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Seoul 2019

Platform-L Contemporary Art Center
1 - 12 October 2019
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Participating institutions
 

Art Center College of Design, Pasadena 
Chung-Ang University, CAU, Seoul
Parsons School of Design , New York
Zurich University of the Arts, ZHdK, Zurich

Silas Fong

Swetlana Heger

Gustav Hellberg

Ken Marchionno

Jim Ramer

MarieVic

Taehwan Jeon

Tobias Gutmann & Pablo Lienhard

Youngjoo Sul

Brett Childs

Amanda Johnson

Steven Baboun

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Photo Silas Fong, Grace, Ryu Jihun and Byun Juneon
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With sponsorship and support from Bitglim and PASA (Photo & Science Art) Festival

www.bitglim.com

중앙대학교 예술문화연구원
Chung–Ang University of Arts and Culture Research Institute

Seoul 2019

Artworks

Brett Childs and Ken Marchionno (Art Center College of Design, Pasadena)
Mary Bradbury
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun

Mary Bradbury is a collaborative work produced by Ken Marchionno and Brett Childs, employing the modeling talents of Emma Thompson and styling of Stef Contreras.

We live in a time when privacy is at a premium. At any, or perhaps every moment, we are being watched. Our information is collected and sold to anyone interested in manipulating our desires for anything from commerce to politics. We relinquish this information freely based on contracts we sign but rarely read; it’s the reason the bike you looked at yesterday pops up today, or the politics you espouse is validated in your feed. While it may sometimes seem convenient, it’s far from innocent.  

We accept these intrusions as part of contemporary society. Unless you’re completely off the grid, it’s likely your moves are being recorded.

But you are subject to a deeper, more insidious form of surveillance. Since the dawn of civilization, the dominant fear relates to the loss of power. Authority is precarious, built on a perception of validity that is constantly under pressure. The more illegitimate the leadership, the more paranoid it becomes.

The belief that the state is under siege has been around since its inception. The leaders of Greece employed spies against their people. And there is perhaps no more notorious spy than Judas Iscariot, spying for the Romans in the take down of Jesus. In the early 1950s, the US House Un-American Activities Committee, saw a rush to villainize certain citizens as enemies of the state. And from 1956-1971, COINTELPRO, a covert arm of the FBI, was used to surveil variously feared Americans, from the KKK to Civil Rights, Environmentalists, Puerto Rican Independence, and the American Indian Movement. 

In 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the US Congress authorized the Patriot Act to unearth threats within the country. This law, replaced by the USA Freedom Act in 2015, allows surveillance of citizens suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups. This all sounds quite reasonable—give up some privacy for safety. Besides, the government is only surveilling suspicious people. But like the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, there is a group-think that skews the results, and the determination of suspicion is itself suspect.

What if you were targeted; what if you were seen as a threat? What if the perceived threat is based on ill-advised or absurd presumptions? Mary Bradbury posits just that question.

 

The work images a young woman in her daily routine: she checks her email, watches videos, goes to work… Images taken in both her intimate setting and from a distance show her actions are being recorded. Does the corroborating evidence prove something insidious? How does knowing someone is under surveillance change the viewer’s perceptions? Do you read clues or create clues? An assumption of guilt forces a pretext that creates a sinister read.

The well-heeled saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it” is turned on its head. “I’ll see it when I believe it” is perhaps the more apt truism.

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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Grace
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Photo: Grace
Silas Fong (Chung-Ang University)
Artist Career Map

In education, a teacher often shows students the best way or the right knowledge in understanding and doing things. In art-making, the artist questions and gives sarcastic or no answers. What happens when an artist became a teacher? What if teaching became an artistic media? As a teacher, can I teach the wrong things? On this occasion, I would like to make learning materials and instructions showing students the wrong way. I doubt if it would be a more effective and critical way for students to learn.

