국문
국문/ENG
The Symbiosis of Bitchondria and
Non-Bitchondria
Hybridization is grounded in relationality. Humans forge relations with artifacts and other beings, becoming through these relations what we call “technical chimeras.” Other objects, too, become chimeric, hybrid. Through interactive relations, entities transform or expand into “relational subjects,” constituted through their entanglements. One might argue that hybridization is the very paradigm through which our present era[1]is understood: all existence has become hybridized.
Digital media has introduced yet another turn to this hybridization, not simply by rendering visible what previously existed unseen, but by proving through visualization the existence of beings that previously did not exist. The distinction between the two grows ever more meaningless. Humans are no exception, as we may now inhabit digital personas. This is the precise condition of our age.
It is within this contemporary circumstance that Suji Han trains her attention on the hybridization of digital information and materiality, specifically on Bitchondria. For years, she has been affirming and investigating its existence while tracking its life. She explains how the entity captivates her through its fundamental embodiment of the hybrid between the virtual and the material. Bitchondria represents the merger of the digital attribute bit with mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell, essential to all living things). It is a hybrid being at the most elementary level.
Han pursues Bitchondria’s past, present, and modes of activity with a gaze at once cautious and relentless [Suji Han, Bitchondria(xⁿ,yⁿ,zⁿ), (2022)]. According to her, Bitchondria dismantles and hybridizes the boundaries between macro- and microcosms, between material and digital space alike. It is, in essence, a trans-boundary being, an entity that perpetually crosses borders. Her investigative gaze, too, is hybridized, approaching the subject matter as a scientist, archaeologist, artist, and ultimately a detective. She sleuths the traces of Bitchondria’s past and maps the trajectories of its present movements, rendering them visible. What demands her attention throughout the investigative process is the space Bitchondria inhabits and its interactions with other beings within it. She articulates her focus thus: Bitchondria operates not only in material space but equally within digital space, engaging diverse objects and actively intervening in the events that arise within both domains. She is particularly drawn to tracing Bitchondria’s pathways through digital space.
To comprehend Bitchondria, one must first understand the space it inhabits, for it emerged as a digital apparition (Digitaler Schein), a being marked by the quantum bit. The digital apparition is a new mode of being entirely. Vilém Flusser, who argued for an understanding of the digital world, not as a given but as a constructed alternative world, devoted himself to establishing an ontological proof of the digital apparition. He forcefully rejected the view that dismisses it simply for appearing “virtual” and therefore “unreal,” a position entirely without justification. The virtual is an alternative world and has, finally, become a real existence.[2]There is no ontological distinction between the given world and the constructed alternative, for all worlds exist as images. Both are merely phenomena. What lies behind the phenomenon is ultimately beside the point.
From this foundation, Flusser advocates for the digital world, celebrating not only its spatial and virtual characteristics but the imagination of the artist who constructs it. He defines the essential feature of the bit-constructed alternative world as superficiality (Oberflächlichkeit) and offers it his praise (Lob). We must therefore shed our suspicion toward the beings inhabiting these worlds and traversing their spaces, recognizing them instead as complete and authentic entities. The digital apparition has now rightfully entered the category of the nonhuman. The digital apparition inhabits both the digital realm and material reality, undergoing hybridization in both. It transforms and evolves through relations with other life forms, with matter itself, and crucially, with humans. The digital apparition has become one among the multi-species.
Han’s artistic practice echoes Flusser’s philosophy in numerous ways, particularly in how she conceives the digital apparition and its operative space. She names the distinctive feature of digital space as Flattened Flat Space [Suji Han, Welcome to Flattened Flat Space (2019)]. This flatness is exemplified in the two-dimensionality of digital display. Yet despite its apparent flatness, this space is in fact profoundly, almost inconceivably deep. So deep that no one reaches its end; new spaces continually reveal themselves, perpetually connected to the present one, in endless succession.
Bitchondria ventures into this depth willingly, forming relations with the space itself and the beings within it. To form these relations, it explores, becoming a nomadic, transversal subject that drifts through the expanse. This exploration yields evolution. Its encounter with a jellyfish transforms its very mode of existence: infinite proliferation and infinite repetition become possible. This mirrors Agent Smith in The Matrix, a digital apparition who multiplies endlessly, each adverse encounter breeding new replications. Such is Bitchondria’s life.
