by Jawni Han
As far-right electoral populism worldwide has returned with a venomous vengeance alongside a seemingly perpetual cycle of economic crises, we are left to wonder if we are condemned to repeat all this for eternity. Such is the question that visual artist Kim Ayoung grapples with in her recent sci-fi video series Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022) and its twin sequels, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024) and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024). They revolve around Ernst Mo and En Storm, doppelgangers from parallel universes whose names are anagrams of the word “monster,” cruising around Seoul on motorcycles in identical outfits—athleisure reinterpretations of Gundam pilot uniforms. They also happen to have the same job: delivery gig workers for UberEats-esque platform Delivery Dancers. But there is a little twist to their daily grind that sets them apart from the ordinary UberEats drivers of our reality: Ernst Mo and En Storm are among the select few “ghost dancers” who can travel through little cracks and crevices within the space-time continuum.
The AI system fueling the delivery platform is known as Dancemaster, and it considers all possible delivery routes; determining the fastest commute in a matter of seconds. In a visually wondrous shot of Ernst Mo riding her motorbike from Sphere, her surroundings warp and appear as a Möbius strip. This is exactly how Delivery Dancer wishes the world to be: a closed-loop system in which all aspects of labor, value, and time are optimized for maximum productivity and accumulation of capital. In Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Fredric Jameson argues that what we commonly call “progress” under capitalism is merely “an attempt to colonize the future, to draw the unforeseeable back into the tangible realities […] very much in the spirit of stockmarket futures.” Time itself becomes a commodity for consumers who pay for fast delivery, and the platform’s control over time becomes a basis for return on investments for stakeholders.
But that Möbius strip snaps when Ernst Mo’s journey through the time warp takes her to En Storm. Her encounter with the doppelgänger is the subject of an off-screen conversation between Ernst Mo and her therapist who is more concerned about her productivity level than her emotional well-being. The therapist has one other crucial agenda, though: making sure that Ernst Mo’s encounter with her doppelganger does not evolve into a belief that a different self—therefore a different world—is possible. The belief in different futures poses a grave existential threat to the stakeholders. When Ernst Mo and En Storm are in close physical proximity, Dancemaster’s GPS system ceases to function, and “time slows down,” she tells us. It is a bug to be squashed. By the end of the video, in a desperate attempt to restore normalcy in her life, Ernst Mo kills her doppelganger and everything seems to go back to business as usual—but the resolution is nothing more than a temporary respite.
Ernst Mo’s experience is a feature, not a bug in the system. Delivery Dancer’s signature “lightning-speed” delivery service necessarily runs the risk of puncturing the illusion of its airtight control over time by superseding the limits of clock time. This contradiction mirrors the inherent tension within capitalism between the desire for a domesticated future that one can invest in and bank on and the unpredictable business cycle of growth and recession. Unsurprisingly, the disruption in the space-time continuum and workers’ productivity reemerges at a much larger scale in 0° Receiver and Inverse. In the twin sequels, Ernst Mo, still a ghost dancer employed by Delivery Dancer, is part of an underground resistance movement that seeks to topple the tech company’s monopoly on time. People wish to experience time outside the logic of productivity and optimization. The crisis of an individual in Sphere has transformed into a full-fledged dissident network that pushes the contradiction in Delivery Dancer’s business model to its extreme.
During a stealth operation seen in 0° Receiver, Ernst Mo travels to a vast desert, rendered in stunning video game imagery, via a time-warp portal to hide time safeguarded in a black Pelican case. There, much to her shock, she runs into En Storm who informs her of “Timekeepers,” Delivery Dancer’s para-police force that tries to thwart the resistance effort. Not long after Ernst Mo returns to her own world, she is confronted by a Timekeeper who is dressed in an all-black outfit that seems to have walked out of a Yohji Yamamoto lookbook. Determined to liberate time and rescue En Storm from Dancemaster, she tenaciously fights back but proves to be no match for the Timekeeper. Time remains in possession of Delivery Dancer and En Storm dies yet again. The same plot is repeated in Inverse, which takes place in Novaria, a Metropolis-like city-state that seems to exist parallel to the techno-futurist Seoul of Sphere and 0° Receiver.
A tragic ending, for sure. But Kim does not succumb to pessimism here. Before dying, En Storm murmurs: “We have failed once again, but we will meet again on this day, nineteen years from now.” Just as the crisis of capitalism is to be repeated until its last breath, so is the resistance. In his essay On the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani speaks of “repetition compulsion” that underpins the history of capitalism. It is not that certain events of history repeat themselves; rather, the cyclical structure of the system, unable to overcome its shortcomings, keeps generating devastating crisis moments in our economic and political life. For Karatani, while Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s ascension to power in 1851 and the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany are distinct historical events, they are the same in being different crisis responses to the destructive caprices of the market economy. In each instance, to quote Karl Marx in the subject of Karatani’s essay, capitalism appointed “grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part” to save itself from drowning.
The Delivery Dancer series locates “repetition compulsion” in our commitment to freedom. The duplicated plots of 0° Receiver and Inverse rhyme with many instances of repeated sequences in each piece. In the latter though, the repetition of certain shots is accompanied by different visual rendering and stylization. For instance, unlike in Sphere, Kim introduces a 2D illustration rendering of Ernst Mo and En Storm in a style reminiscent of GL webtoons. GL, short for “girls love” and also known as “yuri,” is a queer subgenre most prominent in manga that depicts sexual and emotional intimacy between woman characters. The incorporation of GL aesthetics opens up an “enemies to lovers” possibility for Ernst Mo and En Storm, and places queerness in opposition to Dancemaster’s mechanized time. Queer temporality, which rejects the biological clock and the heteronormative timeline, fundamentally refuses the social reproduction of “straight” temporality, the essential building block for Delivery Dancer’s empire. Kim emphasizes time’s elasticity and expansiveness at the end of Inverse through En Storm’s concluding voiceover: “There are many kinds of time. A time where a needle pierces the softest petal […] A time where a coral reef annelid lays its egg. A place where a week lasts for ten days. A place where a week lasts for seven days.” Our world in which a week is seven days—the world of capitalism and Dancemaster—is simply one of the many possible worlds.
At one point in Sphere, En Storm tells Ernst Mo about “the hole in the world” accessible via leakage in time when traveling through a time warp. This hole, which allows parallel universes to collide with one another, contains a well of possibilities—utopian or otherwise. Jameson dismisses the common conception of utopia as an ideal society to be modeled after and instead proposes a more provocative definition: utopia challenges the “universal belief that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socioeconomic system is conceivable, let alone practically available.” It is precisely this apparent truism of our neoliberal world order that Kim dares us to rethink and push back against. So what if a week is actually eight days and we base our temporal measurements on the time it takes for a caterpillar to metamorphosize into a butterfly? Thanks to Kim, we now know that this is not a flight of fancy, but the repetition compulsion in us driving us to imagine a different world.
Jawni Han (she/her) is a Korean writer, translator, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn.
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