Soh Yeong Roh

director | art center nabi

12.06.2019 | 18.00
Lebanese International University – Beirut campus
Amphitheater – Block D

FREE ADMISSION

Soh Yeong Roh received a BA in Economics at the College of William & Mary (1984), and an MA in Education at Stanford University (1990).

Self-taught in art and technology, Ms. Roh is said to have pioneered the new media art scene in Korea by founding Art Center Nabi in 2000. Her experience in the field goes back to 1991 when she served as head of Art and Technology Exhibition at Daejeon Expo. Seeing the possibility of digital technology transforming much of our lives, Ms. Roh began to explore how we could use the technology to serve humanity, which has become her lifelong mission.

Besides running Art Center Nabi, a powerhouse of media art with its lab and education programs, she serves as a board member at Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technology, Creative Commons Korea, and P.A.T.I., an alternative design school. She is also an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, and a visiting professor at the Department of Art and Technology, Sogang University.

<How I stumbled into Neotopia>

talk synopsis

Loneliness was the very start. We started making companion robots at Art Center Nabi. We soon realized that some level of intelligence is required to have meaning emotional connection. So we delved into artificial intelligence, using mainly the latest API’s. We learned what pattern recognition technology does to our collective thinking and further, our consciousness. We also learned that technology is not the bottleneck(even ‘stupid’ artists like us could use it); rather, it was the lack of data.

The data is monopolized by platform giants like Google and Facebook. Thus started our quest to imagine and create Neotopia, where common people can participate in the making of a ‘better’ society, by fusing social imagination with innovation.