SIGNAL ON SALE

Media art and digital art are often considered similar; however, they are indeed distinct fields. Media art primarily focuses on the properties of the artwork as a medium, aiming to transcend traditional forms such as painting and sculpture. It is characterized by the use of mixed media, including moving images like video, mechanical image reproduction such as photography, and sensory experiences encompassing light, sound, space, and traces, allowing for multisensory engagement. My own works diverge from traditional sculpture or painting by incorporating both the viewer and the subject more dynamically within the structural framework, challenging conventional visual perception. Recently, my light and video projects have been combined with architectural-like structural designs to stimulate viewers' spatial awareness and perception of scale.

Digital art, as mentioned by Axl, seems to be centered on the medium itself, particularly based on digital computation via computers. This is less about the techniques used and more about the fundamental difference between analog and digital time perception. Bergson’s concept of duration discusses time as a continuous flow, but the advent of digital technology has introduced the ability to fragment, replicate, and transform the passage of time and events into discrete points or sets of points. Furthermore, memories and information are now digitized and interconnected with vast systems such as images, videos, 3D printing, the internet, virtual environments, and artificial intelligence, radically transforming our everyday worldview. I believe that AI-driven visual projects, like those developed with Excel, exemplify these defining characteristics.

– Jeong Jeong-ju

The work presents a video in which the surfaces of the urban architecture and colours intersect, displayed on an LED screen. At a right angle to this screen, a mirror-finished stainless steel panel reflects and distorts the video. These three elements operate together to create the formal unity of the piece. 

What is “Digital Art”?

In my definition, I adopt a relatively narrow scope: When the generation, structure, or perception of a work fundamentally depends on a computational process (such as code, algorithm, real-time rendering, or data modeling), I categorize it as Digital Art.

In this context, “Digital Art” (in the narrow sense) refers to creations whose generative mechanism requires computability such as, algorithmic composition, procedural generation, neural network reconstruction, or interactive/real-time rendering. Its forms may include digital painting and illustration, 3D modeling and digital sculpture, digital animation and video art, generative and algorithmic art, interactive installation, VR/AR art, net art, digital photography and image processing, and game art.

Many early contemporary artworks dealt with digital themes, but since their production processes did not rely on digital computation, they are more accurately classified as conceptual art or other categories. For instance, Nam June Paik’s practice is more precisely media/video art rather than “digital art” in the strict sense.

In other words, digital art may appear as video or installation, but not all videos or installations are digital art. The key criterion lies in whether they contain a computational core.

I believe that good digital art should possess not only a digital shell but also a digital core: Reflection, critique, or imagination toward technology grants lasting artistic value.

In this exhibition, Digital Eden is a visualized digital utopia constructed with 3D animation, game engine, and AI generation technology. Through it, I wish to ask two questions: 

Can technology truly bring us paradise?

Or are we already living within a digitally orchestrated illusion of desire and algorithmic control?

Thank you for sharing this space and thought with me.
— Axl Le Yi

Users who purchase through NFT will receive a secured USB which contains ‘Digital Eden’ with both Korean and English subtitles. The bilingual version is unique to <Signal on Sale>, as the original video includes only English. The original video is permanently preserved on Blockchain, embodying the enduring nature of digital art.

Axel Le emphasises the importance of NFT being understood as a means of distribution. Not every image uploaded via NFT qualifies as digital art.  

gallerychosun: Hello, it's a pleasure to meet you. From what I’ve seen, your work seems to use NFT technology in a truly digital-art sense. But most people, when they think of digital artists like you, end up thinking about CryptoPunks and how much they have sold for, especially in auctions. What are your thoughts about that, now that countless trades occur every day with CryptoPunks?

Kevin Heisner: Thank you, and yes, that’s an important question, though even the question itself carries assumptions that I think are worth examining.

To me, Crypto, NFTs, and Art are three distinct yet overlapping spheres, sometimes harmonious, sometimes contradictory. Many of the misunderstandings around NFTs come from this intersection, where people try to read one world through the lens of another. Each sphere has its own internal divisions and shifting dynamics. Fragmentation and unity exist simultaneously, as in nature itself.

When people compare my work to something like CryptoPunks, they’re usually responding to the market history, the auction prices, rather than the medium or philosophy. But NFTs for me are not about speculation. They’re about authenticity, continuity, and the translation of invisible thought-forms into traceable, living digital matter.

Our tools: economic, aesthetic, or philosophical are still evolving. Like language trying to describe a new element, they often collapse under their own limits of speed and scale. That’s why I see technologies like AI and quantum computation as potential allies tools to filter the noise, to locate the signal, and to clarify meaning in this new, overlapping space of art, crypto, and consciousness.

Elements is a series derived from Spirit Snacks project, exploring an alternative approach to visualizing energy and vibration. Each piece features a meticulously 3D-printed nylon “spirit” placed atop a plastic rock base, upon which lies a handwoven rug created by the artist. The compositions evoke the meditative geometry of the rock garden at Ryōan-ji, creating a sense of visual harmony that invites viewers to contemplate spirituality, nature, and the unseen.

Within this structure of harmony, the Elements works reveal how sculpture, after the advent of 3D printing, acquires a new sensory reality. The “printed form” is not a mere replication of a virtual model but a visualization of the process through which digital data materializes into physical substance. For Heisner, 3D printing is not simply a technical tool but a sensory conduit between the virtual and the real, where sculpture is composed not through manual labor but through the rhythm of algorithms. The series captures the moment when the printed forms reenter reality from the digital environment, proposing a new sculptural dimension in which material sensation reconnects with the metaphysical.

The rug and the 3D-printed pieces are not attached to each other and exist as separate, independent components. Therefore, the user must arrange them personally, taking into account the balance between the individual pieces.

Ingredients: gelatin, glucose syrup, tartaric acid, natural fruit extracts, natural plant-based food coloring, sorbitol powder, potassium sorbate

Head In The Clouds Eureka Gummies NFT disrupts the boundary between art and consumption, revealing how digital art expands into a new genre through the commodification of experience. The project is connected to Shlumper (A.K.A. Kevin Heisner)’s real edible gummy brand, Spirit Snacks Edibles, and grants exclusive access to a virtual space called Spirit Snacks Lab only to NFT holders. This structure reveals how art shifts from an object of appreciation to a system that constructs an experience of ownership through participation and purchase. While composed of looping video NFTs, physical gummies, and holographic cards, the work’s core lies in the circulation system in which digital imagery and material objects are continuously exchanged and redefined.

This project demonstrates how digital art reconfigures the viewer’s experience through the sensory logic of consumption, extending beyond the conventional art market. The NFT functions not merely as proof of ownership but as a symbol of participatory spectatorship, transforming art into a hybrid genre where acts of consumption and play converge. Shlumper employs this structure of sensory consumption as an aesthetic material to explore how digital-age art simultaneously generates economic relations and sensory experiences. Head In The Clouds Eureka Gummies NFT presents a new form of post-consumer art, where distribution, ownership, and enjoyment merge into a single aesthetic event.

Each gummy only becomes art when it is consumed; a fleeting, sensory event that dissolves in the physical world yet continues infinitely on the blockchain. The NFT functions as both vessel and record, ensuring provenance while allowing transformation as technologies shift. The artist sees NFTs not as speculation but as structure: a framework for trust, continuity, and play in an ecosystem where the physical and digital breathe together.