“Hi everyone, welcome aboard.
It’s so bright today, there’s a cool summer breeze, it’s the perfect day to have a guided tour,
apart from the fact that our destination is underwater.
There’s a southeast wind blowing, which we expect in this season.

Right now, we’re in a city called Busan, in South Korea.
Can you see the group of rocks standing in the sea behind you?
Those are called the Oryukdo Islands.

Our coordinates are 34° 57′ 38″N by 129° 18′ 24″E,
and our destination, Surisol Underwater Lab, lies under our feet. …”

The Surisol Underwater Lab is a fictional site conceptualized by Kim since 2020. It is situated on the seabed near Oryukdo Islands in Busan, Korea, and serves as the premise for various creative works, including the Surisol Underwater Lab Guided Tour (2022); At The Surisol Underwater Lab (2020), crafted for the 2020 Busan Biennale; Surisol: POVCR (2021), a VR experience; and The Underwater Response (2021), commissioned for the 2021 Asian Art Biennial in Taichung, Taiwan. These fictions are set in the near-future, taking place about a decade after the COVID-19 pandemic. They revolve around an undersea research facility dedicated to the production of biofuels through kelp fermentation. Kelp, an abundant algae along the Busan coastline, becomes a pivotal resource as the world progressively reduces its reliance on fossil fuels due to concerns over climate change and depleting resources. Overseeing kelp cultivation and biomass production, the Surisol Underwater Lab is under the management of an AI entity known as Surisol.

Organized by the STRP Festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in April 2022, this guided tour/lecture performance was conducted on VRChat, a social VR platform. The 3D world of the meticulously constructed and utilized Surisol Underwater Lab and undersea terrain, developed by Kim’s team, was made available on the VRChat platform. Within this realm of extended reality and the metaverse, a fleet of audiences and participants were welcomed at a set time to traverse and engage with the Lab and its kelp farm together as avatars. This shared experience fostered a fleeting coexistence, a co-telepresence of sorts. In this tour/lecture performance, Kim, who simultaneously exists within and outside the narrative space, served as a one-day tour guide to the participants, guiding them through the laboratory, marine zone and the kelp farm. During the journey, Kim prompted them to consider the array of senses (smell, touch, taste, etc.) that would typically remain inaccessible within the realm of extended reality. The 15-minute edited video here is a recording of this participatory performance in the virtual realm. It stands as an experiment in exploring how the relationship between the narrative and the audience shifts and fluctuates among works that inhabit the same narrative space yet employ different mediums, underscoring how the audience transforms from a detached, objective observer on the periphery of the narrative to an engaged participant inside the boundary, participating in its very creation. The video encapsulates Kim’s profound fascination with transmedia narrative, which involves the evolution and expansion of narratives based on the chosen medium. For the 2023 exhibition at HEK House of Electronic Art Basel in Switzerland, this piece was installed to allow the audience to engage with VRChat and immerse themselves in the Surisol Underwater Lab and its undersea realms as avatars, freely exploring the environment.

Short Version
In April 2022, STRP Festival in Eindhoven invited Ayoung Kim as a co-creator for their STRP Scenario #16: Interspecies Internet. This is edited documentation of the 30 min performance/guided tour held at the Social VR platform VRChat for the event. It was also live-streamed to online users worldwide. In this guided tour, audiences were invited to visit the Surisol Underwater Lab and the kelp farm, where the senior researcher Sohila and the operating AI Surisol had been out for a duty.

*Surisol Underwater Lab is a fictitious place conceived by Ayoung Kim since 2020. It features in a series of projects including At the Surisol Underwater Lab (2020), Surisol: POVCR (2021) and The Underwater Response (2021).
These speculative fictions are set in the near future, around a decade after the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020.

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