The Ghost in the Machine

Ah Jungju transforms, variates, fragments, and loops sounds and images collected from mass media and everyday life, creating video works with a distinctive narrative structure. Jun Sojung constructs nonlinear time-space dimensions to stir up new awareness on the history and the present, or deals with the experience when material borders shift and penetrate our daily senses. A collaborative work by these two artists,The Ghost in the Machine(2021) reveals their interest in linkages and fusions between nature, objects, artificial matters, and machines. The work experiments with the transference and streaming of the senses created when the separate entities are combined. The film shed light on the ‘technical objects’ that stimulate our sensoria—swaying film strips reflecting light on the wall; an air pocket making noises while plummeting to the ground; linear materials taking the wind from a fan; a speaker amplifying the sound of air bubbles in a fish tank—installed in the atrium of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, called Seoul Box. An Jungju & Jun Sojung staged a theatrical situation of objects and machinery orchestrated in the museum like the tissues underneath our skin—muscles, blood vessels, and organs. Cruising through the museum through the lens of cameras affixed to the AI drones and the drones operated by humans, the viewer becomes immersed in the mechanical transformation of different sensations—vision, acoustic, olfactory, speed, and spatial ones that are saved, played and streamed.