Started in 2019 in partnership with Hyundai Motor Company, PROJECT HASHTAG marks its fifth edition this year. The project extends beyond the limits of the traditional open call to discover artists, curators, theorists, technicians, and researchers from different fields, spanning across industry, science, and popular culture.
The hashtag (#) referenced in the project’s title, is a symbol that has been widely used in searches conducted via social media. By attaching hashtags to words and phrases in online posts, social media users ensure that their content appears whenever others search using the same words. In this way, hashtags have become a leading international symbol representing interconnection and communication. Reflecting on the hashtag’s significance in creating endless and unpredictable opportunities, the open call transcends the boundaries between genres to foster communication through harmony. PROJECT HASHTAG is committed to experimentation, expansion, and collaboration, annually discovering two teams that embody these principles.
PROJECT HASHTAG 2024 looks forward to fostering enhanced and unrestricted engagements, leveraging the insights and successes from the last four years of submissions. The significance of this open call lies in its exploration beyond traditional visual arts, venturing into novel realms such as nature, artificial intelligence, popular culture, science, and law, marking a deliberate effort to pioneer new territories.
PROJECT HASHTAG 2024 began with an open call in March 2024. This year’s applicants proposed both fusion-based projects using new technologies such as generative AI meta-verses and computer games, and social experiments addressing today’s most acute controversies. There was a pronounced tendency to examine from diverse perspectives social issues such as changes in environment, human relationships and values brought by the introduction of AI technology into daily life, and to explore communal solidarity through interaction with others.
At the PROJECT HASHTAG 2024 showcase exhibition, we introduce projects by ‘Wish Office’ and ‘Playing Art Method’, each of which addresses a different a theme in its own way through the medium of computer games. ‘Wish Office(Kim Raeo, Oh Saeol, Seo Jin Kyu, Seo John, Titaniun(Choi Joonseong))’ builds ‘Wish World’, virtual worlds made up of the wishes of all people. This work is a social-experimental game that examines contemporary society, in which individual effort is so easily thwarted, through the grammar of gaming. ‘Playing Art Method (Cho Hoyoun, Kim Youngju, Rhee Sei)’ creates a meaningful discourse based on questions that arise when computer games are exhibited in a museum as a form of artwork. In the process of exhibition they form a loose learning community, using workshops and publications.
The two teams’ projects run from November 15, 2024 to April 27, 2025 at MMCA, Seoul.