The Other Internet — Subtitled NYC

The Other Internet

06.12 – 08.23.2026

Yehwan Song

Curated by Brian Droitcour

How is a fountain like the internet? Both hide their engineering to deliver a wonder that looks effortless. Water systems were once fed from central reservoirs but evolved to use redundant sources, much like the distributed networks of the internet designed to survive outages. In early modern Europe, fountains were built as symbols of power; tech infrastructure is the dazzling achievement of today’s titans of industry. The pressure required to move water through a system, like the bandwidth needed by data, produces surges, failures, and bottlenecks. And the movement of data, by analogy to water, is described in terms of flow. The metaphor of liquid is central to how our conception of information.

These connections form the foundation of Yehwan Song’s kinetic sculpture The Other Internet. It is not the kind of fountain that first comes to mind—a round pool with central jets in a city square—but something closer to the tiered, cascading fountains of Versailles, Peterhof, or Generalife, where architecture and water infrastructure merge, and the garden wall is at once a boundary and a spectacle. This form of fountain as engineered environment is precisely what interests Song. To understand the texture of life in the present and how technology shapes it, she reaches back to older technologies—ones that reveal their workings, so you can see how the parts move and respond to each other. She approaches the web as an environment shaped by historical, political, and economic forces: an infrastructure structured around the calculated motives of states and corporations.

Song has long been interested in the use of water as a metaphor for the internet—web surfing, ports, streaming services, the deep web. “This language produces powerful imaginaries that romanticize the internet, fostering illusions of anonymity, freedom of speech, democracy, and open exploration,” she writes. “At the same time, these metaphors obscure users’ ability to recognize the structural inequities embedded in the internet itself.” The internet is no longer the space it was once imagined to be. Users are no longer surfing the web; the agency implied by that metaphor has eroded. Rather than navigating freely, users are pulled under—the ocean of information doesn’t opens onto vast horizons but functions as a whirlpool, drawing users toward a central core and stripping them of the capacity to choose their own course.

The Other Internet takes this critique a step further by attending to geography. Usage habits and platform structures vary significantly from country to country. South Korea, for instance, restricts the data it shares with international tech giants—Google is denied access to location and transit data, and TikTok was banned until recently. Yet even within a nationally inflected internet, code remains dependent on Latin characters and English commands. What does it mean for Hangul to appear in a browser bar? What hybrid conditions does that create?

Song realizes these questions in sculpture through systems of differing water volume and pressure, with spouts that strike smartphone screens and trigger responses in different languages. Lines begin under similar conditions, but some gradually strengthen—their valves opening further—while others weaken and close. One or two lines come to dominate, but entropy follows. Overly strong flows are reduced, and other languages rise again. The process repeats continuously, with valves in constant motion. Sentences appear on the screens, seemingly fed by water but also driven and interrupted by the competing pressures in the pipes. The result is a system that lays bare a mechanistic struggle for power while preserving another mystery—the hidden competition between the infrastructures that determine which languages and cultures flow freely and which cannot.

—Brian Droitcour

Artist Bio

Yehwan Song (b. 1995) is an artist based in New York. Working across installation, performance, and web-based media, Song explores how digital culture reshapes perception, attention, and everyday life. Recent solo exhibitions include Are We Still (Surfing?) at Pioneer Works (New York, 2025) and The Internet Barnacles at G Gallery (Seoul, 2025). Song has participated in major exhibitions including the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), Helsinki Biennial (2023), and the Asia Art Biennale (Taichung, 2024), and presented work at the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, 2026). Upcoming presentations include the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 2026), Edith Russ Haus (Oldenburg, 2026), and a solo exhibition at Subtitled.nyc (New York, 2026).

About the Curator

For the last twenty years Brian Droitcour has been working in and around the art world as a critic, curator, editor, and educator. He has contributed to publications including e-flux, Frieze, and Spike, and has written catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. From 2014 to 2021 he worked at Art in America magazine, where he organized special issues on topics including the digitized museum, generative art, and immersive art. He has taught in MFA programs at Pratt Institute, Maine College of Art, the George Washington University, and City College of New York. Droitcour edited an online magazine for Outland, a fine art NFT platform, from its founding in 2021 to its suspension of operations in 2024. In 2025 he relaunched Outland as a nonprofit dedicated to initiatives in publishing and education about digital art. Brian has previously curated exhibitions at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York, as well as at artist-run spaces at venues including a jewelry store, a pizza parlor, and a subway station.

All photos courtesy of Subtitled NYC, New York