In Wanderer, artist Jae Hoon Lee digitally weaves together satellite imagery along with environmental sound to form a series of new terrains, familiar yet wholly other. Users drift along macro views of cracked roads and grassy berms, stitching their own narratives and non-places together based on the fluctuating juxtapositions of image and sound.

“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…”

The well known dérive from the Situationist International was an an intentional drifting, a conscious series of accidents and chance encounters designed to upset the efficient journey, the well-trod A to B of work to home, home to study, study to work. But while de-facto leader Guy Debord compared this technique to the abstract terrain of language used by the psychoanalyst, it’s practitioners played out their ‘detournments’ in a decidedly physical landscape of bricks-and-mortar architecture, crowds and passers-by. In contrast, Lee lets us drift through an entirely constructed digital topography, environments sourced from fact and stitched into fiction. Road indicators bleed into dusty rocks, a backyard hose snakes into beach dunes flecked with light. Stripped of social and built architecture, the cues are removed from this strange world. Without the functionality of banks and gas stations, without the community of companions, we’re left instead to wander in a non-place. The user becomes a hyohakusha, ‘one who moves without direction’.

In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.”

Along with photography, Lee employs field recordings, sound sourced from environments, as a type of second landscape. This supplementary topography ebbs and shifts to it’s own rhythm, introducing buzzing planes and pattering rainfall in cycles seemingly independent of the imagery. While air drifts through these sonic spaces, carrying noises from afar, the pictured environment is flattened, hermetically sealed in the thin glass layer of the user’s screen. The result is a type of quiet, slow-motion struggle, as imagery and acoustic information drift in and out, tugging against each other, leaving the viewer to resolve them into a coherent psycho-geographic “place” or simply hold them apart in constant tension.

A weathered skeleton
in windy fields of memory,
piercing like a knife
-Matsuo Basho

“Maze-like” is how the artist describes this space. Each user is restricted to a horizontal or vertical panning motion, butting up against the browser container before panning through another sliver of this constructed landscape. Whether ‘corrupting’ satellite images with spliced in photographs, or forcing us into claustrophobic movement, the work seems to question our relationship with technology, the authenticity of our knowledge, the self-limited ‘mapping’ of ourselves and our environment. How do we challenge pre-established notions or create true alternatives? Is it actually possible to ‘conceive what is outside’? Like the meditating prisoner who finds (some) freedom, rejecting the given maze parameters of this work to instead backtrack, linger, or restart reveals new possibilities and wider imagined ‘places’. Perhaps it’s this mode which allows a static wandering, a stationary drift in a ‘turbulent, stormy zone, where singular points and relationships of force between those points are tossed about”.

Jae Hoon Lee was born in Korea and moved to the United States in 1993 to study Fine Arts, majoring in Sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1998 he moved to New Zealand to pursue his studies at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts. Having graduated with an MFA in 2001 he is now engaged in a doctoral programme. Lee’s exhibitions include Greenhouse, Frankfurter Welle, Germany; A Tossing of Experimental Shorts, Cinema Cube, Seoul, Korea; Electric Power, Han-Jeon Plaza Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Common Uncommon, Somar Gallery, San Francisco, USA; Hwang-Lee-Kim-Jun, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco; Alive! Still Images into the Twenty-First Century, Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University, New Zealand; Flesh and Fruity, Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand; Pressing Flesh, the New Gallery (Auckland Art Gallery) New Zealand; and Break Shift, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand

Knabb, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology, Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995. pg 50.
“Théorie de la dérive”, Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958)
Between Deleuze and Derrida, Paul Patton, John Protevi, Continuum (London, 2003) p. 86, 87

In Once More Again (Again) by Kah Bee Chow, a sequence of quartz crystal images taken over a day are re-activated differently with each user and page visit, playing back in a light-filled poetic which ultimately captures, doses, and manipulates time itself.

The work opens with a quartz crystal cluster, often used for and associated with notions of healing, “capturing and changing bad vibrations”. Yet the object here seems more a conduit or catalyst for light vibrations than for those of the bodily kind. As the suns rays strike the planes, peaks and points of the cluster throughout the course of its daily journey, our gaze receives the full aesthetic spectrum of light qualities: hushed, enveloping, blinding, shadowed, piercing and radiant. In this sense the object is stand-in or placebo, illuminating the phenomenon of vision, time, and the passing of light through a space. As in Akio Suzuki’s “Hana”, where the Japanese artist simply placed a vase of flowers in the room, the central object is both crucial and unimportant, providing the catalyst which shifts our perception away from the concrete and physical, to the phenomenological and the transient, to our own perception. “The space no longer appears to be empty, or rather, the surrounding emptiness now seems to signify something quite different… giving the impression of being more active, much tauter somehow, charged with an immanent vitality.”

