Navigating on the Sea of Data (Dohyeon Bak, 1st Year Electives, 11th Apr 2025, Word Count: 2200)

This is a record of my journey to find data I would like to use for my artwork through 2024-2025 Electives. For that, I have to start by revealing my movitaion for determining each elective module. The reason why I decided to select (dis)connect the machine with Juriaan Gregor as my first elective is that I do not like digital technologies. Their precariousness, that is, their dependence on delicate devices which need constantly the energy generated from spinning by burning something endlessly, gives me a gloomy presentiment of future, complexity and burdensome feelings to be incorporated in my practice. Even though I have designed and set up stage lights, sound devices and video projections in my former theatrical experience, I had always felt a difficulty to take them as the means I should pursue for my artwork. However, it is also true, that they give a visual or auditory form to present artists' imagination which might remain to be opaque if without the support of such technologies. I made my mind to face them directly to find out how should I utilise them.

This spectacle is that comes from images drawn by lights, which are adjustable by electric signals I cannot understand fully. Surely, everything is fundamentally uncomprehensible to me, even so the digital technology especially make me helplessness because there are some people who created programmes or devices using these enigmatic signals. People are almost to equal each other in philosophical or artistic questions such as what is life and how to live, however the fact there are nature laws we must obey and experts who manipulate the laws for their purpose exist makes me frigthen sometimes.

Motion Capture Suit. Magnetic Field Generator. Digital Keyboard. Controllable Webcam.

D.I. Box. Portable Video Mixer. Motion Sensor. Kinetic Sensor.

WiFi Router. MIDI Controllers (fader-type and knob-type). These are like eyes, nerves or parts of brain of human. The machine can see an outer world through these sensory devices and react to it through these connectors. They can collect various data from outside and show it us in dreamy ways that would be impossible to realise without these digital technologies. The next is one of my experiments with Isadora software.

Here, I am projecting three images onto two objects - an opened notebook and a hanging plastic poncho - from one projector. On a left page of the notebook, there is a real-time image of a camera installed my laptop and a recorded video is playing on the next page. On the raincoat, there is a cut-out light shaped by a control tool of the software. This small experiment did not have any context. As an impromptu, it derived from my impulsive curiosity: how many different types of images can be presented at the same time, through one laptop computer and one projector? There were only three types, I could add more: I could connect my phone camera through Bluetooth, link numerous images on the internet, and project more lights which have different colours or shapes changed by sound or a kinetic movement of a subject of a camera. This means, roughly, that I can project any images on any object.

This is a scape of my table. Here, each object can exist as the screen for being overlapped by other images under a purpose of projection.

At that moment, an exterior of the objects becomes unstable and a thing has to be displaced by an illumination. All that remains is a meaning of the object as a symbol, in life of the audience or their owner. This is one of the reasons that I am horrified by digital culture. Almost everything can be replaced with new one or transform into another, instantly; thus, it is neither new one nor another. It is an illusion, a play using light. Like this website, it is a ghost, with no permanent physicality. Identity of the object is bleached or blended with other images, on the surface of the object. A problem is, a material composing the object is not changed by those images. My concern is that this visual effect would provoke only a desire such as being someone or having something rather than help to understand the desire. The effect can be called theatrical, and fascinating. Then, what purpose should I make it for? What data should be used for it? That is the why I choose Frame of Reference by Asu Aksu as my second elective. I was wondering that what is data and what are ways to measure and present it.

This is what I did when I was asked to put out and organise my belongings on a desk in my class. Asu said that what sort of thing I have and how I organise them display my personality. It is true because of getting something and placing it implies a decision, including a decision that I would not decide to it. In that sense, literally everything of someone can be a medium indicating their personality: their posture, behaviour, pronunciation, vocabulary, property... the matter is a frame. Due to everything is data, if I try to memorise and interpret those, my brain will be exploded. The frame functions as a filter that allows specific data which should be awared to enter a perceptible field and blocks the other data. The following is an example.

This picture is what I drew along an instruction in the class. Each dot, line, shape, or colour means my age, region of birth, waking up time and bedtime, a number of my friend, my personality that I think (extrovert or introvert), et cetera. I think, these questions and the way of answering (drawing) are frame, determining the type of data and how it is presented.

Collection of the drawings. So, what do these mean? Puzzle pieces-like drawings. On the one hand, they looks like a riddle. It is because I am not familiar with decoding the signs they have. If I become familiar with it, I can read easily personal information from them. Yet, let me point out this. The data what this frame is collecting is that familiar to the modern society: age, region of birth, time to go to bed, experience of having a pet... This frame asks these information to present in an unusual way, like abstract drawing. It is interesting, however it does not suggest a new way to understand these familiar data. Participants should make dots as much as their age. In that process, what occurs is a conformity to a standard of how to count my age (if I am stamping over forty dots, there is no way but to admit it even if I do not want to). Answering to the question of whether you are an extrovert or an introvert is also that confines my personality to myself, and even to others. This frame looks like a new way of interpreting the standardised data, in fact, it is close to a new way of internalising the standardised data.