Han does not simply track Bitchondria’s existence; she actively communicates it to humans through varied means. She actively engages in the visualization of the invisible. Her methods are diverse: lecture-performances, talks, installations, and image-based works, all of which testify to Bitchondria’s manner of being. As scientist and as artist, she traces its evolution, its operational spaces, its companions, and allies, and pursues their lives as well.
From jellyfish juice to xenon skin, she extracts hybridized beings concealed within any space, revealing their existence. These entities discovered post-Bitchondria are more evolutionarily advanced, and possess more evolved “bodies” through which they sense the external world and embody those sensations. Sensory expansion advances in lockstep with evolution. These evolved Bitchondria and companions traverse both digital and material space, for now, as transversal objects. Yet they are approaching subjecthood; through their growing awareness of space, relations, and other beings, they will soon become subjects themselves. Upon achieving subjecthood, Bitchondria and its companions will discover, in the very act of cognizing the world, the realm of the non-Bitchondria, entities existing outside the Bitchondrian domain. They will then confront the necessity of acknowledging these others and contemplating a shared existence: symbiosis. Non-Bitchondria face the same imperative. Before long, both may find themselves positioned to deride the very concept of nonhuman. “The nonhuman?” they might ask. “By whose decree?”
[1] Shim Hea-Ryun, The Media Philosophy of the 21st Century: From Digital to Post-Digital(Seoul: Greenbee, 2024), 24.
[2] Vilém Flusser, “Digitaler Schein,” in Digitaler Schein: Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, ed. Florian Rötzer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 147–148.
국문/ENG
The Symbiosis of Bitchondria and
Non-Bitchondria
Shim, Hea-Ryun (Professor, Dept.
of Science Studies, Jeonbuk National University)
The debate surrounding the “post-human” world has grown
fierce, flowing along two currents that ultimately converge on a single
critical transformation: hybridization. One current traces how human
forms and ways of life will transform beyond the human, yet remains
fundamentally concerned with the human itself, specifically with how humanity
is being de-centered. The other current shifts direction entirely,
flowing toward objects and entities beyond the human, asking how we should
re-establish the ontological status of other species and material things which,
despite their immense diversity, have been flattened and subsumed under the
reductive, human-centric label of “the inhuman.” The former grapples with subjectivity;
the latter with objectivity. Yet both are ultimately preoccupied with
the same phenomenon: the transformation of all existence through relationality
and entanglement.Hybridization is grounded in relationality. Humans forge relations with artifacts and other beings, becoming through these relations what we call “technical chimeras.” Other objects, too, become chimeric, hybrid. Through interactive relations, entities transform or expand into “relational subjects,” constituted through their entanglements. One might argue that hybridization is the very paradigm through which our present era[1]is understood: all existence has become hybridized.
Digital media has introduced yet another turn to this hybridization, not simply by rendering visible what previously existed unseen, but by proving through visualization the existence of beings that previously did not exist. The distinction between the two grows ever more meaningless. Humans are no exception, as we may now inhabit digital personas. This is the precise condition of our age.
It is within this contemporary circumstance that Suji Han trains her attention on the hybridization of digital information and materiality, specifically on Bitchondria. For years, she has been affirming and investigating its existence while tracking its life. She explains how the entity captivates her through its fundamental embodiment of the hybrid between the virtual and the material. Bitchondria represents the merger of the digital attribute bit with mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell, essential to all living things). It is a hybrid being at the most elementary level.
Han pursues Bitchondria’s past, present, and modes of activity with a gaze at once cautious and relentless [Suji Han, Bitchondria(xⁿ,yⁿ,zⁿ), (2022)]. According to her, Bitchondria dismantles and hybridizes the boundaries between macro- and microcosms, between material and digital space alike. It is, in essence, a trans-boundary being, an entity that perpetually crosses borders. Her investigative gaze, too, is hybridized, approaching the subject matter as a scientist, archaeologist, artist, and ultimately a detective. She sleuths the traces of Bitchondria’s past and maps the trajectories of its present movements, rendering them visible. What demands her attention throughout the investigative process is the space Bitchondria inhabits and its interactions with other beings within it. She articulates her focus thus: Bitchondria operates not only in material space but equally within digital space, engaging diverse objects and actively intervening in the events that arise within both domains. She is particularly drawn to tracing Bitchondria’s pathways through digital space.
