VISIOLOGY2009: Single Channel City
Sep. 11 - Sep. 17, 2009
Song Chayoung, An Jungju, Lee Yeleen, Jeon Suhyun, Cho Chungyeon

Visiology is Sangsangmadang’s annual program of which the purpose is to provide more opportunities for the video artists who mainly focus on a single channel. This year’s Visiology 2009 presents a theme of Single Channel City that will deal with the issue of place and space. It will screen the videos that address the urban life, from the city-dweller’s perspective, that doesn’t allow anymore unknown place for people today.
Preface
VISIOLOGY 2009: Single Channel City
Noam Kim (Director of Gallery Sangsangmadang)
Walk on the screen.
The four seasons of Seoul come and go and pass by the people just finishing up a long day. The city, seemingly turning into a theme park or a gallery, provides an unlimited surplus of premeditated events and shows. Seoul is not exceptional in this sense. The clouds are passing by fast and A4-sized pieces of paper get blown off over the skyscrapers. An underground hermit is staring through a tiny window that seems like a television monitor at the season fleeting by like the wind. People breathe out heavily in the living room of their high rise apartments.
There is an Italian movie titled La Strada(1954). It depicts the lives of Gelsomina and Zampano who carry out their grave reality and evoke a feeling of sorrow and an emotional touch along the wistful theme music. On the other side of the emotional spectrum, there is a personal catastrophe in facing the course of change from the traditional society to the industrial. When walking out of the theater after a heart wrenching movie, we welcome the salivating desire of capital that fabricates our universal feelings into nice products.
In the motif of video, the early 1980’s movie Videodrome(1983) impressively illustrates the main character’s suspicion and fear around new media. Here, reality and illusion cross each other through the medium of video and therefore whether the desire is solely mine or the other’s is completely ambiguous. The problem of people living in the video era is ably symbolized. Such a point of view is perhaps more elucidated in the Matrix. The mythical and spectacular Matrix is another version of Videodrome.
Our life comes across various kinds of moving pictures through various channels. Every day certain things define and influence our minds, perhaps consciously or unconsciously. Neither our aesthetic or emotional life is completely free. There is a resistance movement against the operation of such an outer force and we find it in artists.
This familiar occurrence happens around the media and in the inside and outside of art. The media is said to be open-ended. The same goes for interactivity. However, the reality is another story. It involves the subject defined as a gaze and implicates the matter of power. Making a leap in logic, the simplest form of media art, which is usually thought of to be single-channel video, opens itself up to the gaze of the viewer, but at the same time, the viewer is exposed to the single-channel and thus, their interactive mechanism is unequal and irreversible.

<Song Chayoung,
Chamber, 3min 8sec, HD, 2008>

<Song Chayoung,
The Isle of the Dead, 2min 55sec, NTSC, 2007>
We can get certain inspiration from the “totalitarian interactivity” introduced by the new-media critic Lev Manovich. “A Western artist sees the Internet as a perfect tool to break down all hierarchies and bring the art to the people. In contrast, as a post-communist subject, I cannot help but see the Internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, always present are lines for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen.”
This unfamiliar concept of “totalitarian interactivity” has a nuance of disrupting the optimistic vision of “interactivity” surging around the media art. The odd combination of the two conflicting words of totalitarianism and interactivity has the effect of opening up a new point of perception. It advises us to review the context of political economy, culture, and art in which the “interactivity” that we receive involuntarily has been accepted and functioned. We can think that such misery or interest can be possibly experienced in a somewhat exaggerated or specific time and place.

<An Jungju, Harmony at the Porte, Triumphal Gate, Harmony_Lip-sync ProjectⅡ in Paris,
HD, 3min 24sec, 2008>

<An Jungju, Harmony at the Puerta, Alcala Gate, Harmony_Lip-sync ProjectⅡ in Madrid,
HD, 3min 23sec, 2008>
Manovich’s essay talks about the internet and the information technology society, but we can apply his analysis further to media culture or the new-media culture as a whole. Not to mention the single-channel videos included in the exhibition, the term single-channel video art is somewhat vague. It may be impossible to fully grasp the term and what are the forces that rush into it or rush out of it, unless you live an in-between life like Manovich who re-settled successfully in the United States from the old Soviet Union. It may be a special experience had by only a limited number of people like Nam June Paik, whose life swept through that of a colonized citizen to the European avant-garde and to a cosmopolitan artist in the United States. Encountering life, impressions, or a certain poetic feel in this world of cutting-edge new media that has evolved through single-channel video, one of the oldest forms of media, is perhaps such an experience.
The emergence of new media makes the world even narrower and diminishes the safety zone between people, cultures, and places. Consequently, for the artist, his intuition and inspiration narrows more and becomes trite and cliché. All he can feel is an eternal reincarnation of routine and tedium. For this reason, plentiful theories and aesthetics about single-channel video in contemporary art are mostly myths or rather absurd or fallacious fables. Of course, in the history of other genres, forms, or isms is no exception to this. The ominous syndrome in Videodrome is also the syndrome of interactivity that Manovich discussed. We can observe similar symptoms in the recurring fever or neglect of the public toward art and artists and the artist toward art or the public. Leaping in logic from a perspective of aesthetic politics, this can be transformed into a type of fascism of media culture or aesthetic fascism.
So, what’s the matter with this? Isn’t our life somehow kitsch and like a soap opera that plays on cliché emotions over and over? Moreover, the consciousness, memories, and images created and shaped in everyday life, which is surrounded by the rise and fall of the media, can fall into two completely opposite perceptions or ideologies.

