PACIFIC LIMN
2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) uses locally sourced virtual products such as Adobe Flash animation and Apple’s Monaco or Menlo typeface to create a whimsical and indirect commentary on the psychology of the working class in an information society within postindustrial imperialism. For two months, YHCHI inhabited the economically polarized South of Market neighborhood, where a variety of socioeconomic realities overlap and coexist, from Facebook employees to the homeless. The Flash animation is influenced by realist cinema and depicts the tediousness in commuting by air and ground combined with the kitsch of an “Asia-town” window display. Overlaid with text-like femslash prose in a semi-coherent style of karaoke lyrics, the sensory cacophony disrupts a viewer’s thoughts and alludes to a desensitized boredom mixed with the desires of the alternative persona of a fictional Japanese woman.
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, a partnership between the South Korean artist Young Hae Chang and the American poet Mark Voge, is widely known as a pioneering net art project. However, this label in many ways limits the breadth of their work, which simply took the early internet as a productive medium for a more expansive practice. Their signature, flash-animation form hasn’t varied much since their formation: in a practice parallel to concrete poetry, text-driven narratives are flashed sentence by sentence over a colored backdrop, oftentimes set to jazz compositions. Drawing comparisons to propaganda and advertising strategies, YHCHI draws into an ethical limn between representation and oppression, truth and fiction in the digital era, by way of their inhabitation of perspectives beyond their own positionalities. Rather than propose the internet as a potential realm for the imagination of new narrative futures, pasts, and stories, YHCHI actualizes these practices, the viewer rendered helpless under their visual onslaught: their work is oftentimes difficult to watch, and in its original flash-animation form was not pausable. Harnessing a jazz aesthetic, traditionally a black music of improvisation, YHCHI proposes an unapologetic appropriation in order to realize aesthetic and critical rewards. Increasingly, the world YHCHI constructs has become tenable, any “objective” position compromised as digital ecologies become emergently infected by interests and power, whether for better or worse.
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