Ayoung Kim Delivery Dancer Codex curated by Ruba Katrib
On view at MoMA PS1, New York,
November 6, 2025–March 16, 2026
Review by Jana Astanov
featured image: Ayoung Kim, Character Illustration, 2022.
The gig-engine hums. The dancer delivers. The code propagates.
Delivery Dancer Codex by Korean artist Ayoung Kim, at MoMA PS1, unfolds as a meticulously designed environment that invites you to sit, rest, and be immersed: plush, sculptural ramp-like seating lets you lie back beneath gigantic screens suspended from the ceiling; a mirror-wall turns an augmented living-room cinema into a chamber that multiplies your own image; and a circular layout leads to a room-scale, animal-based clock powered by artificial light and reminiscent of solar clocks.
The installation centers on Kim’s video trilogy Delivery Dancer, shown together for the first time, in which she turns the precarious architecture of platform labor into a choreography of survival. Three videos created using generative AI, motion capture, game engines, and live-action footage, slip into one another like parallel mirrors with rough edges. The effect: a world where couriers emerge as mythic messengers of a system that both needs their bodies and erases them.
Kim’s protagonists are two fictional delivery riders: En Storm and Ernst Mo, their names anagrams for monster. From the opening frames they move as if between worlds: street and server, flesh and avatar. They ride, dance, drop off, repeat—a choreography of labour that is both mythic and monotonous. In Kim’s hands, the everyday courier becomes the courier-daemon, the mythic deliverer of late-capitalism.
However, rather than romanticising the worker, Kim places them inside a mythic tradition: Mercury with a delivery box, Hermes with a bicycle, the messenger-god of logistics. But this myth does not liberate the worker, instead it reveals how mythology has been reorganised for capitalist architecture. Once the messenger moved between worlds; now the courier moves between apps.
Kim’s work refuses the techno-optimistic lie that digital tools free us. Instead we see how bodies are absorbed, translated, flattened then mythologised to hide the flattening.
The Seduction of the Simulacrum
There is a risk, of course, that the mythic language might aestheticise the very injustice it critiques. By transforming couriers into heroic dancers, does Kim soften the violence of the gig economy? Does myth give cover to the platform that exploits bodies in real time?
The videos flirt with that possibility. But Kim answers it with rupture: glitches, stutters, textures that refuse perfection. The scenes are too uncanny to be propaganda, too strange to be an ode. They leave you unsettled—an itch instead of an epiphany. The point is not to make labour “beautiful,” but to make its absurdity visible.
Kin making with machines
Our era worships efficiency: algorithmic dispatch, instant delivery, labour gamified until it becomes invisible. Kim takes this literally: her couriers move like avatars inside invisible UX. The dancer becomes the interface.
Bodies no longer belong to themselves; they obey a tempo set somewhere in a server farm. Donna Haraway’s reminder echoes here that the boundary between human and machine is thoroughly leaky.
In the logic of Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway urges us to abandon fantasies of escape and instead learn to “make kin” with the tangled, damaged, more-than-human world we already inhabit. Kim’s Delivery Dancer Codex takes this seriously. Her riders never leave the synthetic ecosystem; they ride through it, glitch inside it, breathe through its suffocating code. Rather than offering transcendence, Kim stages what Haraway would call ongoingness: a world where human, machine, and animal time are entangled, and survival requires improvisation rather than purity. The vast animal-calendar is not nostalgia but kin-making: a reminder that even inside game-engine cities, life can still align itself with the rhythms of creatures rather than corporations.
Kim “stays with the trouble.” She doesn’t rescue her couriers from the synthetic world; she keeps them in relation to it, holding open a hopeful detour through the animal-time calendar that governs their reality despite its artificial skin. As if the natural logics of time-animism with sleep, rest, and season could seep into the data streams, making kin with machines.
Not Eden but a survival map: an entangled, glitchy, unfinished futurity where protagonists, En Storm and Ernst Mo, are meant to meet again. To promise reunion “on the day of the black rabbit in the third leap month” is Harawayan futurity which is not utopian, but situated; not outside capitalism, but through it, finding life in the cracks, even as the world keeps splitting into a human and a corporate-profit-driven timelines.
Ontology of time inside the Codex
Time in Delivery Dancer Codex does not behave. It stretches, glitches, and loops. Kim treats time the way she treats labour: as something engineered rather than natural. In one room of the exhibition, a vast calendar fills the floor in the fashion of a solar clock, its face reorganised into animal eras, each paired with graphics that suggest possible or invented constellations. Instead of months and years, time is cut into zoological segments such as the Era of Frog, Turtle, and Seal, a bestiary of chronology. It feels mythic and scientific at once, like a ritual tool built for a future that has already forgotten us.
