“The backpack of wings: Modern Mythology” represents the speculative future scenarios, which are collisions and integrations between a bio-geo tracking technology for wild animals in scientific fields and an animism in seismic disaster myth in East Asia. Since ancient times, whenever a natural disaster strikes, people anecdotally report that “animals knew it beforehand,” a belief related to animals as spiritual beings. As telemetry systems evolve, this animistic belief is transformed into data by calculating, analyzing with biologging on the animal body; moreover, the animal-behavior data enables forecasting upcoming nature events. This current transformation allows us to question the redefinition of relationships between human beings and animals: How far is the intervention of human beings into nature acceptable? Will the animals be perceived as essential members of human society? Will they be revered as gods for predicting a future, or simply as measuring tools?   

Hyeseon Jeong is interested in social phenomena of digitalization, new power/network structures, and decentralization. Her work engages with a wide range of themes, from scientific approaches to political issues. She has generated non-linear narratives by translating and reconstructing the research content from various fields, in a maximization of fictions, radioplay, videos and sounds, entangled under a theme, and then exhibited as part of exhibitions, festivals and sound performances. She is currently studying at Academy of Media Arts Cologne.