#in a way similar to synesthesia; and diverts to his other senses for him to try and figure out

[befuddled-calico-whump]

Hi I found another new detail to pick your brain over :)

In Piercings you show two versions of the same image. One is simply how Hunter looks to everyone else. The colours are flat and how they always have been. But the second has blues and purples pulsating around his head, which matches how his technology works in his understanding of pain.

What interests me is that in the second image Hunters hair is kind of inverted? Like the dark green of it all is still the same, but the blue and orange have been swapped for a bright yellow and electric blue, respectively. This absolutely fascinates me because there's so many possibilities with this. Does his hair change colour (to Hunter) based on what he's feeling? That would explain why the alternate blue looks similar to the lines surrounding him. Or does he have some kind of colour blindness and thought he was picking different dyes when he did his hair? I am very normal over this if you can't tell(<- me when I lie)

- ⌚anon

ah more detail finding! Love it :D

So Hunter's been dyeing his hair since he was a teenager, long before he got the implant. He's more attached to his hair color now than ever, because while everyone he sees has some kind of neutral color that changes with their feelings, when he looks for his own color, there's nothing there

(which is just a feature of the implant: since it's sourced from the user, it doesn't register the 'neutrals' on the user, but Hunter doesn't know that so he just assumes it's because it's him)

What Hunter sees that "comes from him" usually manifests in patterns he can see around him, or things covering his body. Even with very "visible" things like pain, it's more like the colors are hovering over him/in front of him/overwhelming him from the inside out.

That being said, the brighter hair is a result of the implant, but it's less "the colors are tied to his pain" and more "he's in a state of shock when someone makes him look in the mirror and this manifests in some colors in his immediate vicinity becoming almost painful to look at" :)

(hope this makes some kind of sense 😭 describing implant effects and how it works in a way that's linear and sensible is actually Really Hard lol)

[junsojung-text]

Media and the Order of Senses

Nam See Kim (Assistant Professor, Ewha Womans University)

The Premise of Media

Entering Sojung Jun’s solo exhibition titled Kiss Me Quick at Song Eun Art Space, visitors could feel Barcelona. In this exhibition, there is sensorial memory of the city experienced by Jun with her eyes closed. She walked around the city and recorded what she felt with her sensorial organs except for her eyes. This way, she made her sensory drawings of Barcelona. And then, a musician translated the drawings into music and a choreographer transcribed them into physical movements. Going through the process, her sense of touch and hearing is combined with the sense of sight, which is united with tactile sight of moving bodies. At a glance, it seems that Jun tries an experiment to overcome the limits of our eye-centered culture. In other words, her work seems like a project to call into question widespread ocular-centrism by demonstrating how it has minimized our interest in other senses. This work seems to divert our focus onto diverse physiological capacities of our body. Historically, art has involved in this kind of attempt to resuscitate five senses. Friedrich Schiller analyzed negative effects of the division of labor him and viewed ‘art as play’ as a solution for dealing with the fragmentation and alienation of modern man in ‘civil society’. After Schiller, art was considered to be able to help us recover our fragmented or enfeebled senses and impair our physical and mental integrity. Even today, not a few artists pursue the aim to restore the so-called ‘original state of united senses’. Moreover, it is not uncommon for these artists to move towards spiritualism and mysticism.

           Despite certain visual similarities, Jun’s work is distinctly different from the abovementioned artistic lineage. First, Jun’s work is based on media technologies such as video projection. As media theorist Friedrich Kittler points out, technology based media such as photography, gramophone, film, and typewriter divided up once united senses and assigned each a medium-like status. For example, ocular and auditory experience (sight and hearing), which had been united in the creation and reception of a literary work, came to be recorded, saved, and ‘played’ separately in gramophone, photography and film. Through photography and silent movie that send out a set of visual impressions with no sound, and gramophone playing only the sounds of people of events with no image, we got used to image-only and sound-only experience. Our sight and hearing are not working separately in reality, but when it comes to media technology experience, each of the senses can operate independently.

           It is noteworthy that after technology media brought about the division of senses, the mutual translation and correspondence between individual senses came to be explored. For instance, Wassily Kandinsky explored the possibility of communication and translation between sounds (auditory senses) and colors (sight) in his painting. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was interested in materialism, suggested a new kind of music based on direct correspondence between the auditory and the visual by inscribing graphic symbols on phonograph record disks.[1]Therefore, it was not by chance that such artistic experiments were created after the appearance of technology-based media like photography, films, and gramophone.

