Worlds Between: Yaloo on Myth, Memory, and Generative AI

Yaloo is a Korean media artist based in Seoul and Los Angeles, whose immersive digital worlds weave together mythology, ecology, ritual, and speculative technology. Her practice resists fixed categories, blending oral histories with synthetic architectures, personal memory with posthuman species, and K-pop choreography with ancestral symbolism. Across videos and installations, she constructs layered ecosystems that feel both ancient and futuristic.

As part of her collaboration with TITLES, Yaloo developed miyeok-core v1.0, a generative model trained on her visual language from Birthday Garden, a piece set in a speculative archaeological site from the future, featuring a glowing altar and seaweed fairies dancing to K-pop. The model serves as a new interface for her world, allowing others to generate forms shaped by its visual language.

Your work often centers around ambiguity, blurring boundaries between past and future, nature and technology, human and non-human. What does ambiguity allow us to see that clarity doesn’t?

Ambiguity creates space for seemingly unrelated things to coexist and form new context. In my practice, I hybridize everyday motifs with elements I grew up with—things I was told, or read about—blurring oral history, digital folklore, and personal memory into fictional narratives.

One recent project, Birthday Garden, is inspired by the Korean tradition of eating seaweed soup (miyeok-guk) on birthdays, rooted in a Goryeo-era folk tale about a mother whale. The work merges K-pop fandom, K beauty trend, and shamanic symbols into a subaquatic temple—a space of speculative ritual and layered cultural identity.

Through 3D animation and immersive scenography, Birthday Garden becomes an underwater shrine where memory, mythology, and everyday life merge. From this world emerged miyeok-core v1.0—a generative model co-developed with the team at TITLES. It invites other creators to prompt new forms shaped by the logic and aesthetic of Birthday Garden. Ambiguity makes space for these kinds of hybrid systems, where mythology, identity, and data can entangle freely.

Yaloo < Birthday Garden 2022> Fact, Liverpool, U.K, photo by Rob Battersby

What role does evolution and mutation play in your work, both biologically, as well as culturally and systemically?

In one of my Underwater Trilogy works, Homo Paulinella: The Lab, evolution and mutation function as speculative tools, allowing me to imagine other ways of being and alternate paths that life and culture might have taken. The project introduces a fictional, post-human life form inspired by a real microscopic algae capable of photosynthesis.

This thread of speculative evolution extends into the expanded universe of the project, including the publication Slippery, Moist (a collaboration with artist Hounyeh Kim) and subsequent installations such as ROO and Pickled Chamber.

Yaloo <Pickled Chamber 2023>, Industrial Bank of Korea(IBK), Seoul, Korea, photo by Kyungtae Kim

What role do you see mythology and tradition playing in speculative worldbuilding?

In Pickled City, I constructed a luminous fictional metropolis within the strata of debris accumulated from climate collapse. The imagery draws inspiration from the Baekje gilt-bronze incense burner, an ancient artifact that depicts a harmonious ecosystem of human and non-human life. This work is an attempt to gently refract dominant narratives about the future through a speculative worldview grounded in mythology and tradition.

The project originated from the commercially reproduced images of Asian cities found in video games and science fiction—excessively sleek, neon-lit, and stripped of context. Rather than simply rejecting these tropes, I sought to reclaim and distort them through the lens of indigenous memory and ritual logic.

Pickled City Dive 2022, photo courtesy of Zer01ne and Yaloo

Do you think about world building as a collective process?

I see world building as an open-ended ecosystem where diverse senses and languages intertwine and continuously transform. My recent projects involve collaborations with sound artists, graphic designers, architects, and writers, each bringing their own perspectives and approaches. As these encounters unfold and influence one another, I believe the artist’s world expands into a space where diverse sensibilities are interwoven, rather than a singular voice.

How do you think about the “camera” or “viewpoint” in worlds that aren’t centered on the human?

The limitations of a camera or viewport can become an impetus for expanding fresh visual languages and opening up spaces for experimenting with new forms and sensibilities. I try to treat such limitations as materials for variation and subversion, using them to explore non-human perspectives and multi-layered spatio-temporality.

When you're working with AI, how do you understand its role in the creative process—as collaborator, tool, or something else?

AI, as you noted, has become both a new collaborator and a creative instrument in the studio. In its current state of imperfection, it serves as an exceptional partner equipped with chance, ambiguity, and hybridity.

In a sense, we’re already living in a computationally-generated, speculative world. What kind of myths do you think we need to navigate it?

It feels like we are living in an entanglement of physical reality and calculated simulation. It is important that we keep interfering and reinterpreting the world to create multilayered myths that machines, humans, and non-humans connect each other’s senses and memories. Try Yaloo’s model on TITLES, here.

Closing

Yaloo is bringing her worlds directly to each of you through this model. We’re so excited to see what each of you create with it. If you found this interview just as fascinating as we did, please take a moment to follow Yaloo on Instagram, and TITLES.

Much love,

- TITLES

TITLES