On my way
To think about the context and intention of graphic design practice in relation to my life experiences.
The final presentation as a highly articulated performance to express a delicate idea.
The embedded open communication in each of my work.
Noise
video link
Unpleasant journeys of sound/pixel take place in this realm. The randomness in movement denotes a careless intention of decision making. Arbitrary. Brave. Irrational. It is hollow. Without inner structure or a purpose, nothingness echoes. Noise could only exist when juxtaposed with what is meant to be right, expected, desired. It is filtered out through the advancement of humanity and technology. Standing by its own, noise is a mist, a ruin, a hesitation, an awaited intervention. Or, just a poor little person. The energy and emotion bounces around within, only a couple of drizzles are let out. Listen carefully, hear what they say.
Noise is unwanted sound considered unpleasant, loud or disruptive to hearing. From a physics standpoint, noise is indistinguishable from desired sound, as both are vibrations through a medium, such as air or water. The difference arises when the brain receives and perceives a sound.
Image noise is random variation of brightness or color information in images, and is usually an aspect of electronic noise. It can be produced by the image sensor and circuitry of a scanner or digital camera. Image noise can also originate in film grain and in the unavoidable shot noise of an ideal photon detector. Image noise is an undesirable by-product of image capture that obscures the desired information.
The original meaning of "noise" was "unwanted signal"
In radio reception, radio noise is unwanted random radio frequency electrical signals, fluctuating voltages, always present in a radio receiver in addition to the desired radio signal.
"sound of a musical instrument"
"loud speech, outcry, clamor, shouting;"
"a sound of any kind from any source,"
"din, disturbance, uproar, brawl"
"rumor, report, news,"
White noise
Pink noise
Brown noise
Blue noise
Violet noise
Grey noise
Black noise
Reconsidering the meaning of noise and the relation of human and digital media, this video is trying to capture the moment where “noise” occurs. Reconstrue, transcript, misinterpret, conflict.
Earlier, I came across an article by Arthur Jafa, in which he talked about how blur is captured and meant to be captured in Ming’s photographs. “...the photographer (our subject) is confronted with an object that is not ‘stilled’ but in fact dynamic (not mastered but free). And this counter agency, the simultaneous mobility of both the subject and the object will as a consequence, in photography, produce the misalignment we term a blur.” In this case the blur was more intended and desired. The obscured blurry images lose the ability to capture accurate pixels and information but rather be freed from the historical intention of image capturing, and carry a dynamic relation of object and subject. The noise, the blur, is not unwanted.
<The historical image of machines and artificial intelligent machines. Why is noise perceived as an unwanted signal, in relation to the industrial revolution? Where machines are made to replace human labor and designed to serve a specific task. In that case the more accurate and controlled the better. But nowadays, is the case the same? A more equivalent relation?>
Changing of context makes it crucial to reconsider the terminology and methodology we take for granted. But very importantly, to think at this moment about this moment, the present. Noise exists when there is a desired information. When noise becomes the theme, me speaking would become the noise.
Noise in relation to noise.
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One afternoon, after I finished my final critics for the 2021 Spring semester, I noticed a korean word was written and put up on the wall right behind me. I took a picture of it immediately. I didn’t know what it meant at that time but I know how it made me feel when I looked at it.
Even though someone told me what the word meant, I was still obsessed with how it was written and how visually it meant to me. The angle, dimension, composition, tension of strokes itself seems to have something to speak of.
I started to ask people in the artium to read that word without telling them what it really means. I recorded their readings. They are very different from each other.
I am interested in this process of reading; of how we use our body as a translator; of how we approach language with our distinguished linguistic, cultural, personal background. The meaning of word become inclusive and expanded in the process of going through different body agencies. Compared to the final result or the “correct” meaning of that word, the process become what it really matters.
Ideally I will present the process, not the result by any means.
시발
/zally/
/inoi/
/ellabates/
/yaphas/
/Issain/
/qilay/
/hakp/
/ayuits/
/tats/
/ren yi/
就是这种完全不知道
但是强读
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To see our body as a tool / medium / device. And try to use them.
Our voice
Our body
I recorded myself using my voice to mimic mechanical noise. The consistent volume and texture of sound was found very difficult for a human body.The resistance against improvising or breathing made it even worse. They all ended up being no longer than 2 minutes.
The sound was interpreted as a human attempt to associate with machines. By experimenting with calibrating our body in a mechanical manner, the action is trying to approach the boundaries and intersection between human and machine.
In this process, does the stretching of the definition of human also make machines become more human?
I prefer to see them as the same.
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Starting from there, I intended to explore how I can put my body and my life experience in my practice. I started to move, creating as much experience as possible, listening to how my body would vibrate in response.
Experiences as memories are mixed, intermingled with constant movement of background and cars. The installation is set up with awareness of the audience's body. Being able to approach these memories up close but also being expelled from them by realizing the frame is always in between to keep you away from them.
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Alongside my journeys, I noticed how my body moved through spaces, and how the sound would change because of that. Entering a cafe or restaurant would be the most shared experience as the environmental sound would change from street noise to indoor background music mixed with people talking. The transition between two spaces is ephemeral and obscure. Separated by a layer of window, the indoor and outdoor sound has little in common.
Thinking of how sound could inform a space, I recorded sound from two sides of the same surface between spaces, trying to approach the boundary of space from two sides. By playing one sound to the audience's left ear and the other on the right, I attempted to create the experience of being in between spaces. The visually touching of two recording devices makes the contrast speak up even more.
