Mikael Hwang

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes the defining force of our era, marking the end of the IT revolution, Propagation challenges a world where human creativity has been flattened into data and reconstituted as fodder for artificial agents. What alternative futures might have unfolded had we invested our imaginative and material resources not in digital computation but in biocomputation—using life's substrates to carry, encode, and convey information?

Today, virtually all music exists entirely within a digital ecosystem: it is created (often solely) using digital tools, encoded into digital audio formats like .mp3, and distributed through digital platforms like Spotify, enabling playback on digital devices. This seamless process of sonic production and distribution, while now ubiquitous, is the outcome of a particular techno-social imaginary—one that renders information immaterial and culture infinitely replicable. While we have adapted to a world shaped by digital code, we rarely question how digitization shapes life.

Drawing from nature’s example—like mushrooms releasing spores or plants spreading seeds—Propagation encodes a song into DNA and disperses it as smoke rings into Seoul’s atmosphere. Here, the act of release is not metaphorical: the song, materialized as molecular code, circulates throughout Seoul’s urban biosphere. In doing so, the project marks itself as the world’s first biological release of music, using DNA rather than traditional digital formats, and thus embodies the playful gesture of “uploading to the cloud” as a literal, atmospheric encounter between technology and life.

By releasing music exclusively as DNA, inaccessible to AIs that feed on digital data, Propagation makes visible the lack of alternative information infrastructures. It challenges the assumptions of digital universality, exposing how confinement to a singular, digital realm has come to regulate the circulation and preservation of the expression of all life. It prompts us to reconsider how culture is accessed, preserved, and transformed, foregrounding the potential of living materialities as sites of resistance. Propagation asks us to think differently about how we interact with both digital technology and living systems, and to consider how we might retain biological agency amidst the accelerating advance of digital intelligence.