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Photo: Silas Fong
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Photo: Silas Fong
Gustav Hellberg and Sul Youngjoo (Chung-Ang University)
Relational Stratagem
Video, HD1080, 38:11 min

Relational Stratagem is a video film, which is showing a discussion between an art professor and a student, Gustav Hellberg and Youngjoo Sul. During two month they meat on a regular basis to discuss artistic collaboration and art education as well as hierarchical relations within educational situations as well as in the art world on the whole. After two months of talks the video film was recorded.

It proved difficult to find a common ground as base for to make a collaborative artwork. The reasons were many. Youngjoo Sul wanted to develop her own work. So the collaboration resulted in her process making a sculpture being the centre point for discussions about relationship.

Protagonists: Youngjoo Sul and Gustav Hellberg
Camera: Hongseok Kang
Editing: Gustav Hellberg

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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Video still
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Video still
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Video still
Sul Youngjoo (Chung-Ang University)
Meet in the Middle?
Iron, wood and cement
3000×400×500mm

In relationships what we can see affects us easily, confused when what is seen is influenced by the invisible. The mind is invisible, but we often assume someone’s behaviour because we think we’re looking at it. Value is also invisible, but we value it because we often delude that it is visible. But perhaps, what appears is just what is revealed and what is invisible is what is hidden. Nothing can hold everything at a glance. What becomes important at this time is the balance between what is seen and what is invisible. As you balance each other, you meet me in the middle.

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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
Jeon Taehwan (Chung-Ang University)
If not, then so be it
Video Projection with Sound, HD1080, 10:00 min
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun

If not, then so be it is a 3d animated video made using a game-developing
software. In the work a man welcomes you to his house to reveal the stories behind the architecture and his life. A discrete property located in the right mountains, it becomes the perfect hideout from your busy and mundane everyday life.

Steven Baboun, Amanda Johnson, Jim Ramer and MarieVic
(Parsons School of Design)
Transegosynaps

Transegosynaps explores the space between individual conception and the noidal network manifestation. Absurdities arise, juxtapositions develope and shift, disorientation becomes the norm, initiated from an AI’s random generation of concepts shared with participants this project explores shifts in identity and in a hyper-networked world. Technical innovations have fundamentally changed our relationship to the image and there by our  relationship to self and the other. In this  unique and formative time in the history of image making, a time which emerges distinctly from prior historical moments and is unique and singular in its potential.  Image culture exists in a kind of “super-velocity”. It is within this hyper-networked computationally enabled environment, new associations, understandings and strategies are emerging in the project. It is in this context that the project positions. 

Transegosynaps incorporates objects collected and constructed, historical images as well as studio and location imagery and video collected from locations in Asia, the US, from the Middle East to Europe and Northern Africa. The sum total creates an enigmatic landscape in which a multiplicity of potential narratives rise and recede. This closed asthmatic (restrictive) system becomes self generative. 

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Photo: Grace
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
Tobias Gutmann and Pablo Lienhard
(Zurich University of the Arts)
Polyphonic Drawings – when a pen meets a saxophone
Performance/installation, mixed media

Tobias Gutmann’s artistic practice aims to bring people, cultures, and environments together. He uses his own visual language to give meaning, character, and atmosphere to a variety of formats such as installations, performances or publications. Performing both nationally and around the world, his art always hopes to affect people in a positive way, and to communicate an incentive for participation.

 

Pablo Lienhard is a Zürich based improviser performing on saxophones, no-input mixers, guitar pedals, computers and other stuff. As an investigating artist he is interested in randomness, overflow, acceleration, interdisciplinarity, performance, mise-en-scène, contexts, the relationship between language and music, as well as contemporary pop culture.

 

In a performance setting, the artists simultaneously produce music and it’s score. Ink and sound function as two voices of a larger audiovisual composition. Tobias Gutmann and Pablo Lienhard study at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Grace
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Photo: Artist
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Photo: Artist
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
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Photo: Ryu Jihun
Artworks Seoul
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