Suk Kyoung Choi
April 2009
“see.saw” is an interactive environment in which the participant experiences a psychological re-mix of multiple time/space percepts through their physical presence in a virtual/manipulated reality. This project encourages the participant’s exploration through their interaction with the environment by active auditory/tactile sensing.
The work ‘short-circuits’ understanding of our presence in time and space, through a shifting displacement of the normally expected perceptual distinction between oneself and the other. The audience hears over-layered sounds of captured past and current times – mixed/accumulated auditory memories of time and space. Inner core walls collect the traces of the participant’s touch/visualization. These compositional environments are encouraged by multi-touch/visualization technology on the screens in the walls – mixed/accumulated visual memories of time and space.
The Audience enters into the L-shaped dim hallway space and perceives a reflected extended space in which they are standing, in which other persons may also appear (if there are other beings in the other arm of the hallway), though these ‘others’ are somehow more distant visually than their sound suggests – perceptual displacement occurs. As the participant gets close to the mirrored corner surface of the L-shaped construction, the content for their view in the reflected mirror is substituted with an unknown context which seems to be present where the observer should be present. The audience also hears layered sounds (or voices) of past and current presences.
The work experiments with human psychological sense assumptions about reality through tactile/physical human sensing (and/or perception). I am interested in time and space; mixed, inconsistent, non-linear, and in loops of time and space, in span/spam, in memory, and in multiple mixed realities. Mixed time and space, mixed bodies – objects (interfaces), perceptions, and memories, again. I want to offer an experience in which the participant may perceive remixed time and space, and is thus situated in the awareness of virtual/real (un)realities. Our existence is neither real nor reality (‘what actually happened’) but beingmay be both (localized) real (I – body, objecthood, or interface) and reality (I – mind, subjectivity, or concept) (‘what happened for the perceiver’, a self-defining reduction of reality).
“see.saw”: the ghost in the machine. My work is research, play, and experimentation; on-going, never ending, hunting the ghost.
Suk Kyoung Choi 