           Nevertheless, people calling for the reunification of fragmented and separated senses still stick to the romantic idea of a primitive status of human spirit when all senses were together in unity. For them, the unity of senses is to be ‘recovered’ and ‘rebuilt’. They try to restore the primitive sensorial status in human bodies through diverse spiritualistic and mystical methods. However, their ideas and methods cause head-on confrontation between humans and technology, as they do not understand the dialectical relationship between the two. After the technology based media split up our senses, the reunion between them cannot take place in the manner that romanticists and metaphysicians dream of. This is because after the appearance of technological media, the problem of sensorial integration or synesthesia cannot rely on the concept of ‘spirit’ that is believed to unite the senses of body in the ‘transcendental’ inside. The integration would rather be possible by utilizing the technical media, provoking ‘translation’ or ‘combination’ between different them. The future technology of virtual reality that is to mediate sight between hearing; and touch between smell, does not represent a certain primitive status of human senses. It is nothing but the combined technology of different media senses.        

           Jun does not refer to things like ‘spirit’ or ‘humans’ when she talks about ‘synesthesia’. Maybe she is fully aware that her work is based on the premise of the technical separation of senses. Instead, Jun sheds light on the ‘translation’ occurring between senses. Moreover, she finds common ground among senses not in human spirit but in the manipulation of media. The interesting aesthetic tension in her work comes from this point of view. In Kiss me quick, Jun tries to weaken visitors’ visual perceptual abilities by turning the lights down in the entire exhibition hall. She also installs structural devices to make the visitors bend their back or lower their bodies. As a result, visitors are forced to experience her works using their bodies and senses. They should walk cautiously down a dark hallway, attempt to reconstruct distorted and fragmented images projected on the wall, and watch a video standing uncomfortably in front of a curved screen. Here, the convention of watching comfortably a visual image centered exhibition does not exist. In her media work, Jun relocates diverse sensorial information manipulating and combining different media,[2]and unites multiple senses in her own way. In other words, she brings about a uniquely united sensorial experience by adeptly arranging diverse (technological) media and isolated sensorial information they convey. Critic Sohyun Ahn says Jun’s method is “indulged in senses.”[3]However, despite the nuance of the word, the indulgence is not intended for an aesthetic self-fulfillment. Through the indulgence of senses, Jun’s works telling us “stories of someone’s loss, limitations, isolation, and fall” try to “translate empirical, linguistic, historical, political, and social date into the order of senses.”[4]Likewise,Story of Dream: Suni(2008) (stories of nurses and coal miners emigrated to Germanyin the 1960s) and Specters (2017) (a work about immigration and boundary issues, and identity problem in the global age) in her exhibition at SeMA Buk Seoul Museum of Art, The Song of My Generation, can be viewed stories translated into ‘the order of senses’.

Specters in the Global Era  

Google Map, in this world of images on which one could reach anywhere in the whole world by moving a cursor on the monitor, moving ‘my location’ to somewhere else is possible with a simple click of a mouse. Within a few seconds, the cursor will get to the place on earth where one wants to be. A small pixel clinging to the cursor is a symbol of the virtual ‘I’. The ‘I’ can easily land on anywhere on the map: once ‘I’ do, landscape surrounding the specific location –for instance, the Gulliver Park in Spain- suddenly appears in front of one’s eyes. In that place, we are as free as specters. Due to the worldwide economic crisis in the global age and civil wars breaking out all over the world, immigration is increasing dramatically. According to the UN Refugee Agency, at the end of 2016, the number of global involuntary refugees, 65,600,000, increased by 300,000 compared with the previous year.[5]Between 2008 and 2016, moreover, people applying for refugee status to Korean government increased over twenty times from 364 to 7542.[6]However, the migration of people in the real world is not as easy as moving across the globe on the Google Map to get to a park in Spain. In reality, between ‘my location’ and another place, there are strict border guards and administrative powers protecting their laws and deciding where to offer an entry permit to a refugee or deny his or her entry, or order him or her to leave. Blocked by the powers, hundreds of people trying to move to another place lose their lives in the Mediterranean Sea.

