Yoon Juli (Chief Curator of Ilmin Museum of Art)

 

Unwavering and Decisive

His works are romantic. It may be because he is the most romantic person in the world. I have witnessed the irreplaceable traces he has inscribed upon the world of art, music, popular culture, and the underground scene over a long period of time, all without losing the heart of an artist. The artist’s heart that I have seen through him is one that is unwavering and decisive unshaken by cynicism, and above all a spirit of perseverance, which does not stop looking at the world as if encountering it for the first time, even in the face of inevitable failure. His works are, in this way, romantic and humane. The awkward words used to describe him will always remain of secondary importance. I feel guilty compressing the earnestness, subtlety, and well-subdued sadness of his work into the word “romantic,” which is too narrow a term, and yet I have difficulty explaining it in words other than romantic. The rhetoric of “romanticism” does not only convey gently heightened emotions. His works also have a cool and rough side. His exhibitions do not hide safely behind typical conventions and they say what they want to say without beating around the bush. The objects and scenes he performs combine somewhat precarious gestures and actions and reveal their vulnerability without adding or subtracting anything, rather than creating a beautiful sense of déjà vu all at once. These sentiments of precariousness and vulnerability lie at the root of his calling his robots “cheap cyborgs.” These aspects are not what we usually expect from technology or machines. He is an engineer who probes how technology for which its perfect end point has vanished operates as a homogeneous force, disappointing both futurists and reactionaries alike.

 

Humans

What is the source of inspiration behind his “cheap” robot? I am reminded of several video works that dominated my childhood. In Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1996), Sita, the main character, taken by an agent of the Empire, witnesses a mechanical soldier fall from the sky. They both fell to the ground from the same place. The mechanical soldiers created to replace humans have long well-equipped arms and shoot explosive beams through a hole in the face. However, after the human orders are executed, they become like a part of nature that is weathered or eroded, repeating actions that are close to meaningless. The new mission discovered by the mechanical soldiers is to lay flowers while tending to the tomb of the Buddha or spending time with wild animals. The first emotion that Sita feels upon encountering the mechanical soldier is not hatred of difference, but compassion for the thing that was destroyed by the fall. The mechanical soldiers battle against the human army to protect Sita, and despite the machines’ overwhelming violence, the robots give the impression that they are closer to humanity than humans. The next scene is of the machine people from Galaxy Express 999 (1977-1979). In Matsumoto Leiji’s (1938-2023) worldview, the desire to become a machine people is an important motive that runs throughout the entire narrative of the work. This desire is intensified or frustrated in the conflict between humans and machine people, and coincidently, fulfilled or overcome with the help of other machine people. Machine people are hybrid robots that have either a machine transplanted into a human body, or conversely, a human mind transplanted into a machine. They are portrayed as beings who transcend humans by gaining a semi-permanent lifespan, and despite some negative aspects, they are considered to be one of the only ways for humans to advance their humanity. Ghost in the Shell (1995)—directed by Oshii Mamoru (1951- )—in which the main character Kusanagi, who chose to hybridize with a machine, is crashed into the world of the “Net” that is different from the past—and before that, Mighty Atom (1952-1968)—Tezuka Osamu’s (1928-1989) worldview drawn at the intersection of machines and humans—are part of the same base of popular culture that lie within the scope of similar ideas. In short, they raise questions about the pure-blooded nature that humans are born with, and paradoxically, view the acquisition of more fundamental traits in the process of becoming closer to a kind of mixture or by-product.

The idiomatic personification of robots rather than supernatural minds or spirits is an interesting stance assumed by twentieth century East Asian popular culture. In contemporary East Asian popular culture, which possesses an inherent subculture context, robots are not unknown beings from another world, scientific disasters or the potential for disaster, or harbingers of terrible end times, but rather something in the vicinity of humanity, or more specifically, by way of adding or subtracting something out of a human being, a subject that makes visible what is absent in the mainstream “pure” human being. One episode of Tezuka Osamu’s monumental work, Phoenix (1954-1988), questions the humaneness of machine people in comparison to clones, the most accurate reproduction of human beings. The discovery of humanity refracted through robots may be a feature that East Asian cosmological traditions share with later generations. Philosopher of technology Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics has been frequently cited in recent discussions. We are accustomed to accepting new technologies as something that is literally new or as an unknown innovation, but if humans are, at the level of being, “things” in a certain state that can be represented as a technological creation or configuration, the acceptance of technology is ultimately related to the restoration of order and morality inherent in human beings. This is consistent with the meaning of Byungjun Kwon’s robots. Just like his robots in the cultural context, Yuk Hui’s theory reads like a philosophical subculture. Although it seems difficult to accept this as a general scientific theory about technology, the possibility that it can be realized first through art and culture as an appropriation of the modern technological system, or may have already been realized, cannot be ruled out. The work that Byungjun Kwon has retrospectively described as his first solo performance was given a title—Small Ones to Have All (2010)—that symbolically encapsulates that very possibility and attitude.

At some point, he wrote the following about robots. Robots are comrades who had each other’s backs in the club scene in the 1990s. Robots are strangers, foreign workers, who urged him to take interest in “non-beings.” Robots are refugees who have lost their coordinates. Robots are drunks. Robots that are assembled from miscellaneous hardware and have lost their purpose appear to have each their own defects. Our comrades went their separate ways and art that did not cater to capital was forgotten. Strangers are repeatedly deported. Hometown has become an obsolete word for everyone. Drunks wander in their dreams and suffer from hangover. For some reason, robots appear to wander like ghosts unable to take one side or another. His robots operate based on the same ethics as humans. And the moment they come into conflict with a universally legitimate promised order (“truth” for Byungjun Kwon) or episteme (philosophical high culture for Yuk Hui), they embrace and awaken each other’s malfunction.

