Vintage and
Digital Encounters: Saya Da Jung’s Usage of Online Objects and Glitch
Techniques
The Bosa Bosa Review ©2012 All right reserved.
introduction.
Artist Saya Da Jung (2012) |
She chooses digital media art to make
painting, while perfectly aware that digital art is a complex medium rather
unfit for the over-consciously commercial arts marketplace. The reason why she
is arresting painting in digital art is that she sees it not only as
transcription but as transmission, downloadable, shareable, mechanically
reproducible medium. She swoops up the molecular details of the image-editing
process. She uses the technique of glitch to bring lines and fissures across
the image, similar to paint raked with the squeegee over canvases by artists
like Jack Whitten and Gerhard Richter. She searches for accidents and
randomness beneath the surface of the digital image just as Max Ernst was
searching for natural materials and new textures to give life to his white
canvases when rubbed with the pencil. Saya Da Jung is interested in working
with vintage methods and modern techniques. Having graduated from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago in Film, Video and New Media department (MFA
2010), the only school which uses vintage film editing equipment, optical
printing and jp printing machine, it is only
natural for her to wish to combine old and new, hand processing editing tools
for film and new media like glitch. Mixing everything, from glitch, texture of
surface, painting, lithography, creates the chaos which brings out to the
artist the inner order her art needs.
©Saya Da Jung
|
Saya Da Jung, MFA Graduation Installation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2010 ©Saya Da Jung |
dolls and
glitch.
In her art, Saya Da Jung uses the non-invasive
technique of glitch to grasp the image of the body, an innocent, a-sexual
expression of the body in an over-sexualized culture. Both optically and
mechanically, the moiré
patterns created by the glitch technique of image-editing and the physical pull
in the electronic and digital act, make the glitch-images resemble “ultrasound-images”.
An ultrasound image is brought by a linear array transducer generating a 2D
image of received echoes and is usually associated with pregnancies. Using
sound waves so high they cannot be heard by the human ear, sonography allows
visualization and examination of the fetus without X-rays. The visual texture
of all glitch-images remind of such a process. Yet in Saya Da Jung’s case, the
choice for a glitch technique is not accidental. The visual in her case is
searching for a sound-content. Her “ultrasound” is exposing an inner scream.
The online Barbie dolls have recently become
the object of Saya Da Jung’s works. Just as with the equipment, the dolls she
started using, the Barbie dolls from the “I
wish x I have” series are vintage as well. “I wish x I have” reveals two sides: what is wished for as opposed
to what is possessed already, the “wish list” and the “have list”. The artist
wants her dolls old, vintage, used but not damaged. She searches for them online,
adds them to her “wish list”, even so, bear in mind that it is the list itself
that interests her, not the buy. She never really purchases them. This is not a
“I want to possess” type of Bellmerian fetish, it is the wish for an
impossibility.
The artist retains the image of the dolls on
her computer screen. They are there, in a space of their own, and also open to
the public eye, on e-Bay or someplace else, in a space called cyberspace, a
space empty of matter, a vacuum. They show their beauty, as well as the damages
inflicted on them by time. The artist watches them online and wishes she could
save them. She knows she cannot, therefore she starts altering them herself, by
manipulating the image digitally. This is the beginning of the redemption of
the self. The doll, never getting in the artist’s hands, either left online or
bought by another, is allowed change and freedom in the digitalized space of a
computer desktop. Becoming another, the doll somehow starts telling a story.
If you pay attention to the details, you will
notice that the screen of the online shopping web site is rather interesting,
for certain elements are common to all products and feel pretty much representative
of how objects (and artworks make no exception) are seen, as simple products thrown
on the market. Search for details, and you will notice that there is a “Time
left”, there is a “Price”, a “Best Offer”. Customers can choose to “Buy It Now”
or “Make Offer”. The item has a “Number” and belongs to a “Seller”.