Light itself, and its inextricable twin time, become the focus of the work, as well as the means by which we perceive the subject. As Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson asserts, we all become light projectors when we view an artwork, projecting a reversed image with our eye in the active process of looking. “This is how the piece can, so to speak, look back at us.”

Unlike a painting however, this subject is constantly shifting, revealing new variations and permutations. Curiously, the work encapsulates elements from this medium and others, while evading definition as any one in particular: sequential in some respects as a film but with no fixed form, experientially focused as many installations are but screen-based, responding to user ‘input’ like an interactive but with no control mechanics or goals, comprising a photographic series but restructured using code and variables.

When accessing Once More Again (Again) the sequence begins based on the viewers system time. This engenders a newly construed “day”, bringing together the original light cycle from Sweden with a Coordinate Universal Time value to form a hybrid form of variable duration. The sequence ticks along on a wholly different time structure, calculated not by orbits or diurnal cycles, but instead the potentialities inherent in the media and the wishes of the artist. To complicate this day period, the work further engages a different light source to present the series online – the fiber optics of the Internet. Each image in the sequence is loaded from the web, triggering a string of complex dependencies – variables such as constantly shifting server loads and the location of the user according to network geographies. The result is an alternate ‘delay in glass’ (fibre), where the image signifying each moment is requested, spliced, transported and reassembled on the viewers screen, an RGB depiction arriving finally in our gaze. In this fashion, a constellation of small technical failures and delays shift temporality from a precise, metronome-like phenomenology to something more tidal; ebbing and flowing as data packets are exchanged and bytes retrieved. Rather than a chronological ruler then, Once More Again (Again) seems to present a constantly fluctuating stream.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”
- Heraclitus

Kah Bee’s previous work consistently demonstrates an ability to re-articulate broad, perpetual themes with a contemporary practice, and it’s this unusual contrast – and the dialogue arising from it – which lingers as well in Once More Again (Again), as time and light are captured, repackaged and represented conceptually as well as technically.

“Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.”
-Rick Deckard, Blade Runner

Auckland based artist Stella Brennan presents “Instant Pictures”, a series of networked pages which plunges the viewer into their tiniest details, gateways to the next enveloping image-scape lodged amongst hairs, scratches and dust particles.

These details overwhelm, yet Brennan’s intention seems not so much to shrink the scale of the viewer, but rather to bring the images impossibly close to the eye. Moving through the intricate minutiae of a blanket draped over a hotel bed or cascades of shells piled up in a rockpool, the content is indistinct but diary-like, personal. In this sense, this incessant search recalls a frustrated attempt at memory retrieval, sifting through snapshots to recall a cohesive whole. Yet these aren’t our memories and moments, they belong to someone else. And as we comb repeatedly through the close-ups and colour-fields, the viewer moves gradually from passive perceiver to analytic hunter. The telltale dust abnormality, reminiscent of a chip or pixel, facilitates this strange phenomenon: ignoring a screen of impossibly enlarged details on the search for just one.

The desire for an infinite image is an enduring one, ranging from all-encompassing oil paintings to the articulated analog detail in traditional, large format photography. But the development of the high resolution digital photograph, and its associated camera and scanner equipment created a new ubiquity, widening from the site-specific experience of the museum or the specialist use in the photo lab onto the desktop computers and smart phones of the everyday. In August 2010, Canon recently unveiled its 120 Mega-pixel sensor, a seven and a half fold increase on its current flagship camera, capable of 16 Mega-pixels. This rapid escalation of hardware specifications enables a different kind of viewing: a level of detail which reveals the tiniest flaw. Savvy viewers have become accustomed to spotting the manipulation of these, as evidenced by popular blogs such as Photoshop Disasters, in which the reader skims the image with a specific modus operandi, spotting the mistakes which range from obvious anatomical impossibilities to more understated, subtle flaws: missing reflections and phantom shadows, blurred join-marks, mismatched white balance. In a similar fashion, the recent rise of High Definition television has meant a sea change for film crews, makeup artists, and not least, actors and celebrities. As the normally forgiving eye of the camera becomes a ‘merciless gaze’ thanks to the 2 million pixels available, each insignificant mark takes on the potential for fascination or abhorrence. “Instant Pictures”, with its grainless, almost painterly canvas overflowing the browser, reminds us of the legacy of this fascination, while juxtaposing the new digitised strain of yearning in the form of a pixelized chip.

