah Rho (Artist Website)
• 일주아트하우스, 질투하는 사이보그들 (Ilju Art House, envious cyborgs)
• 백남준아트센터, 진화하는 신, 가이아 (Nam June Paik Art Center, An Evolving GAIA)
• 앨리스온, 인간과 기계의 공진화: 노진아 Rho JiNah 
• 탈영역우정국, 노진아 개인전_표면의 확장 (Post Territory Ujeongguk, Jinah Rho Solo Exhibition_InterFacial ExTension)
• 얼터사이드, 비정형데이터 (Alterside, Unstructured Data)
• 앨리스온, 거대한 시간 속에서 살펴보는 인공지능과 우리, 노진아 개인전 《진화적 시간의 알고리즘 Algorithm of Evolutionary Time》