When Saya Da Jung applies both old and new
techniques to manipulate the film, she withdraws it from a visible modern,
conscious reality back to an image of instincts and origins, an ultrasound
image. Her computer mouse is similar to the linear array transducer of received
echoes, used at medical check-ups. The lines raking the image from one digital
transformation to another are the visual representation of the echoes of chaos
itself, the sound of all beginnings, the beginning of existence, life,
experience, pain. Saya Da Jung uses this feeling of ultrasonic beam, flow,
tissue, motion of materials in her Untitled
video (2010) (1) where she transfers a two channel digital video installation
from 8 mm film to 16 mm film.
Saya Da Jung, Cube Beyond Cube, 2011 © Saya Da Jung for original video artwork, click here |
I wish x I
have (2011) (2) is a film. When we take time to analyze this
film, we notice a doll’s head, legs, and something similar to typed Greek
alphabet letters, currency symbols, and numbers. These glyphs are not typed,
though. They are the unexpected result of the manipulation of files, which is
typical of the glitch editing process. If we look at other works she had made,
a couple of things become more obvious. Cubebeyond cube, who am I? Sound and Fury (2011) and Hurt My Heart (2011), reveal the same ultrasound rage. C-M Motors Body Shop (Hugging for Healing, 2010) is a video
not using glitch, yet still revealing an intense preoccupation with details, parts,
fragments of the body of the device. In this case it might be only a car and
its parts, yet for someone like Saya Da Jung stating that she is constantly
trying to understand the root of her impossibility to communicate with others,
the analysis of the inside parts should be interpreted as a physical search for
the roots of emotional distress. TheScale is Everything (2009) was a work focused on eating disorders, weights
and scales. There are numbers going all over the screen, defining existence
through data and physicality. Those numbers have been intentionally typed, yet
they look similar to the accidental glyphs resulted in the I wish x I have glitch. So looking back to I wish I have, we find the glyph-accident amazing, those glyphs
resulted from the act of glitching with the frequency of numbers at the stock
exchange does grab our attention. Before looking deeper into the subject of
“dolls”, let us understand more about glitch and the background of accidents,
spontaneity, and randomness in art.
(accidental)
background. technique. glitch.
from the Surrealist Frottage to the
transverse isotropy in the digital breakdown of abstraction.
So, what is glitch?
“Technically,
a glitch is best understood as an unexpected, unexplainable consequence of an
interruption within one or more (digital) information flows. All these flows of
digital information are encoded, often with the help of compressions, to store
or transfer data as easy and fast as possible - a technique that is normally
obfuscated. However, when you break a flow of data, it will quite possibl[y] be
corrupted. When the data of an image is corrupted, this can reveal the language
of the compression that breaks through the surface of the image. A
technological event that is sometimes used as a tool in art or as a style in
design.” (3)
British artist M.I.A. frequently uses glitch for her album covers © M.I.A.Maya 2010 |
Therefore, glitch is a methodological
accident. A method is a conscious tool. This particular method brings accidents
from the flow of consciousness forward into the stream of reality. The more
technological reality becomes, the greater the probability that accidents
occur. The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio writes about “integral
accidents”, a concept supporting accidents as the sine qua non condition for technology. In other words, technology existing
without accidents calls for an impossibility. What is the nature of accidents
in art? Are accidents good or bad?
The search for accidents in art is at least
ninety years old. Name it digital
media, video art or glitch, the technique of allowing chance and randomness to
discover on one’s behalf a more exciting background to work on/with, goes back
to Man Ray’s photograms and to surrealism. We will emphasize here those
techniques closest to glitch.
Man Ray, Rayograph, 1922 on The Metropolitan Museum of Art website here ©2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
Max Ernst
and the frottage technique on the nineteen-twenties.
In 1925, Max Ernst, major contributor to the
theory and practice of Surrealism, developed a technique of placing wood and
other natural objects underneath the white paper or canvas, then rubbing the
pencil on top until negative shapes would appear in relief and create unexpected,
accidental textures. His Histoire
Naturelle, a portfolio of thirty-four collotypes after frottage, was
published in Paris in 1926.
Jack Whitten,
the squeegee and the Xerox printers in the nineteen-seventies.
