Exhibition

구기정, 〈Coagulation〉(2022)

Gijeong Goo, Coagulation (2022)

박고은, 〈트리오 A〉(2024)

Goeun Park, Trio A (2024)

신승재, 〈소리심기〉(2024)

Shin Seungjae, Seeding sound (2024)

소수빈, 〈Vivisystem〉(2021)

So Soo Bin, Vivisystem (2021)

서상희, 〈Between_(가상)정원〉(2024)

SEO Sanghee, Between_(virtual)garden (2024)

Gijeong Goo

Coagulation, 2022, Single Channel 4K Video, Polycarbonate rear screen, Stainless installation, Beam projection, Dimension variable, 7min 30sec

Reconstitution of awareness and moment of potential crack

Gijeong Goo transforms natural landscapes with digital technology presenting them in physical space for a sensory experience, focusing on possible relationships between humans, machine, and nature. He translates the real landscapes into 3D-rendered digital images, layering them with virtual information. This creates a captivating space at the crossroads of the real and virtual worlds, where the digitally reproduced landscapes evoke ambiguous sensory experiences. With the subject of diverse states of nature that we are facing in the current era, he merges real and virtual nature to create new landscape, bringing up the new definition on the contemporary nature. Coagulation is an installation work, a convergence of the digital image, living grass, and semicircular sculpture. The composite and distorted digital image was created with 3D rendering technology after shooting real moss, forest, and grass with macro lenses and high-resolution cameras. The audience enjoys the augmented image on the screen by stepping on the living grass and physically experiencing the semicircular sculpture. At this time, the work exists as a space where traces of heterogeneous and hybrid elements interact. This implies a boundary that implies relationships and differences between the flat and the three-dimensional, between the still and the moving, and between the real and the illusory. The space between the works reflects a gesture of resistance to produce hybridity and heterogeneity along with awareness of boundaries. The augmented images, rough grass, and cold sculptures floating on the screen metaphorically imply a view of an area where countless elements arising from various relationships coexist and imply other possibilities. The video presents digitally created nature scene that is more realistic and hyper-augmented than the actual world. The artist crafts a dilemma by blurring the line between real and digital, leaving the audience captivated yet unsure of what they see. The ever-shifting image on the screen disrupts the audience’s existing awareness to propel them towards a state of immersion and simultaneously creates potential fragile moments where the audience become aware of heterogeneity. Facing mismatch between the essence of image and their recognition of the subject, the audience reflect, suspect, and confirm their own visual system. Ultimately, they reconsider and reinterpret the relationship between nature and technologically produced media environment.

/ * With the ‘displacement mapping’ technique, the artist focuses on creating realistic texture of the image. The technique analyses the image information to determine which areas of the flat surface should be pushed out (lighter areas) and which should be recessed (darker areas), making the image feel more three-dimensional. */

Goeun Park

Trio A, 2024, 3D Laser-Scanner Data, 2-Channel Video, About 10min

Our gaze going through the plant’s gesture

Goeun Park works on information design, data visualization, and pattern to record the relationship between movement and space based in Seoul and Amsterdam. She discovers specific movement within tools or spaces, visualizing the tool’s performance characteristics. Creating dynamic patterns of tool, her work recognizes and reinterprets these often-overlooked ‘gestures’ to build a poetic relationship between the object and humans. She follows each gesture of constant movement and tracks its time and space to record the movement, translating the momentary movements into graphic representations. Trio A, a video, reorganizes subtle movements data of a tree recorded by the terrestrial laser scanner into the graphic. The artwork emphasizes color, shape, and structure of data that scientists utilize to observe and record the natural plant movement. The scan file recording the tree’s movement in a scientific figure and data is artificial information, but one step closer look will allow you to experience dynamic movement of thousands of point cloud like a forest. Ultimately, the work suggests that plants are metastably changeable within the complex relationship between nature, technology, and humanity, not static and unchanging. Focusing on the meaning of the nature’s ‘gesture’, this work highlights subtle movements, vitality of nature, and invisible things we can truly appreciate only with a keen eye. The artist interprets information of the movement data file and reshapes its structure, rebuilding the data as a new design. The recreated data is fragmentized into graphic, emerging from gap between intense fluorescent color surfaces, finally liberated. Building graphic patterns, these fragmented data then build graphic patterns, absorbing and merging with one other, and dissolving and restructuring images. Constantly scattering and gathering, the graphic elements in the work interact with other elements facing them and exist as a layer for harmonization. The video shimmers with the inside light interference or reflects with deep light penetration. Each fragment within the work acts as a metaphor for the invisible material level of a higher realm in the structure where it is interwoven with the gap.

/ * Source of the terrestrial laser scanner data: Eetu Puttonen, National Land Survey of Finland Terrestrial laser scanner is a 3D scanner to record slowly moving nature such as trees, water, and terra firma over a long period of time. / / Source of the video text: The dignity of living beings with regard to plants, (Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology ECNH) The video is composed of 43 data files scanning the maple tree in Finland, moving by itself from sunrise to sunset, and each data file is composed of about 16,000 small point clouds. All graphics in the video was created with Cloud Compare program. */