A subtle yet sinister undercurrent seems to run through other works by Brennan – a vaguely dysfunctional relationship between technology and human elements. Her “No Stairway” of 2006 features the haunting, artificial voice of a computer echoing the words of French poet Henry Michaux, who experimented with Mescaline, documenting its nightmarish effects on him in a series of writings. As the voice drones on, the camera pans back and forth, zoomed in impossibly tightly to wallpaper. Whether stemming from the seemingly inevitable march of technology or our investigative desire, these vastly magnified images seem rather to frustrate both impulses, instead capturing our gaze in a claustrophobic chamber. In “South Pacific”, a dreamlike, slow-moving meditation on the effects of war, radar and ultrasound images blur together, bombers and technology usually associated with the body forming an uneasy connection. In “Instant Pictures”, it’s this same hazy malaise that lingers, or – more problematically – is ignored, as our gaze and actions transform a series of personal snapshots into evidence.

[partial notes from memory as documentation, LM]

Collective Blind Spot RGB was a temporary performative work from Boris Dornbusch for Screens, involving the loud reading of a screenplay based upon a popular Hollywood motion picture.

Viewers from around the world tuned in on Sunday, 30 January, 2011 at 9pm in Berlin, 3pm in New York and 9am Auckland. The work was both activated and made complete by its viewers, and will largely disappear after their engagement.

Boris Dornbusch often engages with found situations based on a social or environmental context that he alters, creating both concrete and ephemeral reactions. Slow Change (2009) for example, is a framed photograph of a digital frame displaying a photograph of a hand embossed with the fading impression of three coins of unknown currency.

Deriving from traditions in photo-conceptualism, performance, and object-based installation art, these works draw on a wide range of materials and formal references, and are informed by an interest in exploring the principles of social settings, the readymade and recycling. This often creates humorous and complex scenarios from the simple, everyday means. There is always a link in his works between the materiality and the subject discussed, resulting in a semantic play between titles, imagery and media. Reflecting on things from an often overlooked urban surrounding like braille plates in elevators, Dornbusch’s work makes visible the poetry of chance connections, moods and paradoxes.

Boris Dornbusch lives and works in Berlin and Auckland.

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveller, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside-down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms’ interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes…The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

In Untitled, John Ward Knox probes the surface of our user interfaces, drawing out the pointer convention and shifting it gently from instructor to mark-maker. Unfolding twice, four, eight times on itself, each gesture is flipped and inverted, a reversed movement playing out in another screen-space. The result is a type of multiplication of self, a kaleidoscopic mirroring of our screen avatar. This multiplication engenders new potentialities, as our intentions are extrapolated ten fold, but simultaneously increases the significance of each moment to the same degree. Like the intertwined lovers above the lake in Valdrada, our focus shifts away from the immediate, instead we become acutely aware of how our shifting, produced image appears in it’s multitude of variants. The implication of each gesture is given still more weight because it produces a permanent mark – each action, movement, hesitation, or even stillness creating a fixed image.

Knox often employs the materials and transient phenomena inherent in a space, fashioning works such as “a projection of light” which employed light rays moving along the surfaces of abstract photographs, viewable throughout the course of an afternoon. Melding and shifting – coaxing rather than co-opting – his works reveal hidden forms inherent in surfaces and spaces. Indeed, viewing work such as Untitled Project, where the gentle arcs of a silver chain and steel wire trace a delicate wave at the Dunedin Public Art gallery, Knox sets up a gentle ebb and flow of the gaze. A constant shift occurs, focus drifting from the work itself outward, beholding anew the rectangular crevices and glassy reflections of the space surrounding it, before centering once again on the inscribed contour of the sculpture. With each cycle, each dialogue, the work seems to reveal something new, not so much about itself, but about this re-presented space it hovers in. As in Knox’s physical work, Untitled subtly renews it’s surroundings, highlighting screen space and our movement through it.

-Luke Munn