<Lee Yeleen, Knock to the World Under Our Foot, 3min, 6mm, 2002>
Single Channel City
One of the noticeable changes in art along with the advance of media is the change in perception and attitude in dealing with the issue of time and space. We can see it especially in the experimental performance and the single-channel video that have expanded since the 1960’s. The issue involves the so called specificity of space, conscious place, and the matter of the human body that exists in time and space. Among them, we can see that the matter of space has been brought up in the front of the matter of time. The reason comes from the fact that the lives on this globe have been organized due to urbanism and the expanding network between cities. It also comes from the view that the urban citizen who is situated in such conditions of life is the contemporary human being. Most of all, the central issue in the matter of place is how to deal with regionalism along with the globalization of contemporary art, which is an increasingly expanding contemporary culture.
Single Channel City, the exhibition title, is a designation in the consideration of the matter of place and space, which is being dealt with in media art. The exhibition involves projects from the perspective of city dwellers and the urban world, which doesn’t allow any more unknown space for contemporary citizens, as well as the lives held within it it.
Living a life, not straying from the track of everyday routine that is getting divided into microscopic segments, is, ironically, a type of heroic life. It is true when you think about the fact that adapting oneself to the frame and track of strictly organized routine is a blessing for some people and the result of exertion for another. Through the means of single-channel video, the exhibition connects the process of internalization of urban life and the things that are composed and organized from byproducts of the process where only a single “gaze” and “the city” is a place for life. The form, without a condition of existence, is empty. The familiar issue of ideal communication is thoroughly one-sided. The phenomenon that has occurred since the conscious and events and things have become evidently fragmented. Single Channel City, an exhibition that consists of single-channel videos, is a metaphor of such a view point and aesthetic endeavor. Single-channel video presents the specificity of place in communication art.

<Jeon Suhyun, June, 2009, 10min, HD, 2009>

<Jeon Suhyun, 軍隊+Bundesliga, 7min, HD, 2008>
VISIOLOGY2009
When we reflect the confusion, abstruseness, and complicated aspects in contemporary art, especially around the matter of technology and art, the terms and concepts often can be confused with each other and it is not easy to distinguish the single-channel video from contemporary art in a large sense from media art on a smaller scale. Nevertheless, we cannot depend on the dogmatism of summarizing it into several concepts or perspectives based on not-yet-agreed or specific experiences. What we have confirmed many times is that through single-channel video, which is the simplest exhibition form in media art, we are still expecting to touch the issue in a simpler and clearer approach and that single-channel video is a medium through which the artist can express his subject and viewpoint in a simpler and clearer way.
The curatorial team of Gallery Sangsangmadang believes that we can attain a certain degree of accomplishment in grasping at this aspect of contemporary art by introducing single-channel video artists and their work consistently in an annual program over a long time period, not just in a one-time program. In the development of contemporary art, the matters of visual image and its meaning, the matters of form and content, and the matters of comprehension and communication are all intertwined and entangled like a cobweb.
The video exhibition has its doors open to an infinite point. We invited artists considering the context of video art that has been recognized as the most reflective and contemplative expression of art. The participating artists have searched for their artistic philosophy and reality of life through art, using the form of single-channel video.
Starting from the above idea Visiology 2009 aims to provide more opportunities for video artists, who mainly focus on single-channel video, and to present their work and enhance their capabilities through technical workshops. We would also like to think over the technical and artistic strategies and applications of single-channel video which has been approached only in a conventional or general context so far. Moreover, examining various acceptances and aspects of media art and dealing with the issue of public acceptance of art and further expansion to the public, we would like to present young artists who explore the possibilities of single-channel video.
We would like to offer an opportunity to examine the current status of single-channel video art through the exhibited work and furthermore to think about the relationship between technology and art and between the artist and society, which has been a long-lasting concern in the history of art. We will also reflect what the video images are or can be in life and in the passage of life. The images that run on the monitor or slowly through our mind can be a place for memories and introspection.
However, most of all, the common point of video is to place artistic intuition and sensibility on the flow of time and consciousness. For the video artist, single-channel video is like a sharp sword that he can thrust into the routine of the city and with which he knows where the secure aesthetic shelter is against the tsunami of cutting-edge media.

<Cho Chungyeon,
Utterance, 3min 22sec, HD, 2009>
Screening
9.11 Fri 6 PM
9.12 Sat 5 PM
9.13 Sun 7 PM
9.14 Mon 5 PM
9.15 Tue 5 PM
9.16 Wed 5 PM
9.17 Thu 5 PM
Time 40min
Venue Cinema Sangsangmadang(KT&G Sangsangmadang B4F)
Admission Fee 4,000won
Event
9.11 Fri 6PM Opeing Screening + Artist Talk l B4F Cinema
9.15 Tue 6PM Technical Workshop l 2F Gallery
* Workshop participation application: gallery@sangsangmadang.com