C.U.T.E. Opens BEASTS, a Korean Folklore Play Installation
Scarlett Kim and Anthony Storniolo built the free, motion-driven Unreal Engine work for the Digital Arts Space at The Music Center in Los Angeles.
- When
- Oct. 21 to Dec. 20, 2026; Wednesday to Friday, 5:30 to 9:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 to 9:30 p.m.
- Where
- Digital Arts Space, The Music Center, Los Angeles
- Cost
- Free with RSVP
BEASTS, a free play installation by Scarlett Kim and Anthony Storniolo of the Center for Unclassifiable Technologies and Experiences (C.U.T.E.), opens Oct. 21 at the Digital Arts Space at The Music Center in Los Angeles and runs through Dec. 20. Visitors enter a transmission station, choose a creature from Korean folklore and answer its call through movement. The scenes include hide-and-seek across a foggy flower field, puppeteering a horde of rat-humans and karaoke in a borrowed body.
The creatures are gwoemul, shapeshifting beasts of Korean folklore. The makers' page describes them reimagined through the experience of the Korean diaspora, in a retro-futuristic world between Seoul and Los Angeles. The Music Center says the environments are built in Unreal Engine, with motion capture technology from MOVIN. Kim directed and wrote the work; Storniolo built the interactive systems, music and sound.
The Music Center presents it through its Digital Innovation Initiative, whose Digital Arts Space hosted Armon Naeini's ID: Part III and Po-Hao Chi's Life in Motion earlier this year. Character art is by Dabin Lee and Alexander Thornborough of LEEBORO, with voice and movement by Jenapher Zheng. Entry is free with RSVP, per The Music Center's announcement.
An earlier version was a live digital puppetry performance by Kim, presented at SIGGRAPH 2025 in a paper written with researchers from Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Kim is an interdisciplinary fellow at the Royal Shakespeare Company. A Funeral for the Internet, made with Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, showed in Venice this year.
For more reading, see A Funeral for the Internet went to market at Venice, At Nxt Museum, the visitor is the puppeteer and the SIGGRAPH paper on the earlier version.
Killscreen lists the play installations, game shows and screenings at the edges of games that almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week.
