The Corner Monster is a collaborative project supporting the independent research of Suk Kyoung Choi and Mark Nazemi, current graduate students at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Statement
The Corner Monster is process-led research through art as implicit interpretation of liminal states of embodiment using narrative data to explore the idea that affective states are deeply encoded within language and its remediation.
For the purposes of this research we define liminal embodiment to be a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the threshold, a concept drawn from Jung. In terms of embodiment in an electronically mediated society, this could be understood as a dissociative condition of being in two places at the same time.
This research investigates narrative as way of understanding this condition. Narrative is taken as the descriptive codification that mediates between our inner visceral sensation of existence and the exterior condition of the world in which we are embodied. In this space of cybernetic interaction that permeates the flesh, skin is the fine ‘outline’ of inner meeting outer, and the skin of embodiment has become a liminal barrier that suggests tentative associations with the infrathin, a concept suggested by Duchamp.
It is from this suggestion of passage that the research builds to form a conceptual transliminal poetic that reveals in the patterns of interference between the body and its understanding, possible relationships between the forms of language and its affective embodiment in a mediated world.
The installation is comprised of 2 projection screens, 10.1 interactive surround-sound audio controlled by galvanic skin response sensors, and interactive visuals controlled by force sensors. The research explores the intersections of biofeedback technology, the surrounding electronic media environment, and the traditions of narrative in order to examine assumptions about an affective embodiment that is mediated and transported by technology. The technical considerations involved in bio-metric technologies are almost by nature, deceptive. The driving phenomena are organic impulses that come and go in an electronic space with frequencies and modulations deeply colored by psychological and bio-physical response to context. On the one hand, the resonance of bio-feedback may expose, if only in a remediated and ‘distorted’ form, emergent patterning in the interplay of one data form against another; on the other hand, the interplay is so complex that meaning is elusive and ever changing.
Suk Kyoung Choi 