Space Design_Remove Architecture

2014, lighting, dimensions variable

In the Panopticon, which is devised as a model prison allowing a person to observe many people, the most important factor is the ‘psychology’ of a person to be observed. Under the condition of not being able to see the observer, the anxiety that one is being watched by the observer and self regulation become the most effective means of control. This principle of Panopticon is also easily found in our daily life. The artist makes a pattern of Panopticon by using something visible and invisible, and light and shadow. Viewers entering this pattern created by the repetition of the forms of ordinary objects in the form of concentric circle become observers and those being observed at the same time before they know it.

2011, 1 channel video, color, sound, 24min 50sec video : Tokyo Electric Power Co. editor : Kota Takeuchi

This video work by ‘Finger Pointing Worker’, an unidentified artist, is a recording of the video images from ‘Fukuichi Live Camera’ installed by Tokyo Electric Power Company to show the sites in real time through the internet at the time of the Fukushima earthquake. The artist went to the site and made a parody gesture of Centers, a representative piece of narcissism by Vito Acconci, in front of the camera transmitting live via internet, wearing the uniform of the nuclear power plant workers. And another artist Kota Takeuchi filmed this scene. By showing aggressive and narcissistic gestures, the artist criticizes the ones who do not realize a critical situation and the situations where the workers are not informed of the danger of the nuclear power plant and their sacrifices are heroized.

1983, 1 channel video, b&w, sound, 5min

A man stops the mouth of the artist, who tries to say something, with his hands. Although the video is slow and keeps cutting out, one can continuously hear the voice repeating the title. In this video, performance is recorded utilizing the ‘slow scan’ technique and the images are transmitted to other places via satellite. With the slow scan technology, images are transmitted every 8 seconds, but the sound is transmitted through the telephone lines uninterruptedly. Using the technology to transmit both discontinuous images and continuous sounds to a distant place, the artist shows the energy of resistance to constantly transmit the voice even in the suppressed and limited situations.ir.

2005~2014, print on vinyl sticker, 300 x 450cm, 120 x 480cm

Warvata, a compound word of ‘War’ and ‘Avatar’, is composed of pictograms, a pictorial symbol which is easy and clear to recognize for everyone. Since 2005, the artist has worked on the sticker project: he produced Warvata’s pictograms in sticker, distributed or mailed them to people, and then had people put the stickers on the existing signs or images, take a picture of it, and send them back to the artist. The scenes in which war, an extreme tragedy, becomes a common thing that everybody can recognize and it travels all over the world in the form of sticker, which is a capitalistic method of communication to be copied on a large scale, make people feel horrified from the daily routine. However, the process that the images are created by putting the Warvata stickers on a certain space and they come back to the artist one by one proves a sparkling satire and the power of participation.

1984, 1 channel video, color, sound, 60min

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell was a live satellite TV show linking New York and Paris. Artists including Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman and Thompson Twins had a live performance with the show host George Plimpton in New York, while Claude Villers hosted the show in which Sapho, Joseph Beuys, Urban Sax, etc. performed in Paris. Starting from the scene of the two hosts making a toast, a variety of performances made an interactive feedback by giving and taking, and they were melted into one screen. The exhibition _{Good Morning, Mr. Orwell 2014} displays the main performance pieces in one space for audiences to experience the simultaneous and interactive characteristics of the performance _{Good Morning, Mr. Orwell}.

2014, multimedia installation, dimensions variable

Kim Taiyun & Yoon Ji Hyun showcase a metadata performance Hello, World! that controls and visualizes the information collected from diverse channels and open the platform for its process to be connected to the exhibition space. By asking questions about the two sides of ‘Big Data’ in today’s world where everyone has his or her own channel, the artists lead the audience to realize how much information is shared and controlled and to manage the information for themselves at the same time.

2008, 3 channel video, color, sound, 7min

Either by impersonating a typical TV character or by utilizing classic techniques to attract the viewers, Bjørn Melhus expresses the most essential attributes of mass media. In this video, he creates musical rhythms by repetitively editing the words and sounds to emphasize the urgency. The artist takes advantage of the elements of TV, regarding himself as the generation most affected by television while critically analyzing a range of techniques that mass media use for mass manipulation.

2014, 1 channel video installation

The views of the city Sanghee Song filmed are familiar but unrealistic, and idealistic but somewhat incomplete. The sentences quoted from dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and so on are overlapped on this unrealistic video. With Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time in the background, those that now disappeared and those created while dreaming of a new utopia appear and disappear like the scenes from the dream through the lighting moving on the drawings.

2013, 5 channel video installation, 17min

Liz Magic Lazer, who pays attention to the current political and social phenomena, makes performers involved in the sites like movie theaters, street interviews, or broadcast recordings and set the scene for these kinds of situations. A five-channel video installation work _{PR(Public Relations)} to be presented in this exhibition is a kind of post-drama in which one man sitting in a cafe expresses his thoughts and opinions while watching a street interview situation for news. This piece reframes the influences of journalism and its mechanism on the public awareness into performance and video work.

2009-2014, multimedia installation

A media artist duo Exonemo, consisting of two artists Sembo Kenseke and Akaiwa Yae, has shown a variety of media extension works including net art, sound video processing, software programming, live performance and installation since 1996. Supernatural is a video installation that sheds new light on the relations between digital and analogue, virtual and real space, and consciousness and unconsciousness in a experimental and humorous way by connecting their studio in Japan and the exhibition space through the internet.

2004, 2 channel video, color, sound, 25min

In this video, Harun Farocki, a documentary filmmaker and video artist, shows the relationship between today’s city and visual media through a parody of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a _{Movie Camera}, a classic in film history. The scenes of many European cities come from the functional video images shot for security cameras, city planning, and traffic system management, etc. The artist creates a video essay by rhythmically editing these functional images and adding the phrases that contain philosophical reflection on city and sharp eyes on social network to it.