WA'AD

2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

18:51 minutes

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

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The absurd condition of human survival under environmental degradation and geonational balkanization is taken as a starting point for WA’AD by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The work’s premise is a confessional narrative emerging from a Palestinian astronaut on a desperate international flight mission to colonize Mars. That there is also an Israeli astronaut on the same mission plays into the complexities of the landed history of ethnic antagonism between Israel and Palestine, which has stretched on for centuries. However, WA’AD takes an immense leap from this historicizing frame, in that it doesn’t try to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instead providing an absurd meditation on the isolated, existential nature of individual relation and difference. The day to day nature of small, human memories and concerns become much of the work’s focus, carried along by its galaxial jazz track. The nature of this narrative inhabitation of a perspective far removed from YHCHI’s respective positionalities again draws a question about the ethics of representation into the frame. But WA’AD presents a character bordering on the realm of science fiction, drawing a parallel between the utopian frame Wa’ad herself eventually espouses, and the digital anonymity that allows similar narratives to circulate online. Subjectivity is explored as an existential condition that pushes the potential for new affinities in states suspended from the context of normative society, though still dependent on geo-national power in order to make its renegade escape. WA’AD asks broad questions about the limits of identity, and the nature of human relation in its inescapability from power in the present moment.

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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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Colors:

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• geopolitics.n.01
• religion.n.01
• power.n.01
• country.n.02
• science_fiction.n.01
• identity.n.01