Works I (2000-2004)
All the works made before 2004 are best viewed in my previous website
DUAL SPACE
Interactive computer installation, 2003
Tech/Software/media:
Real time 3D animation, live video, Max/MSP/Jitter, web cams, LCD projectors, tracing paper,spot lights.
The MFA thesis project ‘Dual Space’ sums up my interests in human-computer interaction and digitized body issues, emphasizing the remotness and the visual mediation of current digital communication.
Using Internet communication technology, we keep the remote relationship with unknown people. At the same time, we extend this communication method, such as email, to people who are physically in a close locale.
The direct motivation about this work occurred when I notice myself being comfortable with sending email even to communicate with my neighbor next door. It seems we remain within our personal domain more and more, without intimate interaction with others.
In addition to the remote structure, the communication gets visually more virtual. Our body is mediated through the digital technology. We watch various phases of our virtuality float around in the cyberspace through the computer monitor. The phases are sometimes email, chat room ID, or our digitized pictures from a web cam. Using the digital avatar, we build up new identity and remodel our body appearance. Our physicality does not play its authentic role here. Our body is digitally filtered and modified. Ironically, our physically isolated bodies are now connected together through such virtual visualization.
The project is to create an pseudo-cyberspace exaggerating its essence of remoteness and virtuality. I also wanted to create a hybrid space that has the essence of the real and the virtual, and the material and the immaterial, where viewers are invited to see themselves with a different body appearance in a different terrain of virtual environment
Using this structure, I also wanted to evoke the feeling of intimate interaction using the physical body movement. Those are I think we are constantly losing through the networked interaction.
Exhibition:
Dual Space::Virtualbody – Recent Interactive Installations by Hyun Ju Kim, Gallery120, Syracuse, NY (solo), 2003
VIRTUAL BODY
Interactive computer installation, 2003
Tech/Software/Media:
Real time 3D animation, touch sensor,I-cubeX digitizer, latex skin, LCD projector, Max/MSP/Jitter, Alias|Wavefront’s Maya, Newtek Lightwave
The interactive installation ‘VirtualBody’ explores the notion of digital flesh, disembodied in virtual space. With this installation, I wanted to reveal the aspects of virtual representation; immateriality, vulnerability, and the vacancy inside the computer graphically represented body. I also wanted to incorporate the sense of touchness with this disembodied body representation to exaggerate the contradiction between the immaterial digital technology and the anxiety for the physical interactions.
At a first glance, viewer encounters the constantly moving realtime image of 3D modeled body projected in the wall. The body with the shiny platinum surface reminds of robot or cyborg body which is cheaply employed in our image culture such as sci-fi movies or video games. It is obviously not the human body, but a fake representation referencing human body.
The separation between viewer’s body and the virtual body disappears when viewer touch a patch of rubber skin which has a touch sensor underneath. This action of touching penetrates the border of digital skin of virtual body and creates illusion for viewers to feel they are moving inside the body. Once inside, the appearance of body changes into the abstract composition of several wireframed layers of 3D model. There is no surface or border but only polygonal lines which is a basic modeling structure of 3D graphics. Thus the space inside the virtual body is vacant, unlike human body which is filled with inner organs, bloods and nerves. The body has no sense of materiality. This immateriality and emptiness is ironically juxtaposed with the rich experience of touching.
Exhibition:
Dual Space::Virtualbody – Recent Interactive Installations by Hyun Ju Kim, Gallery120, Syracuse, NY (solo), 2003
Digital Video ( 5min), 2002
Tech/Software/Media:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Digital Performer
A portrait of a human being living in techno-society. It visualizes a pregnant woman who is concerned about her child being influenced by the white noise emitted from technological apparatus.
Malnutrition:case1-noise is the first video episode among my on-going ‘Malnutrition’ series project, which deals with the parental insecurity caused from current society.
The motivation for this work came from my Korean heritage regarding prenatal training for baby. ‘7 principles’ handed down to traditional Korean folk society for pregnant women asserts the importance of keeping pregnant women in a nutritious environment for a well developed fetus emotionally and intellectually. Hearing good music and sound is considered, especially, significant here.
Since I was aware of this, I realized the contradiction between this traditional principle and the way we are living in this technologically developed society. It seemed the maternal role is to provide child with nutritious environment, but was not always guaranteed.
Personally as a computer art graduate student and as a mother, I could not help but spend a majority of my time in front of the computer hearing all sort of noises emitted from equipment. The noise is so diffused that we cannot escape from it, unless we throw out all the electriconic equipment. It is like we are so dependent on technology, almost merging into machine and becoming the cyborg. I wanted to visualize this thought using the white noise and the pregnant body.
Exhibitions:
Spark Screening, Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY, 2002
Projected Shorts Vol. VII, Zanny’s Molecular Cinema and Maresk Media, New York City, NY, 2003
MFA show, Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse, NY, 2003
DMORPH
3D animation, Video (4min 45sec), 2002
Tech/Software/Media:
Newtek Lightwave, Apple Final Cut Pro, Digital Performer
‘Dmorph’ is a video portrait, dealing with the uncanny feeling about self-identity morphing into a cyborg identity.
Since I was deeply involved in and dependent upon technology, I was continually conscious about it. It was an inescapable process for me to portray myself as a cyborg in this technological landscape. I documented myself with a video camera and placed the video images within 3D graphics, creating a cyborg image.