Shin Seungjae

Seeding Sound, 2024, Aluminum Frame, 8-Channel Speaker, PCB, 220x400x300cm

Sensory projection and dormant potential

Shin Seungjae creates sound material using diverse media that incorporates keywords related to nature, develops algorithm, and composes music by computer. He highlights the stereophonic sound technology through composition and computer music. Seeding Sound, an interactive audiovisual installation work, is composed of living plants, micro current sensors, Arduino, and a speaker. The data, measured by the plant cell when the audience make a contact with the plant leaf, plays a role as a compositional element in the 3D sound system created by the artist. When the audience touches the leaf, the plant cell senses it, leading to an increase in calcium ion concentration. This change is captured by the micro current sensor attached to the leaf and delivered to the 3D sound system built by the artist. The artwork comes alive as the stereophonic sound system transforms physical contact and audience interaction with the plants into plant sound. The plant’s leaf, as its skin which should be penetrated to demolish the boundary, is a vulnerable point. When touched, it embodies co-existence of two-sided elements such as fixability and flexibility, repetition and variation, creating a ‘layer’ as a contact point between the inner and external worlds. The plant’s layer works as a liminal surface connecting the inside and outside like human skin that has reciprocal relationship with the outside. Sometimes it can function as a protective skin, an organ of perception, or a boundary between the plant’s internal and external worlds as well as a corridor to the external world to embrace surrounding environment and atmosphere. As the audience touch the leaf and build relationship with it, they realize the concept of ‘in-between’ and experience sensory expansion from sense of sight to sense of touch. The artist manifests stereophonic sound as a new medium, ‘seed’, as the sound is created physical contact between the plants and the audience. The audience plant the ‘seed’ in the flower bed again at the end, meaning that the plant species of the ecosystem are actively changing and broadening the audience awareness as they re-plant the seed. As they forge a relationship with the plant, data cumulated over time sequentially create new sound structure. It is a metaphor for the leaf forming complex skin self over the course of the continuous interaction with the external world. The shape and structure of the sound goes through adjustment and modulation, influenced by the relationship between the plant and the audience, eventually tying the final notes.

So Soo Bin

Vivisystem, 2021, Plant, Magnet, Cork, LED, 120x120cm, 3ea

Dispersed crowd that changed the center of gravity

So Soo Bin’s work centers on environmentally-driven plant modification, exploring possibility of liberating the immobile plant by combining it with the machine. The artist looks into the ‘future coexistence system’, raising question about how the merging of machine and life form could affect the future environment. She explores the natural cycle of plants – multiplication, division, repetition – through their shapes and patterns. Her work features transformed plant forms sharing the common concept of life. Organic structures, whether rendered as natural images or virtual shapes, become a theme of the work, or even used as art materials. Vivisystem, an interactive installation work, allows the audience to engage in moving the plant by themselves to create the current ecosystem. The audience make a contact with both living and artificial plants by hand, shaping the installation’s form through their own hand movements, which is a sensory and playful experience. As the audience freely move the two different magnetically responsive natural elements, the boundary between the organic and the artificial dissolves in a dynamic interplay. Ultimately, the work suggest that plants are metastablely changeable within the complex relationship between nature, technology, and humanity, not static and unchanging. Through the rearrangement and recombination by the audience, the work not only transforms the subject as an image, but also the underlying meaning, therefore, the previous meaning is removed or replaced with something different. A jumble of natural and artificial plants on the dark surface reminds us of the current ecosystem where the organic and the man-made traverse and coexist along ever-shifting migratory paths. Plants are affected by various ways and eventually transformed into entirely new forms through natural processes like interspecies crossbreeding and human interventions like genetic modification. They possess an inherent capacity for hybridity as they transform into different species, constantly evolving themselves. Vivisystem, a term encompaasing both ‘living and artificial systems’, showcases the heterogeneous living circle. By moving the living and artificial plants on the surface by themselves, the audience intervene the migration (movement) of plants. This interactive experience serves as a metaphor for the ecological disturbance in the real-world like genetic modification and cross-breeding, ultimately prompting us to re-contemplate the existence of plants and the balance of the ecosystem.

SEO Sanghee

Between_(virtual)garden, 2024, Plant, 4-Channel Video, Dimension variable, 3min 30sec

Opaque overlap of analogue and digital

SEO Sanghee explores the boundaries between two contrasting things such as reality and virtual reality, digital and analogue, revealing energy, events, limitless overlapped values that emerge from their collision. She establishes virtual nature environment in a physical space and shatters the boundary between the real and virtual, suggesting a new way to approach nature at the boundary of the real and imagination through expansion of sensory perception and immersion. Her work expands to imaginary space where the audience have new experience about the nature as the virtual world seamlessly blends with the physical world. Between_(virtual) garden, a video installation work, displays plants, the object of nature which is the symbol of analogue, at varying heights and distance, and combines artificial lights controlled by computer, a representative of the digital realm, with video images with pictorial expression. The artwork establishes an artificial garden as the living plants and imaginary plants coexist within a single space. Individual plants, hanging at varying locations, transform their shapes in response to the audience’s position and viewpoint, and distance between plants and their location create new relationship and proportion. This dynamic arrangement constructs a landscape that flexibly multiplies its border area through overlapping layers. The intermediate area between them is a boundary with heterogenous and different things, clearly existing yet as a free point that belongs to no singular space. At the boundary between the real garden with living plants and the virtual garden giving sensory experience but without physical existence, the audience experience immersion and connection, entering the point where the reality and the virtual world intertwine. At the boundary between the virtual and real world, the living and artificial plants meet. While the latter become opaque, the overlapping image on the living plants creates a novel nature. As the audience walk around the gaps between real plants and their overlapping 3D graphic counterparts, they become one of layers in an opaque net generated by both the real and virtual worlds. Then, they act as a part of the subject within the work, crossing the real plants and virtual landscape in one space. By highlighting the potential energy generated from the coincidental collision between contrasting elements, the artwork explores a novel aesthetic experience. The work invites the audience to embark on a contemplative journey to find a novel relationship within the artificial garden, a combination of coolness of digital media with analogue sensibility of nature.