Artistic duo explores power of language in new tech-driven project
Courtesy of Monica Nickolai
Breaking away from their typical large-scale installations, the artistic duo Kimchi and Chips presents their project titled "Unread Characters." This work intertwines neuroscience and technology to delve into the power of language, examining how it is collectively created and the inherent fleeting nature of its meaning.
Upon entering the gallery, viewers see two optical installations made up of lightboxes and lenses that illuminate to form written characters. As viewers move within the gallery, the illuminated characters change in response to their movements. Characters are written on small squares scattered on a small platform. To the left of the optical installations is a video monitor featuring the process of writing the characters onto paper. On the opposite wall, there are two UV prints of the characters and another video monitor of the characters rendered as 3D objects that rotate in various directions.
The Korean-British team’s own cultural confluence shaped "Unread Characters."
In an interview with The Korea Times, British artist Elliot Woods, one half of the Seoul-based duo, explained how language played a role in shaping their combined artistic identity. “We wanted a name that was anti-arrogant," he said. "When we were starting out, it felt like the art world had a lot of inflation of character, and the names of things often become more valuable than the things themselves. And we wanted to combat that a little bit by having this name, which was self-defeating.”
Afaka characters are displayed as part of the "Unread Characters" project displayed by Kimchi and Chips at Daejeon Museum of Art. Courtesy of Monica Nickolai
"Unread Characters" began with Korean artist Mimi Son’s observation of the power imbalance between English and Korean. She researched Ndyuka, a Creole language of the Surinam region in Africa. This language combines the languages of the Indigenous people who escaped enslavement and the region’s European and American colonizers and enslavers. The Ndyuka language is a living historical record of survival, migration and identity. It is written in Afaka script, a writing system currently in danger of extinction.
“Language itself is part of your body," said Woods, who has a master’s degree in physics and an interest in neuroscience. "Your mind doesn't exist inside your body before language. Your mind exists also within language. Language is like a computer within which cultural consciousness occurs.”
Son practiced writing Afaka with typography students, creating more than 30,000 characters. These characters were fed into a machine learning model, which created a spatial “memory” of the characters and programmed a neural network of them as a kind of artificial intelligence.
A closer look at the lenses used for the "Unread Characters" project displayed by Kimchi and Chips at Daejeon Museum of Art. Courtesy of Monica Nickolai
This AI was inserted into an optical installation made of many lenses. The installation tracks viewers' movements within the gallery, which trigger the AI’s “memories” of language, causing written characters to appear in the installation by means of illuminating the lenses.
The way the AI seems to “scatter” the language in response to viewers’ movements reminded the artists of the work of Korean poet Yi Sang. Yi wrote "Crow’s Eye View," a poetry anthology that was published during the 1910-45 Japanese occupation. His work often spatially scrambled language on the page and ignored spacing as a symbol of his frustration with Japanese colonial rule. The syllable blocks of Yi’s poems were fed into the neural network of the second optical installation, which also responds to viewers movements.
The exhibition features a video of the team hand-writing Afaka characters on a monitor, while their handwritten characters are displayed in a stacked arrangement on a platform. “Writing systems are deeply influenced by digital technologies, and we aim to illustrate how this interaction unfolds,” Woods explained.
A video shows someone practicing to write the Afaka script at the "Unread Characters" project displayed by Kimchi and Chips at Daejeon Museum of Art. Courtesy of Monica Nickolai
The interactions between their work and the viewers point out important truths: that the way humans interact together is, as Woods stated, “as a part of a larger organism.”
“Inter-subjectivity means that you create an objectivity in a way through interactions between people, not as an absolute truth that's out there,” he said. “That's always interesting to us, the way in which we humans are part of this intersubjective world, not an objective world. And humans are necessary for making meaning… Meaning exists because of our way of making sense of the world. Without meaning making, the world would be too complicated. It's too confusing. So we invent meaning, and we do that collectively, and then we use that to act, and to think and to live.”
The duo created the work for this exhibition in two stages. When revisiting their existing progress, they created UV prints of the glyphs as well as an animation in which the glyphs are aligned in rows and rotate in 3D animations. The result is a total disconnection from the original meaning of the written characters and in which the characters exist and move free of meaning to most viewers, as the name "Unread Characters" implies.
The name of the group exhibition, "A New Sense of the Shared World," points to the growing awareness of the way our singular sense of identity has transformed, especially post-pandemic. Our collective sense of the world is constantly being filtered through our interactions.
Pieces of paper with Afaka letters are piled on a platform at the "Unread Characters" project displayed by Kimchi and Chips at Daejeon Museum of Art. Courtesy of Monica Nickolai
“Meaning-making is something entirely democratic, and we get to choose what the meaning of things are," Woods said. "And art often is the place where meaning is played around with. There's a lot of plays on meaning. What is the meaning of this material? What's the meaning of these words? What's the meaning of these ideas? How to put them in different relationships? And that play with meaning, as the audience engages with it, involves themselves with it. It's part of the process of making what the meaning will be for the next society. In 10 years' time, 20 years' time, everything might look the same, but it will mean something completely different. Even if, materially, everything's the same, the meaning of things is still up for grabs.”
A poster for the group exhibition "A New Sense of a Shared World," at Daejeon Museum of Art until Sept. 29 / Courtesy of Kimchi & Chips
Kimchi and Chips is known for spectacular large-scale works that combine science with philosophy. These works include "Another Moon," in which they used lasers to construct a sphere of light in the night sky with solar-powered lasers. Another of their works is "Halo," an outdoor artwork that uses 99 mirrors to angle sunlight onto a fog-like mist to create a large, mystical halo. Their works have been highly received internationally by institutions that include the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Somerset House, Ars Electronica, ACC Gwangju, Zeche Zollverein, SXSW and Resonate Festival.
"Unread Characters" is on display at the Daejeon Museum of Art until Sept. 29. Visit kimchiandchips.com for more information.
Monica Nickolai is a writer and artist. Her text-based artwork has appeared at exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and Korea. She currently lives in Daejeon and teaches at Hongik University's Sejong Campus. Visit monicanickolai.com for more information.