Project Description From news to messages to everyday records, stories now travel not only through books and paper but across screens and machines. They move faster and lighter, sometimes generated or translated by machines, constantly in motion. This project explores how such drifting stories encounter us and how they can be sensed in space. Here, a story is not read but experienced—moving, colliding, and passing by. Floating Whispers is a project that investigates the form and transmission of narrative through a swarm of autonomous carriers. Each carrier contains layered content generated by NLP-based AI, creating and recombining narratives in Korean, English, Chinese, Arabic, and other languages. On their exterior, video imagery unfolds; inside, systems emit sound and light. Moving organically through the exhibition, the carriers meet the audience, cross paths with each other, and shape an environment in which stories can be experienced. In this process, narrative is not consumed as text but encountered, traversed, and embodied in real time. These mobile carriers no longer function merely as machines of transport. They move as if alive—where stories, memories, data, movement, and sensation are entangled. AI’s language feels at once familiar and strange, while the carriers’ motions, though designed, resist predictability. The project unsettles human-centered structures of storytelling, suggesting that technology may not only mediate but also become a new agent in the creation of narratives. About the Creator Youngkak Cho, a ZER01NE alumnus, has long explored the complex systems that emerge between technology and society, narrative and materiality. His practice experiments with the layered orders of contemporary reality, using cutting-edge tools such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and data-driven systems to construct social sensibilities and sculptural narratives at the threshold between the virtual and the real. For this edition of ZER01NE, Cho presents a project that reconfigures the entanglements of objects, beings, information, and mobility into a sensory network. Floating Whispers condenses his ongoing inquiry into the axis of “technology–narrative–mobility,” proposing new forms of storytelling shaped by nonhuman agents within a rapidly changing world.

Curator's Note Who carries stories today? Writing no longer lingers on books and paper; it slips across pixels, traveling ever lighter and faster. In this sense, Youngkak Cho’s Floating Whispers explores how the sensory transmission of narrative is being reconfigured by technology. The work draws on the artist’s personal rhythm of constant movement—packing and unpacking, traveling for both work and leisure. From the sensation of his body and memory being loaded into a suitcase, he imagines himself as a mobile language device shaped by technology. Starting from the containers, smart devices, and cloud servers in which our mobility and memory overlap, the project proposes a new form of narrative: AI-generated stories carried by autonomous smart carriers that traverse physical space. This is no longer about ‘reading’ stories but about encountering and passing through them—an experience whose thresholds are made sculptural. Floating Whispers consists of a cluster of autonomous smart carriers embedded with generative AI. Outward-facing modules project fragments that suggest narrative, while internal natural-language systems (NLP) generate and recombine stories in Korean, English, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Moving organically through the exhibition, each carrier emits fragments of its tale. Crossed beams of light and sound, synchronized swarms, and unpredictable shifts in direction become a physical performance of machinic storytelling, where audiences encounter stories through chance collisions and fleeting proximity. Here, movement itself becomes a language, a unit of narrative. The focus is no longer on characters or plot but on the patterns and rhythms produced by machinic systems. This recalls Bruno Latour’s collapse of modern ontological divides—subject/object, human/nonhuman. The carrier is not a mere machine of transport but an assemblage where narrative, technology, information, form, sensation, and mobility converge. As Manuel DeLanda has argued, such assemblages are not fixed structures but non-linear processes of relation and dissolution—so too, here, narrative slips from linear plot into continuous becoming. Floating Whispers invites us to reflect on our shared reality with machines—especially machines that now “speak.” AI-generated language is at once familiar and strange; the movements of autonomous robots are efficient yet illogical; the system as a whole is designed yet open to accident. The performance embodies an artificial sense of presence, a stage for experimenting with ‘becoming-narrative’ beyond human-centered storytelling. Stories here are not told or recorded—they slide, intersect, pause, and vanish like the carriers’ own trajectories. At the same time, the work asks about the weight of the stories we carry today. Travelers, migrants, refugees, even the technical objects that transmit data—all drift with their narratives. In this floating condition, Floating Whispers captures stories as sculptural sensations, suspended between reality and fiction, human and machine, being and data. “Whispers” are fragments of broken sentences, clusters of drifting meanings—metaphors for the nonlinear realities we increasingly encounter in technological worlds. The project is not merely the use of AI as a narrative tool; it is an experiment in whether technology itself can become a subject of narrative.