On the contrary, comparing each other's drawing that is created individually from hearing a same word expands the notion about recognising that word. What are similarities and differences among these drawings? Why is the word "Listening" mainly depicted with human's ear, why does the word "Sharing" has so many human hands? Similarly, the word "Body" is commonly being represented as a human figure (it is also intriguing that there are other drawings with totally different shapes). For me, this indicates a tendency of that human recognises outer things with the sense of own body.

However, the digital technology like wearable motion sensors provides an opportuinity to experience a body image in completely different ways. This suits on the picture makes connection between wearer's joints and a computer programme, sending data such as a position or velocity of each joint to the programme. This data as a signal which has unique parameters can be sychronised with any visual or auditory medium on the programme. On the screen, wearer can become animal, imaginary creature, or superhero controlling such as a fire or thunder, even can become that element itself. That is, a whole body of the wearer that becomes a input-machine controlling outputs of virtual world. Spontaneously, this fact suggests a possibility of that our real world is not quite different with the virtual reality. It reminds me a striking metaphor called The Butterfly Dream by an ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou (c.369 BC - c.286 BC):

Once upon a time Zhuang Zhou dreamt that he was a butterfly, a freely fluttering butterfly, and his feeling was that he completely content, and he did not know that he was Zhou! Suddenly he awoke then there he was, self-aware as Zhuang Zhou. He did not know whether he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt of being a butterfly, or was a butterfly who was dreaming of being Zhuang Zhou. (Zhuang Zi, chapter 2)

If considering its speed of development, the digital technology seems that it can be replaced our real world, but it is important to notice it is still staying in the visual and auditory areas. Other sensations, such as scent, taste or feel is impossible to be realised by digital materials, yet. This is significant because the virtual world would lose its meaning of existence when an inhabitant experiences a lack of the sensation which is composing that world. Then, as a being standing on the physical world, what is the relationship with digital technology I should have?

This experiment was inspired a visual artist and performer Sol Enae Lee, especially her digital artwork in the exhibition titled In the Borderlands of Collective Fire Is Scary. In her artwork, text on screen responses to outer sounds and changes its size to an extent that it is illegible. It suggests a paradoxical impression in that text as a tool for communicating with outside world becomes indecipherable by sounds of outside world. This precarious state of text established by digital technology implies that what should be realised might be not only the virtual world equivalent to or beyond the real world, but also the precariousness itself between the non-physical world and physical world.

So I asked Juriaan that there is a way of collecting real-time data opened to the pubic on the interenet using Isadora, he taught me how to do it. The above is a way of collecting a data of earthquake in the world from USGS and converting a signal for Isadora. Technically, this signal can be utilised to operate any device for performance: turning on a light, playing a sound, shaping a figure, taking a picture and so on. Depending on the intention, it has a potential to become a proof indicating a close and delicate relationship between the audience and rest of the world. I think, the one of unique qualties that human can get from the machine, it is that has nothing to do with emotions. Art of human tends to be affected by emotions. For instance, a timing of a dancer's pose, a lighting effect created by a designer and rhythms played by a musician are difficult to avoid being interpreted in a context of emotional activity. However, if I move in the light turned on and off or drum beats made by the data of earthquakes, it can have a different context from a movement in stage lights or sounds which are designed with the theme of earthquake by human. I am assuming that the framing of the digital technology can provide a relatively objective method of recognising a relationship between a self and social phenomena without being emotionally biased. I am not belittling the emotions of human. On the contrary, I agree with Lauren Berlant (1957 - 2021) that All the messages are emotional (The New Inquiry, 2016). Emotions is involved in a whole kind of human behaviours and have a critical influence. This is why I am careful in selecting what kind of data I will experiment. There are many data that seem to have a significant meaning socially or personally, however if I use it without considering, it would hurt someone.

The final task of Frame of Reference was that making a scent of myself. Even though I could not attend due to an illness, I created my scent using ingredients of what I had mostly consumed recently: a ground coffee, tobacco, chocolate, apple and yoghurt. Because I thought that what I ate become my body. Digital technology has not yet reached realisation of this bodily sense, including taste and smell. It is still staying in the role of making a vision or mirage. The matter is, as the vision became so vivid, swift and reliable to be controlled, people have accepted it as a part of their reality. Now people can see it everywhere, giving it more permissions to manage their life. More precisely, to those who able to access or manipulate the data. It is a dangerous phenomenon, but on the other hand, the digital technology may play a role of indicator who let us know a new imaginary way of understanding our reality that was impossible before. I am still sailing on the ocean of data with this uncertainty. End