A lot of art about algorithmic labor treats the subject from a critical distance — data visualizations, didactic wall text, systems diagrams explaining how a gig-platform algorithm works. Ayoung Kim’s ongoing Delivery Dancer project does something different: it builds a full speculative world, populated with sculpture, game-engine animation, and multi-channel video, told from inside the experience of a delivery worker navigating a city governed almost entirely by algorithm.
Watch: Ayoung Kim on ‘Delivery Dancer’s Sphere’ (Frieze) (YouTube)
What the project actually looks like
Delivery Dancer: Time Curves, currently on view at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, combines multi-channel video, game-engine animation, sculpture, synchronized lighting, and sound into an immersive installation depicting delivery workers moving through algorithmically governed cities — transforming what Kim describes as the hidden architecture of digital infrastructure into something physically walkable and felt, rather than explained. It’s one chapter of a larger, evolving project that’s appeared across venues including MoMA PS1 (Delivery Dancer Codex), the Institute of Modern Art (Delivery Dancer’s Sphere), and the National Asian Culture Center in Gwangju (Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse), each installment extending the same speculative world rather than restarting it.
Why the “time” framing is the actual argument
The Gwangju chapter specifically dug into pre-modern calendar and timekeeping systems that faded once the Gregorian calendar became a global standard — a standardization Kim’s work links directly to imperialism and the exercise of political power. Read against that history, Delivery Dancer’s algorithmic time — the platform’s delivery window, the app’s constant timer, the rating system’s relentless present tense — reads as the latest version of the same pattern: a single, externally imposed time system replacing the varied, locally meaningful ones that came before it. That’s a considerably sharper argument than a general “gig work is exploitative” critique, because it’s built on a specific historical throughline about who gets to define time itself.
Why this is worth following as a project, not a single show
Because Delivery Dancer unfolds across multiple venues and years as one continuous speculative world rather than a series of unrelated shows, each new chapter adds to a cosmology that’s genuinely being built out over time — closer to how a long-running game or serialized fiction develops than how a gallery show typically works. For anyone interested in how game-engine tools and world-building techniques are migrating into gallery-based art practice, Kim’s project is one of the more sustained, multi-year examples currently running.