To comprehend Bitchondria, one must first understand the space it inhabits, for it emerged as a digital apparition (Digitaler Schein), a being marked by the quantum bit. The digital apparition is a new mode of being entirely. Vilém Flusser, who argued for an understanding of the digital world, not as a given but as a constructed alternative world, devoted himself to establishing an ontological proof of the digital apparition. He forcefully rejected the view that dismisses it simply for appearing “virtual” and therefore “unreal,” a position entirely without justification. The virtual is an alternative world and has, finally, become a real existence.[2]There is no ontological distinction between the given world and the constructed alternative, for all worlds exist as images. Both are merely phenomena. What lies behind the phenomenon is ultimately beside the point.
From this foundation, Flusser advocates for the digital world, celebrating not only its spatial and virtual characteristics but the imagination of the artist who constructs it. He defines the essential feature of the bit-constructed alternative world as superficiality (Oberflächlichkeit) and offers it his praise (Lob). We must therefore shed our suspicion toward the beings inhabiting these worlds and traversing their spaces, recognizing them instead as complete and authentic entities. The digital apparition has now rightfully entered the category of the nonhuman. The digital apparition inhabits both the digital realm and material reality, undergoing hybridization in both. It transforms and evolves through relations with other life forms, with matter itself, and crucially, with humans. The digital apparition has become one among the multi-species.
Han’s artistic practice echoes Flusser’s philosophy in numerous ways, particularly in how she conceives the digital apparition and its operative space. She names the distinctive feature of digital space as Flattened Flat Space [Suji Han, Welcome to Flattened Flat Space (2019)]. This flatness is exemplified in the two-dimensionality of digital display. Yet despite its apparent flatness, this space is in fact profoundly, almost inconceivably deep. So deep that no one reaches its end; new spaces continually reveal themselves, perpetually connected to the present one, in endless succession.
Bitchondria ventures into this depth willingly, forming relations with the space itself and the beings within it. To form these relations, it explores, becoming a nomadic, transversal subject that drifts through the expanse. This exploration yields evolution. Its encounter with a jellyfish transforms its very mode of existence: infinite proliferation and infinite repetition become possible. This mirrors Agent Smith in The Matrix, a digital apparition who multiplies endlessly, each adverse encounter breeding new replications. Such is Bitchondria’s life.
Han does not simply track Bitchondria’s existence; she actively communicates it to humans through varied means. She actively engages in the visualization of the invisible. Her methods are diverse: lecture-performances, talks, installations, and image-based works, all of which testify to Bitchondria’s manner of being. As scientist and as artist, she traces its evolution, its operational spaces, its companions, and allies, and pursues their lives as well.
From jellyfish juice to xenon skin, she extracts hybridized beings concealed within any space, revealing their existence. These entities discovered post-Bitchondria are more evolutionarily advanced, and possess more evolved “bodies” through which they sense the external world and embody those sensations. Sensory expansion advances in lockstep with evolution. These evolved Bitchondria and companions traverse both digital and material space, for now, as transversal objects. Yet they are approaching subjecthood; through their growing awareness of space, relations, and other beings, they will soon become subjects themselves. Upon achieving subjecthood, Bitchondria and its companions will discover, in the very act of cognizing the world, the realm of the non-Bitchondria, entities existing outside the Bitchondrian domain. They will then confront the necessity of acknowledging these others and contemplating a shared existence: symbiosis. Non-Bitchondria face the same imperative. Before long, both may find themselves positioned to deride the very concept of nonhuman. “The nonhuman?” they might ask. “By whose decree?”
[1] Shim Hea-Ryun, The Media Philosophy of the 21st Century: From Digital to Post-Digital(Seoul: Greenbee, 2024), 24.
[2] Vilém Flusser, “Digitaler Schein,” in Digitaler Schein: Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, ed. Florian Rötzer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 147–148.