Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse

Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse is a large-scale project consisting of a game engine-based computer graphics video, a multi-channel video utilizing generative AI and an installation. For the ACC Future Prize, Ayoung Kim traveled to observatories across India where she conducted interviews with astronomers and Feng Shui Compass experts. She also delved into the study and analysis of fading calendar laws, the Possible Worlds, and the physics of time. In the exhibition hall, a large calendar marker, moving mathematically and precisely to cast shadows representing the passage of time, introduces a new concept of time. Meanwhile, a massive three-sided screen at the center showcases a virtual world, developed in collaboration with AI as an advanced vision of the future.

The two main characters of the prequel, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, Ernst Mo and En Storm, are featured in a completely different setting than their predecessor: the inhabitants of Novaria, an isolated virtual city in the far future. Ernst Mo accidentally delivers an artifact containing a time perspective of the past that has been destroyed. The story depicts the clash between different time frames and possible worlds that occurs during this process. It is a society where science and technology have established a perfectly controlled system, rendering external connections unnecessary and sustaining flawless homeostasis within the order shaped by its advanced systems. However, the introduction of a past time perspective into this world brings with it the possibility of a lost cosmology, or the possibility of the coexistence of different time systems, which creates a rift in society. Similar to how the history of calendars involved significant effort to align the cycles of the sun and moon, the two protagonists, Ernst Mo and En Storm, are engaged in a movement to restore past chronology, aiming to foster a sense of connection between individuals and the broader universe.

Ayoung Kim draws on iconography from non-Western civilizations to craft a sensory reinterpretation of temporality, while also collaborating with AI to develop the calendar’s iconography within the narrative. She brings her East Asian sensibilities to the forefront through indigenous and traditional lines, including the lyrics of Bocheonga (步天歌, Butiange in Chinese, meaning “Songs of Sky-Pacers”), a collection of poems that compiles traditional Asian constellations in words and pictures. This can be understood as her intention to illustrate the futuristic nature of Asia, which creates and expands new possibilities through the exploration of time and modernity. She awakens in us a sense of the complexity of time and space, of the repeated attempts and failures to create cracks in a solid world, and of the fate of the two protagonists whose relationship persists because of their failures, that the conditions of time, space, and history that we take for granted may not be universal within our own world. Her recursive imagination, employing algorithms that disrupt causality, along with a fragmentary and speculative narrative approach using montage techniques and sensory variations, appears to reflect the reality of our world, where a single causality or definitive conclusion is unattainable. Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse introduces a fresh perspective on time and space by depicting a possible world where an extinct cosmology coexists with an alternative time system. It provides an experience that blurs the lines between traditional and modern, real, and virtual through a production method that disrupts conventional notions of space and time.

# script content

Some human beings have chosen to live in voluntary isolation, descending to the ground to escape threats such as the climate crisis, in a future different from this one. Partially submerged in the ground, this world is a vertical city named Novaria, divided into sleek, expansive domed glass spheres constructed with advanced technology. It is a society cut off from the outside world, operating as a self-sufficient and autonomous system. Unaffected by sunlight, it is free from planetary cycles and instead relies on the light of “Lumina,” a luminescent creature and center of science and technology. Novaria’s time and calendar are dictated by the creature’s finely controlled reproductive cycle, and Novaria’s greatest festivities take place during the ten days of the year when the Lumina glows intensely.

Delivery rider Ernst Mo, the protagonist of the Delivery Dancer app, accidentally delivers smuggled artifacts from the city’s vanished past through a customs office located in the lower lot. In the city ostensibly cut off from the outside world, these ancient artifacts are slowly causing cracks in the world of Novaria.