The body is our general medium for having a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945)

Welcome to the 2026 ARTS KOREA LAB FESTIVAL SENSE THE M.O.M.: Moment Opens Memory.

In only a few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken on much of the thinking we once believed was unique to humans, and it has left us asking what being human now means. Now, housed in robotic bodies, AI is stepping off the screen to see and hear the world directly and move through it. This is what we now call physical AI.

Yet teaching machines these bodily skills has proved harder than teaching them to think. In that difficulty, we have discovered how elaborately our own bodies have been working all along. Where engineering has sought to give machines a physical body, art has explored the somatic one, the body that senses and remembers. The body remembers less by retrieving a stored record than by recomposing the past from what it sees and hears now. Each moment of sensing is thus also a moment of remembering.

We meet the world through the senses of the body, and the body composes whatever arrives into one experience, encountering the past and the future.

Sense the M.O.M. names this moment. M.O.M. stands for Moment Opens Memory, and through it we hope to revisit the question: What is the human body that senses and remembers?

Amid the questions AI raises about what being human means, we hope this question, at least, begins in the body rather than the head.

Director, KAIST Art and Technology Center
Associate Professor, KAIST Graduate School of Culture Technology
2026 AKL Festival Creative Director
Dr. Julian Jinjoon Lee FRSA