Delivery routes carried Ayoung Kim onto TIME100 AI

During the pandemic, Ayoung Kim rode along with a courier in Seoul and watched an app tell a grown woman where to be, how fast, in what order, all day. "I wanted to show the individual rider's dependency on the governance of the app," Kim told TIME, "how this one-way protocol, disciplined communication, urges an individual human being to be optimized for speed and productivity." That ride became Delivery Dancer, and Delivery Dancer is a large part of why Kim was just named to the TIME100 AI 2026 list, in the Thinkers category, announced at the end of August.

The series follows Ernst Mo—an anagram of "monster"—a rider for a delivery platform run by a master algorithm called Dancemaster, and it renders Ernst Mo’s Seoul in the visual language of a racing game: game-engine streets, waypoint geometry, a city experienced as a route queue. It has moved fast through the institutions, with a MoMA PS1 show in the fall of 2025, the LG Guggenheim Award, and covers of both Frieze and Artforum.

"I have always wanted to comment on the impact of technology in our society by using it, by appropriating it," Kim says. You can find that circularity suspect or you can find it honest; the work bets that fluency beats purity.

We touched this nerve from another angle in March, asking whether competition dance trained us to perform for algorithms. Kim's answer is grimmer: the performance was never optional—it's the shift you clock into.