dot.dot.dot

dot.dot.dot. brings together Seoul-based artists Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo for their first presentations in Canada. Working at the intersection of media and installation, Kim and Yeo’s practices explore the omnipresence of interactive technologies and their varying effects on human experience.

InYoung Yeo’s Happily Ever After considers the entanglements of bodies with technology and each other; here “lust” becomes subject of the artist’s research processes. Beginning with the idea of technology as a contemporary interlocutor for human desire, Yeo approaches sex, gender and sexuality as both highly mediated by and resistant to the “compressive” nature of digital intelligences. Lust becomes an impulse that drives technological interaction at the same time as it can never be fully satisfied by it. This loop constitutes what Yeo explores as a system of repetition and deferral – a new and ongoing set of frustrated co-dependencies. Her work represents these as repeated patterns and forms, inhabiting the gallery as an edition of wallpaper and a new sculptural work. Yeo states, “Depicting the intertwined physical relationship among people to people and people to technology, the project addresses the wider scope of the cyclical and repetitive pattern of our behaviour in consuming the ‘disillusionment’ of satisfaction in its manipulation and distortion.“

Sejin Kim’s two-channel video work, Mosaic Transition refers to the contentious flow of polluted air across borders and nation-states across Asia. The flow of pollution – a product of prevailing wind currents and industrial production in China and elsewhere – is a defining factor in lived experience across the Korean Peninsula; millions rely on apps and real-time data visualization software to assess the liveability of local atmospheric conditions. Mosaic Transition employs these technological advances as both revelatory and potentially fictive: Kim’s work is inspired by recent political fallout when images of C02 emissions were mobilized in Congress in South Korea – only to be debunked as fictional visualizations. The video work is created to emulate algorithmic data calculations: using open source imagery as material, Kim creates a series of images that overwrites itself in a perpetual cycle of apparent fact and its subsequent replacement. The system and its machinations – alongside glitches, effects, screen captures and overlays – are textured and fast moving, as the real world effects of environmental crisis dovetail with the tools and technologies of data collection and manipulation.

Throughout, the artists explore deep influences on human behaviour and perception; far from decrying the advance of ‘the digital’ the artists represent an embedded yet critically engaged position. They contend, as we all must, with an embodied perspective in a technological environment that, in both promise and imperfection, is intertwined with our survival. This exhibition is part of Particles: Seoul to Vancouver, a program of exchange between artists, curators and institutions.