(For better experience, please wear headphones.)
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To look at all the life experiences of moving around, I found even more clues of how movements itself relate to my work.
( Movement. )
I spent the entire summer of 2021 traveling from city to city, landscape to landscape. I experimented and enjoyed my mind being opened up when my body was on the move. I saw moments where trees were running backwards, the mountains were sliding slowly, the moon was small, bright and alive. I embraced the view but more so the spreading emotions : thrilling, unsettling, rumbling. The emotions are somehow encouraging. It coincides with an unpromising present, but farther, points to an aspiring future.
( Parenthesis. They hold the bodies which are not supposed to be there / are not invited. They normalized my irrational longings to parallel all my emotions with my word / my work / my life. Within the pair of little humps, I feel secured. )
As my trip went along, it became convincing that we are in a dynamic relation with our surroundings when we are moving. Arthur Jafa points out, when he wrote about Ming Smith’s photography, that the simultaneous mobility of both the subject and the object produces the blur. As a captured motion, blur is a projection of the constantly-changing relation of subject & object. The superimposition of moments occurring in different time makes it never too specific, too depictive or accurate. So does the movement itself.
The movement stands for an in-between transforming state that would not be acclaimed by either the Start or the End. It describes the routes, the approaches, the tissues that barely connect two phases. It feels like more or less a flight turbulence to me, which wouldn’t be potent enough to overthrow your existence, yet the fluctuation furtively tamper a small piece of brick and put it right back to where it does not originally intended to be. Without knowing, we sit there tight waiting for the bumps to end, and it will come to an end. But everything has changed. I hate it as much as I enjoy it – the in-between phase, the rattle, the bumble, the fall.
The Guide Book (GB) is an on-going publishing practice, working with individuals, showing their private photos taken during a particular trip to somewhere they have been for the first time. I started this project by gathering my own pics from a trip to Japan, to be specific, Tokyo and Kyoto, in 2018. At that time the project was called TRAVEL. The revisit to my photos of that journey was interrupted by a system glitch which reshuffled my photos in a very subtle way that some photos are misplaced in order. The system intervention allows me to reform the narrative of that trip which would never be complete or correct. The intermingled story, which is made up with my system-manipulated photos and my incorrect mixed personal memories, is activated by the fragmented quality for fantasies to reside in. I made a book, actually books, to hold on tight to those photos (memories). Pages are not entirely bound together, to be specific, half of the pages are just pieces of paper in slightly smaller size in order to be inserted into the book. In another word, they are free to fall off of the narrative as they wish.
( Pause. The ones who reside in between. They are quiet and humble. They show up when there is a need. Their existence rationalize the movements. )
As Peter Osborne wrote in his book Anywhere or Not at All that con-temporary is “...a coming together not simply 'in' time, but 'of' times. We do not just live or exist together 'in time' with our contemporaries, but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally 'present' temporalities or 'times'.” I wouldn’t borrow any of his articulation about this term, but rather share a common feeling that contemporaneity is about the process of occurring, conflicting, melting, overlapping of timelines, where the past is constantly shaping the present. The circulation goes on and on pushing the present forward as futures. In this always on-going movement of happening, questions arise: at what speed ? of what speed ? from what speed ?
Last summer, when I was driving from San Diego to Palm Spring, I believed I had a moment with the car right in front of me. It was on a road with many U turns going down from a mountain. The sun was going down and lights were turning on. Music was playing inside my car… It was Merry Christmas Mr. Laurens, by Ruichi Sakamoto. The other car was 50 feets ahead of me. It happened when we reached the same speed. I felt we were in a swirl where the whole world was drifting and only us were standing still. I was looking right at the twinkling back lights, tripping.
( Relativity. The correlations. Everything and Everywhere. )
Movements are dictated by their context. As in the movements of the viewer's engagement with my works, they take up different shapes and forms. Narratives are being built through the process of reading, flipping, scratching, clicking, deforming and reforming. Problematic Landscapes is a book in which the chapter titles are compiled into the body text with page number noted alongside. Audiences are provided with an option to reorient their journey to another page without having to finish reading the current. A story of a running cursor is a project composed with a website and a series of books. On the website the cursor will keep moving forward once the website is opened. The lifetime of the cursor will be printed directly into a book format. Depending on the print time, the books will be all different. In another project, I made a book documenting surfaces and marks that occurred on them, no text was invited in the book, not even a name. The images of surfaces and marks were printed onto transparent films and the ink will easily fall off leaving a scratch by the viewer's reading through the book. It never was and will be the same. The website of ok, together navigates the audience through tagged pictures by offering a category system where viewers could jump from one to another. The refreshing, loading, and clicking would never come to an end and the audience was guided through an endless cloud of images. The viewing experience, as movement, is always open-ended, and is intentionally designed as an important parameter in my practice, to give the audience the ability to form their own relation with my works.
In a bigger context, graphic design, as a movement, is inevitably shaped and being shaped by our life experience and outer system at large. The choice of the content, the media, the method of communication is in motion. They are dictated by a dynamic system where parameters are constantly changing depending on cultural, socio, technological context.
The movement is cunning and sophisticated that you could never be so sure about them.
( A movement inside a movement. A movement between movements. A movement onto a movement. A movement for a movement. A movement. Movements.)