Drowned World: The Anthropocene in 4 movements
(Four ballads for Ballard)
The songs come to me in waking dreams, turning captures of my environment into messages in a digital bottle, interventions on future histories, containments of some measure of present sanity. This texture, this building, these strange people.
Distorted affect, data captured and manipulated, layered palimpsests which I then carve into with paint, layering as taking away, taking away as layering, an Anthropocene palette annotated and appended until the words of the poet are lost in the noise and the noise becomes silence becomes poetry.
The Anthropocene is a dangerous place – I can only use small scraps of paper torn from floating lampposts, the few remaining images taken on a run for food, work fast, work cheap, foraging memory for imagination. The art has to float on small boats we make from garbage, a making of fragments from fragments, Schwitters rolls over in his watery grave, and the galleries are deep in the radioactive ocean. No need. There is little left.
I spend my final days recording this madness. Are there any others left? Will they cluster on the shore of some faraway reserve, curating notes from the sea, thinking “how curious”?
SK Choi, 2025
/// The animation investigates the phenomenology of discreet temporal parameter changes on aesthetic perception. Starting from oil-on-paper collages (also made from prints of AI mediated drawings), I build layers of generative AI imagery where one change affects another in often unpredictable ways in a kind of Open Work structure (Umberto Eco) that also acknowledges the chance operations of John Cage. The theme explores metaphors of a world drowning in the twin environments of climate change and information deluge. ///
Suk Kyoung Choi 