In 1973, Jack Whitten has used the squeegee
in a continuous motion across the layers of acrylic, producing a dizzying,
quasi-photographic blur. With a
razor-sharp carpenter’s plane he exposed areas of paint underneath, which made
the accidental surprises abound. Whitten learnt from his 1974 artist-residency
at Xerox Corporation that “he could go
far beyond the indexical trace, just as xerography is not limited to one-to-one
transfer but is capable of zooming out or enlarging, cropping or roving,
scrolling or dragging…Works such as the “Gamma Group” series of 1975 induced
moire patterns which connected the physical pull to the parallel electronic and
digital act, the line-by-line raster scan… Xerox was also communicable: created
images that could be sent. Whitten’s works figured out not only transcription
but transmission”, writes Michelle Kuo. (4)
Gerhard
Richter, the squeegee and the digital printing of the noughties.
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art at
Harvard University, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh names Gerhard Richter’s most recent
intervention in the legacies of abstraction, the chance ornament. We are living
in the post-industrial era of abstraction and proliferation. (5)
“Chance as
ideology had entered painting in the 1950s in various ways… A newly liberated
subject, an author, and an art without any intention appeared on the horizon as
one of the great radical promises of the 1960s”, explains
Buchloh.
Corinne Belz’s new film, Gerhard Richter Painting (2011) trailer
uploaded by megatrailer on 14 March 2012 here
His article considers Richter’s artistic
development throughout the 60s, and reaches the twenty-tens when Richter is
again attracting crowds with his Panorama retrospectives at Tate Modern in London and Neue und Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
His recent large-scale abstract paintings have been documented in Corinne
Belz’s new film, Gerhard Richter Painting
(2011), where Richter is using the same semi-mechanical device of the squeegee
as Jack Whitten previously. “The squeegee
process becomes transparent as an operation at the extreme opposite end from
what chance operations in the wake of Surrealist legacies of automatism had
still promised… Richter executes the painting with a massive device that rakes
paint across an apparently carefully planned and painted surface. Crisscrossing
the canvas horizontally and vertically leads to a radical diminishment of
tactile control and manual dexterity, suggesting that the erasure of painterly
detail is as essential to the work’s production as the inscription of
procedural traces. Thus as uncanny and deeply discomforting dialectic between
enunciation and erasure occurs”, and with this Buchloh unknowingly
describes perfectly the discomforting dialectic occurring between enunciation
and erasure in Saya Da Jung’s glitch works created in the same period, 2010,
2011.
The new series of digital prints, titled “Strips” (2011), are close to the digital media glitch through their usage of a highly developed technological application
of rigorously parallel, extremely refined and reduced chromatic striations. “These “Strips” emerged from a paradoxical process in which the artist subjected one
of his earlier large-scale abstractions (Abstract Painting, Abstraktes Bild,
1990 [CR:724-4]) to a series of programmatically anti-painterly operations in
order to produce a detailed and voluminous documentation of the digital
breakdown of abstraction for the pages of a book, “Patterns” (Walter Konig, Cologne, Heni Publishing,
London, 2011)”, explains the author. Many
of the strip-images in this book, such as Variation VI: 29/64 show a close
resemblance to the digitalized character-image obtained by Saya Da Jung in the
process of manipulating her doll-images. A strip of colors and a string of
signs share the same visuality. Buchloh
regards Richter’s abstractions as “apparently
subjected to something more than a deceivingly simple series of mathematical
partitions and multiplications” owing to
“a second operation of doubling and symmetrical reversal.” The subjective
possibilities and their random applications in Richter’s work do not signify to
Buchloh the artist’s abandonment to a digital futurism increasingly surrounding
and overwhelming us. Are Saya Da Jung’s works abandoning themselves to a
reality behind the screen?
Saya Da Jung
and glitch, chance vs randomness in the twenty-tens.
Saya Da Jung more recently works with glitch,
a technique widely spread among Chicago artists. She manipulates the file from
movie file with an image-editor then gets it back to movie format, which is a
method inviting technical errors. She chooses to do what you would not normally
do with a movie file, in her search for something accidental and interesting to
happen. The file does become something unexpected, unplanned. And this search
for accidental improvement is very important here. A strip of colors and a
string of signs are the result of digital manipulation of the film she is using.