Constellations and Cosmotechnics
Couldn’t we all make our own time? Artists and children already do: we look up at the night sky, admire the bright stars, and sketch our own patterns, not Orion the Hunter but a hand, not a traditional mythology but a private glyph. Across Babylonian, Hindu, Arabic, Chinese, Andean, Aboriginal, and Western skies, we meet entirely different stellar symbolism, each born of its cultural context. The animalistic calendar becomes Kim’s own version of what Yuk Hui calls cosmotechnics. In his essay “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics,” Hui argues that technology (technics) is never a neutral, universal tool. It is always rooted in a cosmos: a cultural, moral, and cosmological order that shapes how we create, use, and understand it.
Meditations on being-in-motion
There is this particular quality within the dialogue between the two women; it thins to sparks. En Storm and Ernst Mo trade ontological one-liners or meditations on being-in-motion inside a quantum realm facilitated by AI’s virtual worlds. Each line lands like a system prompt: existence parsed, cached, recompiled. The talk isn’t small; it’s subatomic.
Their conversations unfold like an open-ended workshop in metaphysics. The protagonists range from the ontology of time to temporality’s lived texture within a quantum field, as if they were asking: What is time? Can it be stretched, split, simulated? Is time something we move through or something that moves through us? And when, exactly, will be our time?
Resingularisation and the refusal of capitalist time
Kim’s reconfiguration of time is not decorative; it is a strategy of resingularization. In the final moments, the two protagonists float within vast urban landscape:
“I now understand what it means for there to be mere two possibilities with thin enough density among all the different versions of us.
We may not have succeeded this time, but we will meet again today 19 years from now, on the day of the black rabbit in the third leap month”,
Those lines aren’t romantic futurism so much as a refusal of capitalist time. Under platform labor, time is chopped into seconds, deliveries, ratings where bodies lose breath, rhythm, and selfhood. The gig worker’s life becomes micro-commands: routes, pings, arrival windows. Kim’s animal-calendar and the 19-year cycle break that concatenation. They invoke Guattari’s chaosmic spasm: the moment when a body or a society, suffocating under enforced rhythm, glitches, breaks, and recalibrates into a new harmonic order. The synthetic world of Delivery Dancer borrows an ancient, animalistic calendar; given Kim’s focus on the metaphysics of time, perhaps a return to animal-marked, natural time is the way out of the synthetic worlds where the two characters are permitted to be nothing but opponents. In that sense, yes, it is romantic futurism but romance as a temporal revolt.
Guattari treats subjectivity as a constantly shifting ecology shaped by machines, media, language, embodiment, and collective life. Under late capitalism, these ecologies are accelerated and over-coded, forcing the nervous system into what he calls “chaosmic spasms” which are moments when imposed order collapses and the organism must invent a new rhythm to survive.
Kim’s videos enact Guattari’s ethicoaesthetic paradigm: the couriers’ spasms and glitches under platform acceleration are not endpoints but thresholds, moments where subjectivity recomposes itself through mythical time keeping, and new relational possibilities. There is a hope that potential collapse could become a mutation.
Exhaustion as data
Jonathan Crary’s argument in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep helps illuminate Kim’s world. Crary describes a system that aims to erase all intervals of rest and transform life into a continuous state of availability. In Delivery Dancer Codex, the courier’s time is already 24/7 time measured in pings, routes, and deadlines, without pause or sanctuary. The videos show bodies stretched to match the platform’s tempo, caught in a reality where even exhaustion becomes data. If sleep, for Crary, is the last uncommodified zone, Kim offers dancing as another kind of interruption: a gesture that breaks the logic of nonstop efficiency and returns a moment of time to the body.
A Courier for the Future
Kim isn’t a pessimist. The exhibition is full of openings, moments where the body outruns the algorithm, where dance breaks the code, where motion becomes refusal. There is something rebellious in the way En Storm and Ernst Mo keep moving, not as efficient couriers but as ungovernable dancers, defying multiple realities. In an industry where delivery work is overwhelmingly male, casting the delivery dancers as women instantly tilts the frame toward speculative fiction depicting mythic, sci-fi avatars whose bodies double as servers. Perhaps the exhibition’s sharpest twist is that delivery is choreography: the laborer becomes performer, the performer becomes avatar, the avatar becomes data. And data can be reconfigured:
“to be mere two possibilities with thin enough density
among all the different versions of us”
About the author:
Jana Astanov is a writer and poet, author of five poetry collections: Antidivine, Northern Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox. She is the founder and editor of CREATRIX Magazine and Red Temple Press, its poetry imprint. Her interviews and essays focus on performance art, poetry, and new media.
