Structuring the Sound Object
The Medial Properties of Sound Crap
Perigee Gallery is holding the Perigee Team Project 2022 exhibition <Short—Form> through February 11.
<Short—Form>, the first exhibition of the new year, is the product of a collaboration between artist Hyungsan Jeon and curator Sungah Choo, who were matched through the Perigee Team Project 2022 open call. This team project focuses on developing and presenting—in a different format but on a similar contextual foundation—the work of artist Hyungsan Jeon, who, starting from doubting one's own senses, has taken the acts of ‘performing in order to be heard’ and ‘making others listen’ as the primary context of his work through the structuring of noise as a sound object, now realized together with curator Sungah Choo.
The exhibition <Short—Form> attends to the medial properties of ‘sound crap’—sound that, as it mutates into a new sign system serving as a social and cultural mechanism, becomes a byproduct rather than being perceived as a completed form. The content term ‘Short Form,’ which foregrounds format, is a term used in video and is associated with the consumption of images and video in short bursts.
In the exhibition, screens of randomly advancing Instagram Reels play in real time on six smartphones. The random videos most commonly watched by users, drawn from the same account playing on the six smartphones, advance at different time intervals from one another. The sounds mixing together simultaneously on each smartphone are then transmitted through a massive white signboard structure and synchronized with the movement of flickering light.
In the work <Darkfield>(2022), in which a white signboard roughly two meters tall and wide, oriented vertically and horizontally, is converted into a speaker, the jumbled sound operating atop the ‘Short Form’ format is mapped onto and foregrounded through a physical object that carries the movement of massive light. As a result, rather than the Reels advancing on the small smartphone screen, the viewer is made to first perceive the movement of light and sound emitted from the speaker in time with the rhythm, melody, and impact of the transmitted sound. In this way, the exhibition aims to overturn a structure that had been image-centered, so that the image is no longer one that possesses its own inherent purpose but rather a visual appended to support the sound.
