Time Mutations/Artworks

Kim Beom – Untitled (News) (2002)

Kim Beom – Untitled (News) (2002)

1-channel video, 1 min 42 sec

Kim Beom explores the formation of new relationships between images and concepts through a wide range of media, including drawings, installations, videos, publications and objects. Particularly concerned with ways of “seeing” and cognition in relation to sight—the basis of visual art—Kim continuously reveals the tension and conflict between visual perception and false mind. By suggesting images formed on the retina and works that escape from socially normative notions, Kim invites viewers to abandon fixed ideas and contemplate the world from a different perspective.

Untitled (News) is made up of recorded and re-edited cable television news programs. Working from the basic acknowledgement that television programs represent the fundamental synthesis of visual image and spoken language of our age, the artist breaks them down into syllables and fabricates four stories out of the actual accounts delivered by anchorpersons. The text presents an alternative to the mass media, which has a monopoly on informing us of what takes place in the world and on the personal thoughts of individuals accustomed to viewing the reality exclusively through this controlled lens. Kim uses news, which incorporates images and spoken language, as source material in the construction of his own version of “news” and what he believes is “news-worthy.” The content of Kim’s “news,” therefore, reveals the nature of mass media, which selects, edits, translates, and criticizes stories about the world while crossing boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, truth and falsehood, society and individual, and public affairs and daily life.

Quoted from TRUSTblog

Katarina Boeming – I am telling you a story, home 1996-2006

Katarina Boeming – I am telling you a story, home 1996-2006

Matthias Breuer – Reconstructing the Truth

Matthias Breuer - Reconstructing the Truth

Nowadays reality is a highly constructed body made up of many different ideas, desires and influences. The biggest reality-producing machine, the media with all its different distribution channels, confronts us with a huge colourfulmoving mass made up of countless pictures and sounds. The question about whether what we see is real or not is neither asked nor encouraged. The catchphrase of modernity is see it and believe it, critical discourse is never held. While in ancient times, following Plato's ideas, reality to some is the dancing of shadows on a cave wall, for us it is the interplay of many differently coloured pixels on flat surfaces. Screens are our viewfinders to the world. Our perception is created by artificial interfaces. The connection between reality and man is created by copper wires and silicon plates. A very fragile umbilical cord highly dependent on those who feed it thus holding the ultimate control.

Two movies dealing about the question of what is real, The Matrix (1999) by the Wachowski brothers and World on Wires (1973, orig. title Welt am Draht) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, are left to the electronic brain of a computer to create, with its countless circuits instructed by a programmer, a reality partly constructed partly real to explore reality and its constructed nature. The outcome is a formal critique of (mass-)media's reality.

Full documentation

Sofia Dona – Twinning Towns: Leipzig—Detroit

Sofia Dona – Twinning Towns: Leipzig—Detroit

The idea of the project was based on the concept of town twinning (sister cities) whereby towns or cities in geographically and politically distinct areas are paired. The town twinning concept was applied in the cities of Leipzig and Detroit by focusing on the issue of shrinkage and abandonment. Three examples of that connection were realised.

For the first connection a split video was created, with two trombonists playing in two abandoned swimming pools, one in Leipzig and one in Detroit, in a way that the music of both trombonists creates a composition.

The twinning towns: Leipzig -Detroit project consists of different actions that could be seen as actual actions and symbolical actions. Actual actions can be considered moving from one city to another, transporting, installing, removing, playing music, being involved in the city's life, exploring, finding materials and cooperating with musicians, craftsmen and art initiatives. On the other hand the symbolic action is the twinning, the attempt to transform, through the exchange of materials, buildings of Leipzig into buildings of Detroit and the other way around, transforming in a way the one city into the other. Although the actual action, of the specific installations or events, is visible only to a limited audience (the passers buy, the people involved in the project, etc) the symbolic action aims to the larger image and idea of the twinning of two cities, a wider concept opened up to a lot of questions on what the twinning of towns could mean.

See artist's website for more information

Carl Lee – Last house

Carl Lee - Last house

(2010, 3-channel HD video, stereo sound, 16:30 loop)

When I first moved to Buffalo, NY I was struck by the everyday beauty of the many single-family homes that make up the city. These iconic, turn-of-the-century houses seemed to have endless interpretation. Each structure with its unique details, angles, and arrangements was like a variation on a theme or an instance of an archetype, with its own singular history handed down from deed to deed.

At the same time, Buffalo numbers among the many rust-belt cities dealing with decades-long economic decline and its concomitant depopulation. As a result, vacant and abandoned houses abound. Thousands have been torn down and many more await a similar fate. Empty windows stare out from the last house standing on the block. They wait like a question posed, or a reminder.

If houses are containers for our memories, the structures within which so many minor and major domestic events take place, then each week in this city a collective amnesia grows block by block: a city disappears before our eyes. The demolition of these structures—by design or accident—and the speed, indifference and violence with which it takes place, the transmutations of scale, of space, and even of one's sense of time is breathtaking, tragic, and full of contradictions. Last House is an inquiry, part document, part memorial, into this changing built environment.

See artist's website for more information

Cayden Mak – Buffalove

Cayden Mak – Buffalove

Buffalo(ve) is a multimedia collaborative installation. The lightbox is equipped with an unnamed map of the neighborhood around the Crane Branch Library in Buffalo, New York, which library patrons are invited to contribute their own names to. During the course of the installation, a new clear layer on top of the map is added every few days to give more people the opportunity to share and contribute, as well as create a literally layered archaeology of names that local people give to the landscape around them.

Naming is essentially a social practice, and inscribes values and ideas about a place onto the literal physical landscape. A function of conquest, discovery, and historicization, naming places is usually left up to the strongest, history’s “winners.” However, many places hold secret caches of names — whether they’re what the indigenous people used to call a nearby river, or the name your daughter first gave the grocery store, or a made-up language all your own. Many of these names get lost as people age, die, or move away. Buffalo(ve) is an attempt to preserve some of the hidden, personal, or inscrutable names that we give to our city.

Visit artist's website for full documentation

Stephanie Rothenberg – School of Perpetual Training

Stephanie Rothenberg - School of Perpetual Training

School of Perpetual Training is an ironic instructional training program that exposes the underbelly and not so glamorous side of the computer video game industry. Most people associate jobs in the computer video game industry with information-based labor such as 3D graphics and coding game programs. Yet the majority of the industry relies on the sweat and stamina of migrant and low-income laborers working for electronics contract manufacturers in developing countries.

By following a series of training exercises, participants learn about the precarious employment and unjust labor conditions of workers in the areas of overseas digital game manufacturing and distribution. A virtual “personal trainer” created in Second Life leads participants through a series of training exercises that use motion detection and require full range of body motion to play. Rather than using a mouse or joystick, the motion detection demands the participants “labor” to complete the training exercises, emphasizing the extreme physical nature and motion economics of these jobs. The individual training exercises recontextualize popular classic arcade games – Dig Dug, Tapper, Space Invaders and Tetris – in order to “train” participants for jobs in mineral mining, printed circuit board assembly, box build and global shipping. At the end of the training program, participants can gauge their “global market value” to find out how much they are “worth” in contrast to white-collar workers in the industry and game company profits.

Try the project online