        When I try to move place in the imaginary world, my body and words do not function. Even if I come very close to some kids playing in a playing ground, I am invisible to them. They even cannot hear me. However, when it comes to the real world, the story is entirely different. Even though I do not say anything, my appearance and my body deliver information about who I am. Because of my looks, I might be identified as Chinese or Japanese, or Vietnamese. Even when I do not speak a word, a taxi driver would recognize me as an Asian. In case I speak their language, for example, English or French, he or she can ‘see’ something else between my lines.This is because my accent and pronunciation will inform that I am ‘the other’ who do not originally belong to this culture and language, that I am either a foreigner or an immigrant. Regardless of my will, thus, my body, my language, and my accent bear a set of meanings. The meanings decide the area of my mental and social activities, and leave a trace in my existence. Someone might frown at my accent, and someone could feel comfortable about my appearance.The complex interaction created between my looks and my words (or accents) feels powerful.

Time Axis Manipulation

Spectersis the title of Jun’s work where she speaks about the ironic situation in the global era with her signature attitude of indifference. Specters appear both in the past and present. Even if ghosts came from the past, we cannot say that they belong entirely to the past. If something of the past appears in the present, the past is not considered to be completely over. But that doesn’t mean specters exist in the present. If they do, they might not be called specters. Ghosts do not ‘exist’ in the present, but ‘appear (and disappear)’ in the present. The condition of their appearance is different from that of ‘things’ such as coffee cups and plates that we could always see in a kitchen. In this regard, for ghosts, time is a paradoxical thing. They are from the past but appear in the present: they belong to the past but are connected to the present.

           Moving images are like specters as every movement we see in them was produced in the past. In front of our eyes, screenings of moving images repeat a set of movements made in the past. Like ghosts, in Jun’s work, the movements of a choreographer appear in front of us, but they are not ‘present’ hear and now just like an object next to us. In a way, we play with them in the present; yet, in reality, they do not exist. For us looking at the screen, the movements being developed in front of our eyes belong to the past. Therefore, we watch the movements developing: movements that have already passed, disappeared, and cannot be repeated in reality.However, this is not the only similarity between the medium of moving images and specters. Moving images can repeat things that have already happened while ghosts can freely cross the temporal boundary between the past and present. We can play moving images ‘counterclockwise’. To be more specific, we can return time to the point before things happened, as it is described in the following sentence:

“Grandmother’s inn was being rebuilt. As if someone were clicking on the rewind button using the Final Cut Pro program, I was able to see with my eyes the succession of short scenes showing the bricks in the dilapidated building returned to their original place, one by one.”

The scenes showing the reconstruction of grandmother’s inn do not describe a memory of the past. Memory can let us jump into a moment of the past or replay a moment in time suddenly, sporadically, randomly, and rapidly. Nevertheless, no matter what, we cannot play our memory of the past backwards. That means our reflection on the past follows the linear flow of time. Therefore, the images played backwards are not to do with how our memory operates. The reversal of time can be realized only through the technical manipulation of the progress of moving images. Kittler calls this process ‘Time Axis Manipulation’ and sees it as one of the most important capabilities of the technical media. Jun makes the most of this media technology that helps her counter the irreversible flow of time where every living organism and thing on earth belong. Thus, in her work, the pieces from a collapsed building return to their proper places, a squashed up coin regains its original shape, and a wall we passed by riding on a train comes back before our eyes. But sadly, through all these things, one cannot but sense the irreversibility of time much more vividly than before.

[1]L. Moholy-Nagy, “Neue Gestaltung in Musik. Möglichkeit des Grammophons”, Der Sturm, Juli 1923 [2]See Nam See Kim, “New Familiarity, Old Unfamiliarity: Sojung Jun’s Media Work”, Video Portrait, Total Museum [3]See Sohyun Ahn, Sojun Jun’s“Kiss me Quick” Limitation-Rise-Indulgence of Senses [4]See Sohyun Ahn, Sojun Jun’s“Kiss me Quick” Limitation-Rise-Indulgence of Sense [5]http://www.unhcr.org/global-trends-2016-media.html [6]http://www.index.go.kr/potal/main/EachDtlPageDetail.do?idx_cd=2820

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