"*"
2019
installation
h160 x w300 x d150 cm
*(asterisk) is an installation comprised of an armillary
sphere apparatus rotating an apple in 360 degrees and four cameras
omnidirectionally scanning the surface of the apple in real-time.
Computers calculate the similarity between fragmentary images of the
present apple and apples I've eaten before, as if they were my
memory of apples. The computations and compared apple-fragment
images are shown on four displays respectively.
And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
"Nausea" Jean-Paul Sartre
One day in a supermarket, you are surrounded by
mass-produced commodities. Everything is properly and
bureaucratically categorized so that consumers don't get confused in
the ocean of goods. In the fruits aisle, you take an apple by hand,
which is not exceptionally outstanding though, seemingly fine and
you put it into the shopping basket. By the way, did you confirm if
this apple is really an apple? It's a ridiculous question since the
apple was located in the box for apples and you don't need to
classify apple one by one (and of course, it looks like the very
"apple" without peering at it). In that sense, your recognition is
slightly supported by the arrangement of articles in the supermarket.
The similar things can be found oftentimes in ordinary cities, the
differentiation of the gender symbols on the toilet, generic signs
and signals which specify your direction and timing to proceed, and
labels are usually telling you what is located there. Owing to these
designs which indicate particular meaning, our recognition is
tacitly guided and omitted in a way. This automated recognition is
reinforced by continuous experiences, ordinarily being accustomed to
a definite lifestyle (If you are surrounded by nature, obviously it
requires another type of recognition). We don't have much time to
recognize each object in the city-jungle and it's even unnecessary.
When you walk on the pedestrian walkway, you don't need to recognize
every object around you as
YOLO(Real-Time object detection)
does. Otherwise, we're gonna lose control of ourselves by a
numerousness of objects and absolute high resolution of reality.
In one article, it is talked about a hardship which a woman, who is suffering
from Asperger disorder, has gone through. Unlike a healthy person,
she cannot perceive appetite. We normally discern an appetite as a
consistent signal, even though its strength is lightly fluctuating,
depending on one's health condition. A researcher points out the
possibility that this is not because she lacks the specific
conspicuous signal from the brain or certain sensory organ doesn't
work, but she just cannot abstract collective of micro-perceptions
as a macro-meaning, namely, appetite. This discloses that in order
to recognize something, you have to ignore highly detailed
divergence and when you were stuck in a high resolution of reality,
you would possibly lose recognition.
According to British psychologist Louise Barrett, when a
monkey moves only one finger on its hand, it consumes more brain
energy compared to the action of grasping, moving all five fingers
at once. This is a bit counterintuitive. When you move five fingers,
it means you should control more muscles and it seems to require
more exertion of neurons in the brain. Yet in the process of the
development of body structure between muscles in hand and tendon in
the arm, it has evolved as they move naturally as one unit. Since
the motion, grasping is more crucial than moving one finger and
monkeys should take hold of foods and tree branches. Hence our
natural system tends to reduce redundant energy consumption to
function or behave in a more efficient way.
Categorization functions to make it easier to store the
information. By giving terms to forms, "rectangle", "circle" and
"triangle", you can readily memorize them as a pattern instead of
tracing the subtle contour completely. As digitalization enables the
computer to deal with the information as discrete data, human
categorization makes use of the similar methodology for
memorization. This is a quite fundamental capability for us to
survive though. Say, you've found a fruit which is edible and
categorized it or just named it as fruit A and if you cannot
classify fruit A afterward, even though there is a fruit A in front
of you, concerning the classification of biological taxonomy, it
could ruin yourself. Since you cannot distinguish something
beneficial from other objects in a certain circumstance. However,
this categorization includes a downside as well. It scales down the
complexity of the reality and people might forget that categories
themselves are not versatile concepts but arbitrary division to some
degree as rainbow colors consist of different (amount of) colors
depending on the cultural context (in the same manner, gender
spectrum is also dependent on one's background ). Besides that, It
could also work as a reasoning to characterize a certain racial
group and cause fierce discrimination. Yet Nature itself is not
separated(there is no even life and death, the ideas are invented by
a human), you will never be able to see that intact world though.
The reality we can observe is always omitted and simplified more or
less to optimize the reality for human beings.
When you recognize a certain object, you necessarily
fail to catch something in detail. And when you repetitively
experienced categorized recognition, you would not even observe the
objects, since you've already known that without contemplation. One
Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky was aware of this downside of
categorization. In the book "Art as device"(1917), he claims that by
categorizing objects in a repetitive manner, we lose the sensation
of the existence of objects and he calls it Automatization.
After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it. [...] This is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war. [...] And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By "defamiliarization" objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity.
As a technique, "defamiliarization" makes you perceive
an object again, which has become almost transparent to you due to
Automatization. Without bureaucratic categorization of people like
racial groups, gender, nation, age, then the complexity which one
could have would suddenly emerge and you would be obliged to observe
them more precisely. Or while sketching a specific landscape, you
control a pencil with your arm on paper and probe the structure and
the relationship between objects and this could revive their
individuality by laborious perception. Defamiliarization is intended
disorientation. It breaks existing frame though, it doesn't
necessarily constitute a new frame which can be construed, it just
shows its complexity as it is.
The title, *(asterisk) is used for wildcard character in
software and it functions as a placeholder for any characters.
Signal which computers here can deal with is just 8-bit RGB data(0 ~
255) and it has nothing to do with object and ontology which we
have. They are just an array of numerical values. * is entitled for
the representation to become a placeholder for any entities which is
undifferentiated, unrecognized, complex, laborious, and aimed to
procrastinate the categorization to observe the object concretely.
Diversity of the surface of apples which I've ever eaten before is
complicating the categorization "apple" and simultaneously evokes my
memory of apple from a single apple as a collective, a universe of
my memory. One can even consume a word, "diversity" as a symbolic
term without observation of the very object and the consumption of
symbolism could escalate the ignorance of the specific reality as a
noise which is not supposed to pay attention. In this work, apple,
to which certain legendary and religious symbolisms adhere, is
decomposed pictorially and materially to observe object anew and
abolish the conventional categorization.