We may name it “the error”. In digital media, glitch is a technique of chances,
of randomness, leading from a movie to an error. Is this chance, randomness, or
a determined, technically explicable process? Philosophy and sciences regard
chance and randomness as possibly not the same thing. Some theories consider
that there is chance without randomness. Randomness is seen as indifferent to
history, while chance is not. Other theories focus on the concept of randomness
without chance. Theories of chaotic dynamics build on sets of infinite binary
sequences which are measure-preserving, and where each coordinate can be
represented as an infinite binary sequence. Baker’s transformation of stretch
and fold dynamics in chaos theory is described as follows: “We take a system the state of which is characterized by a point in the
real unit square. We specify the evolution of this system over time as follows,
letting Q be the function governing the discrete evolution of the system over
time.” (6) Similarly, Saya Da Jung witnesses the discrete evolution over
time of the initial image in her work. The binary system behind the image
suffers a transformation. The glitch visual effect is actually not explained by
artistic transformations, but by the chaotic dynamics of the binary system
supporting the images on a digital platform. The chaotic movement of the glitch
becomes specific and explicable.
In
other words, Saya Da Jung’s Barbie dolls are more than just dolls. They are
entities caught between chance or randomness and determinism. Is there any
compatibility with her inner thoughts or consistency in the accidental flow of
the glitch? Let us consider what Saya Da Jung wished to represent with her
dolls, what kind of game of forces between determinism and chance, randomness
and free will, are her dolls actually expressing from behind the computer
screen.
(non-accidental)
subject. the dolls. the self. the other.
Now that we went through the history of
techniques similar to glitch in painting, manually manipulated printing and
digitally manipulated printing, we may focus on the actual subject of Saya Da
Jung’s recent works and ask the question why dolls? The doll could be the image
the artist chooses for herself. An avatar, a self that is an other. Another
image. A former image, of herself as a child. An image of another. An image of
an unborn child.
Dolls in art have a history themselves. I
would argue that unlike the rich historical background of the glitch technique,
the history of dolls in art explains almost nothing about Saya Da Jung’s dolls.
By contrast, we get a glimpse of what her dolls are not: sexual, useful, to be
possessed. The hottest trend in the Japanese contemporary art, artist Takashi
Murakami, makes erotic figures such as Miss Ko and other female doll-figurines
which sell well on the international market. His dolls, or kyarakutaa are exactly what buyers want them to be: sexual,
graphic, they represent the female figure subordinated to their wish
list. Mario Ambrosius is using big-sized dolls (75x112.5cm) for his A ma poupee japonaise, (2000-2001) (7).
Just like Hans Bellmer, he likes to leave visible the cruel lines separating
the doll’s parts. Manabe Mamie’s Momoko
dolls are dressed in sweatshirt clothes and exhibited (8). R.M.Fischer has used
big dolls, live-sized plastic mannequins as artworks in his “Bloomingdale’s Department Store Window
Installation”, 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, New York, 1979.
Each mannequin had its own source of light, and was exhibited in such a way
that they looked almost dragged into the light. Whether or not that light
expressed the flashlights making famous people famous, or the light shone on
beauty, an observation point is definitely fixed. The doll is observed from
only one angle. Saya Da Jung’s Barbie dolls, too are seen from a single
perspective, that of the camera photographing them before the images are
uploaded online.
Takashi Murakami, Miss Ko, at the Versailles (2010) read more about challenging the Versailles in The Economist |
Laurie Simmons is perhaps a little closer to
Saya Da Jung than any other artists mentioned. Simmons used colorful figurines
in color-coordinated interiors, in works such as Red and White Kitchen, Yellow Living Room, Blue Bath etc., in
Chromogenic C-prints, 38x50.2 inches, 24x24.5 inches (1983). (9) Her style and
usage of dolls developed from a Hitchcock-like Black Series (1977), to mini-home housewife Interiors (1978), Water
Ballet with real performers (1980-1)
and Dolls Underwater (1981). Laurie
Simmons watched a lot of Hitchcock films, and was inspired by their ideal
color, spatial relations and lighting.