It visualizes the amplification of the anxiety through the process of a woman, the artist, becoming a cyborg; starting from pure video image into 3D graphics, continually switching back and forth between the two extreme mode, and finally exploding under the maximum stress while remaining only a creature, shocked by the process of morphing, trembling, and still blinking its humanlike eyes in silence.
The movement of a red light emitted from an Apple Pro mouse and its sound were added to build up the mood. It is very much blurry and slow in its motion in the beginning so that viewer cannot recognize it as the movement of mouse. By overlapping the woman’s face, the woman is imagined to be wandering around the city landscape, but her actual position is in front of monitor, constantly and nervously clicking the mouse at the hand. However, this is not obviously shown in the video, but the viewer can sense it through the visual and aural elements.
The 3D graphic body was modeled and rendered after experiencing photos and videos of the woman. Although the rendered images are very similar to the actual woman, they are very metallic or plastic, dry and lifeless. This artificial imagery serves as a metaphorical means to implicate the properties of the machine, the technological and the virtual. Layering the 3D face on top of her actual one (with half opacity) allows for a mutational impression, resembling the cyborg.
Exhibitions/Screenings:
Open Air Video Art & Music Festival, Nikotama Art Tree, Tokyo, Japan, 2003
Projected Shorts Vol. VII, Zanny’s Molecular Cinema and Maresk Media, New York City, NY, 2003
Video Now 2003, Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY, 2003
MFA show, Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse, NY, 2003
Media[Less]Medium, Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, 2002
International Audiovisual Creation Festival of Navarre 2002, Pamplona, Spain, 2002
Toronto Online Film Festival, Toronto, Canada,2002
STRUGGLING
Video Installation, 3D Animation, 2002
Tech/Software/media:
Newtek Lightwave, projector, handmade sculpture
Since I started my graduate study dealing with 3D animations, I noticed that the imagery purely represented through computer graphics was hardly appreciated by the people in the “high” art world. The whole craft of 3D animation unsuccessful and unmarketable in the art world. Partially as a reaction to this frustration, I made a piece to simulate this cultural aspect.
It consists of a white cube with a dome shaped semi-transparent screen on the top. From the bottom of the inside of the cube, there is a video projection pointed up at the dome. The video projected here is a naked, 3D woman who keeps walking and jumping around to escape from the boundaries of the dome where several ropes are swirling around, as if barring her from the external world of the dome. Viewers are invited to take a look at the woman’s struggle with an omniscient perspective. This trapped 3D women’s torture is no more significant than anything but visual entertainment for the viewer who would soon forget about this little virtual creature and move on to another piece of work.
Exhibition:
Spark 5th Opening, Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY, 2002
AURA
3D animation (4min 52sec), 2001
Tech/Software/Media:
Newtek Lightwave, Apple Final Cut Pro, Digital Performer
This experimental piece questions how much we have been interacting with others, even in silent and subtle ways, and how constantly we have been changing ourselves from these interactions.
Similar to the early 3D animations, ‘Aura’ is an experimental animation dealing with the theme of human interaction. There are many forms of communication or interaction between two individuals. Those include all kinds of languages, such as direct speaking, writing, and some physical expressions. Besides these, I thought about a silent mode of interaction, which excludes any kind of languages, but does include interacting feelings, energies, and forces. Those feelings and energies can be described not in the obvious ways of language, but through the context or the aura between the individuals. These feelings are sometimes in discord, but sometimes in concord producing harmonic resonance.
In ‘Aura’, the interaction expands to be among people of different cultures as well as among individuals. This interaction enables the individuals to keep changing their shapes and making new hybrids. The shape is very much organic, visualizing the linear transformation of birth, internal and external changes and growth, and finally death. ‘Aura’ also visualizes wide-ranged interactions in a cultural gaze. The hybrids of individual interactions produce the vitality of cultural mass.
The work is also my exploration about real and virtual spaces. It begins with a scene of people walking in the street, a real, external space, that moves to the virtual and inner space of computer-generated imageries. This virtual inner space enables the viewer to meditate on the moment we meet and pass unknown people.
Exhibitions/Screenings:
MFA show, Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse, NY, 2003
International Audiovisual Creation Festival of Navarre 2002, Pamplona, Spain, 2002
Toronto Online Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2002
I/O, Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY, 2002
OTHER MISCELLANEOUS WORKS
3D animation (5 min), 2000
Tech/Software/Media:
Newtek Lightwave, Apple Final Cut Pro, Digital Performer
My first 3D animation at the Syracuse University.
After a period of training as an engineer in the field of information technology, I seriously started my journey as an artist by attending the Computer Art program at SU. It was a thrilling moment to see my first animation is viewed in front of my classmates at the final critique.
WOODEN IMAC, 2002
I like to work with sculptural objects in my project. The tangible process of dealing materials such as wood, rubber or plaster gives me a different contentment.
Imac from Apple company & wooden IMAC
Click the wooden IMAC to see enlarged one.
Details: Logos, Joints, CD-Rom and Fan.
Exhibition : I/O, Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY
Synchrony, 2001
Procedural Animation, 3min 50 sec.
Tech/Software : C++ programming with OpenGL Library, Aftereffect, Digital performer, Final Cut Pro.
Procedural animation has a power of providing automated visualization of natural phenomena or mathematic formulations. I use OpenGL library with C/C++ language programming to explore its possibility of creative use.
Oscillograph, 2001
Procedural animation visualizing the graphics from oscilloscope based on its the mathematic equations.
Untitled, 2000
A series of B/W photographs(12) and Digital video(2min 15sec) with sound experiment dealing with the idea of alternative ego.
