TAEZOO PARK

“I came to New York City in 2008, which was one year before the digital switchover,” recalls Korean-born artist Taezoo Park, who studied digital arts at the Pratt Institute and currently resides in Brooklyn. “That’s when the old broadcasting system went from analog to digital, so a lot of televisions were abandoned on the street.” Park was drawn to the discarded technology and what it represented. “We think about a machine as a functional object, but when it isn’t working its value is zero, it becomes e-waste,” Park muses. “Why do we keep doing that kind of routine?”

Park’s alternative, creative approach—collecting abandoned objects like television sets and computer monitors, then using digital media and other mediums to transform them into art  proved to be a unique and multifaceted solution. “As an artist, I not only wanted to give them new life, as a form of art, but I also wanted to talk about the direction of technological development, its sustainability, and the undiscovered possibility through the series of my artwork, Digital Being.”

Park’s works in the Digital Being series, such as “Digital Being: Rebirth - I” currently on display at 3 World Trade Center are all part of his vision of “an invisible, formless creature born out of a gap of radical digital transformation.” Shown in numerous galleries and at art fairs around the city, the concept of Digital Being continues to evolve along with the rapid technological changes that are so representative of the current era.