Laurie Simmons, Red and White Kitchen, 1983 |
It was Max Ernst’s Au-dessus des nuages marches la minuit, 1920, a surrealist collage
of tiny Barbie-doll-like legs descending an insect-shaped top, that inspired
Laurie Simmons when she started creating images of tiny Barbie-doll-like legs
descending objects that had some kind of value to women, such as purses and
houses. She started creating “walking objects”. On top, an object, the lower
part, the legs of a doll. Walking Purse (1989),
Walking House (1989), Walking Gun (1991), Walking Cake (1989). In Bending
Globe (1991), she is showing the naked legs and buttocks of a doll from
behind. The rest of the body is inside the globe. Saya Da Jung’s I wish x I have: Hot Ass (2011) has got
the same perspective, while adding some hot color. Simmons later moved to the
“love doll”, placing a real-size doll in the same places she used before in her
art, in a bed, underwater etc. The most recent works of hers moved therefore from
the casual, house-wife to the erotic plastic immobile female figure, as art.
Max Ernst’s Au-dessus des nuages marches la minuit 1920 |
In her text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey (10) quotes
Hitchcock while writing about stereotypes in traditional Hollywood films, scopophilia,
about women reduced to images, signifying the male desire, and men, bearers of
the male gaze which stands at the root of voyeurism, fetishism, narcissism and
identification with masculine ego ideals. She calls this obsessional male gaze
in the Hollywood trend of representation, erotic contemplation. The erotic
contemplation is a state of mind towards which Saya Da Jung’s dolls show no
interest. The erotic contemplation creates a space of no-choice, shut and
restrictive to someone else’s desires. Saya Da jung’s dolls choose to have a
choice, choose openness, and sublimation
of their own desires. Subjects like dolls and others can become an artist’s
signature, as it is in Hand Bellmer and Simmons’s case. Sometimes the dolls are
merely a starting point, and the artwork evolves into a different subject. In
Hans Bellmer’s case, desire, torture and death took over the doll. Saya Da
Jung’s forms, the digitalized images of dolls themselves are changing their
texture and material through editing.
For the moment, Saya Da Jung feels
comfortable identifying her self with let us say, immature images, from
anime-like computerized characters to Barbie dolls. She is not breaking them,
not twisting them. These miniature bodies are subject, not object. Saya Da Jung
is watching them, unobsessively, analyzing them, giving their static status a
dynamic input. A modern input. In After
Dark, a novel written by Haruki Murakami of an Orwellian 1984 inspiration,
a camera is following the rhythms of a character until the character itself is
left devoid of a certain reality. The camera is manipulated in the novel in
such a way that it leaves the observers unnoticed: "we are invisible, anonymous intruders...we
observe but we do not intervene". Yet, while being unnoticed, the movements of the camera change the
reality of the character to the point of loss of identity. Saya Da Jung moves
this “object” called doll into a subjective category. Observing the doll translates
as self-introspection for the artist.
Take this Barbie doll as a woman in modern
society. She might be texting, checking emails, reading e-zines and news
online. Purchasing books, shoes, airplane tickets, online. Might have people
around her texting, google-ing, on the bus, on the subway, walking, not
stopping, not noticing, not communicating. A woman invaded by useful and
useless information, needing it to find a job, to hold a job, to promote
herself or her employer. Social networking, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook,
MySpace, Blog, Website, update, upload, upset. This is the modern image of a
woman’s space. A modern woman’s space. Such a noisy space and cyberspace, that
the inner scream of the human being is left unheard, deafened. In this space
where no silences are allowed, where the environment is too big and too varied
and absorbs everything in it, Saya Da Jung manipulates the film of one’s
presence destroying the image until nothing is left on the film as if that life
had never existed. She manipulates the file from movie file to Photoshoppable or
image-editing file then gets it back to movie format, in her search for
something to happen at random. The newly obtained file reveals the unexpected, the
unplanned. As we already mentioned when analyzing ninety years of art history
as a background of the glitch technique, this search for accidental improvement
of the real support of the artwork is essential and while bringing about
negative shapes, it is a very positive tool in itself. But Saya Da Jung does
more than glitching: her manipulating of the file turns into a medical scan
pulling the fiber of the film till the scream of the human being is heard.
Using a doll, the modern woman is still screaming deep inside, that there is
something wrong in the world around her.
The choice for a doll can also be seen as a
denial of the flesh. “I am a lump of
flesh, a commercial asset”, is what Haruki Murakami’s character Eri,
observed with an Orwellian camera, thought of herself. When replacing one’s
flesh-ness with the cold plastic body of a doll, everything that is negative
about the way flesh is seen by others voyeuristically, fetishistically, is
opposed, and therefore untouchable. Saya Da Jung’s dolls are not awaking erotic
fantasies. On the contrary, if they could talk something, they might say Don’t touch me !
conclusion.
Glitch is, if we may, a modern mosaic of
chances, a digital error of memories, thoughts, emotions, repulsions, sympathy,
which synthesize two fundamental ideas, chaos and order, into one unified form,
as the artistic expression of creative destruction, which in mythology is
represented by the sacred figured of the Hindu god Shiva, destroyer and
creator. With glitch, Saya Da Jung destroys an image. The destruction of an
image creates another. In modern times, the expression “creative destruction”
has been popularized by its usage in relation with economic theory, capitalism,
socialism and democracy writings. Making art right from the heart of capitalism
and democracy, New York-based artist Saya Da Jung’s works get closer to the
original meaning of creative destruction. It is an entire world of creation she
is destroying and a new creative world she is trying to turn destruction into. With
the doll subject, a mother – child attachment becomes more visible in her
works. When asked how would she engage the public with her most recent
doll-works, it was the women with experiences of abortion that she thought of. Saya
Da Jung’s creative destruction in art derives from a dual creation-destruction
in life which opposes economic theories with humanistic studies of the human
being.
The surrealist body, prior to the digital era
was highly erotic. A photograph of Man Ray inside the Central Office of Surrealist Research (1924) is showing a
fragmented sculpture flying above the surrealist circle. There must be
something connecting broken dolls and fragmented sculptures representing in
museums across the world the classical ideal beauty: the idea that before
becoming a fragment, the whole was not just whole, it was perfect. The woman’s
body, before fragmented by the male erotic gaze, was perfect. The unborn
children, if not dumped by the male egotism, would have been perfect. Saya Da
Jung’s regard is not piercing through the surface of the image with harshness,
she gently looks at the body of the doll, does not buy or damage it. She leaves
surfaces intact, online, she edits and transforms their reality. With her
glitch technique, she makes sounds of pain and unborn heartbeats existent at
frequencies higher than you will ever be able to hear, hearable. The search for
the inside of herself is Saya Da Jung’s Ultrasound.
NOTES
(1) Saya Da Jung, Untitled (2010)
(2) Saya Da Jung, I
wish I have (2011)
(3) Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman
explains more about glitch on her blog (accessed on 10 February 2012)
(4) Michelle
Kuo, Jack Whitten – A Portfolio – in
Art Forum International, February 2012, pp 184-195
(5) Benjamin
H.D. Buchloh, The Chance Ornament:
Aphorisms on Gerhard Richter’s Abstractions, in Art Forum International,
February 2012, pp 168-179. See also another recent article, Till Briegleb, Gerhard Richter: Der Unsichtbare, in
ART, Das Kunstmagazin, February 2012, pp 18-37.
(6) Chance versus Randomness,
in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (accessed 7 February 2012).
(7) At
the Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo, in Bijutsu
techo 10, 2003, p. 88.
(8) Manabe
Mamie’s works in Bijutsu techo 10,
2003, p. 96. See also her official website www.petworks.co.jp/doll/
(9) Some
of these works have been on display at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, for
further reference visit tomiokoyamagallery.com.
(10)
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Screen 16.3, Autumn 1975,
pp. 6-18.
Author: O. (Curatorial Assistant, The National Museum of Art Osaka, Japan)
Special thanks to: Ryoko (Researcher, The National Museum of Art Osaka, Japan)
written for the KCAF XII 12th Korea Contemporary ART Festival
17th April - 22th April 2012 Hangaram Art Museum in
Seoul Arts Center, Seocho-dong 700, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Korea
in March 2012
original publication available here
17th April - 22th April 2012 Hangaram Art Museum in
Seoul Arts Center, Seocho-dong 700, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Korea
in March 2012
original publication available here
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