 

Faces

In This is Me (2013), he uses himself as a medium. This is Me projects a constantly changing “face image” using a light projector after painting his face white like an empty projection screen or canvas. The image of the face overlaid on his face is then displayed again on the wall behind where he is positioned though a video device. Facing the blinding light of the mechanical device, he sometimes looked as impassive as a machine, and sometimes painfully elevated. He appeared to have become the medium. The issue of identity that This is Me deals with is something that always returns and is repeated in contemporary art, but through mechanical recognition procedures, recording, and screening using facial recognition, mapping, and image generation technology, rather than simply expressing the confusion felt by an individual artist, his work became a performance that presented the human face as a device or the representation of humanity in a hybrid state looked upon as a device. Although it gives form to a simple idea, it appears to have been an important opportunity for him to clarify his position in the field of art. The Byungjun Kwon of Another Moon Another Life (2014) orchestrates his work more like a neutral technician. Another Moon, Another Life was released around the same time as This is Me, and as the title suggests, it places the “I” at the boundary of the theatrical form and builds up a complex stage apparatus. As a director and performer, he uses various elements on the stage and fuses traditional theatrical elements with media technology. He looks like a foreign substance transplanted onto the stage. And here, as the steam sprayed by the machine takes the place of the role of the face, the “I” presents the possibility of a new mechanical face in relationship with the foreign substance accumulated on stage. It appeared to suggest the emergence of the robot as a meta-subject for Byungjun Kwon.

Meanwhile, shortly after returning from the Netherlands, he performed Six Mannequins (2011). This performance was a collaboration with his long-time comrade, the musician Dalparan, and as such, it allows us to look more closely at his present and past as an artist. What is the difference between mannequins and robots? The mannequins used in Six Mannequins were limited modifications of ready-made products unlike the robots, which are closer to handicrafts. However, the fact that they are mass-produced products stamped out in a factory does not lead directly to the special interest in the mannequin. Mass production is too common a material condition to determine the aesthetic uniqueness of a work today, and its plurality does not necessarily drive an art work into one side or the other, whether good or bad. Compared to robots, mannequins mirror young, beautiful bodies as the shell of consumption that adheres closely to the product without any gaps. It is ironic that the mannequin, faithful to the eroticism of the body, can look like a dead body or induce a sense of the grotesque, but in short, it appears to have been a stopover reached by Byungjun Kwon as a musician while trying to make sound with foreign substances as an artist. Kwon and Dalparan amplified the otherness that the mannequin instinctively evokes and imploded it as if by accelerating it, adding gestures that cannot easily be embodied by a mannequin and overlaying it with indescribable dissonance and sounds resembling screams. The ruptured mannequin, having exceeded the product’s threshold, was collected by them as the wreckage of a familiar sound. At this time, Byungjun Kwon’s experiment was to theatrically declare the first-person “artist” of Small Ones to Have All at the furthest distance from himself, while at the same time disturbing the directness of the word “theatrical.” On the other hand, in Club Golden Flower (Alternative Space LOOP, 2018), the robot projected his purposeful body is made to entertain feelings of sorrow. Like the remains of the mechanical soldier that has crashed to the ground seen by Sita, the robot is a kind of blank face, pupils where the splintered remnants of an industry or a commodity have fallen. Without depicting humans specifically, it evokes the common customs and nostalgia that once belonged to humans. Where is the place we crashed before we broke into pieces? At this stage, his robot passes through the database of local popular culture, and presents a more vernacular aspect than that of the mannequin as a shell for the human-commodity. Gil’s Doll (2006) and Out of body Mannequin (2011) can be referenced on that route.

 

Light and Sound
Even though Club Golden Flower took the form of an art exhibition, his series on robots were generally closer to a theatrical play with robots on stage. Lyrics of Cheap Cyborg 2 was selected as an invited work for the opening commemorative festival at the Daehakro Theater Quad, which introduces experimental plays, in 2022. As a sound technician and engineer, and as a member of a rock band that left a radical mark, it is no exaggeration to say that his work is fundamentally based on performance that borders on the theatrical. In his works, the expression “performance,” or more concretely, “robot comprehensive performance,” or as classified by media specificity, “robot mechanical theater” have all been used interchangeably. Regardless of the theoretical approach, he does the work of a screenwriter and director. His work induces a theatrical experience, offering the feeling of entering a scene on stage. Coincidently, saying that his work is theatrical does not appear to be a great compliment in contemporary art. There seems to be an instinctive fear of theatricality among curators, critics and so-called institutional experts. Sometimes this fear feels like an inherited defense technique passed down to some part of contemporary art to protect its genetic specificity from the characteristics of the same species from which it is derived. Thus, the “indifference” with which he deals with theatricality ends up making contemporary art and the museum, its temple, uncomfortable.

Byungjun Kwon’s most striking theatrical element is the use of shadows. Most of his robot series create shadows with artificial light. Here, curators and critics already find themselves at a loss. In so far as the shadow is subordinated to the object and seen as a passive support, it brings up the memory of classical philosophy devaluing classical art as an inferior representation. This is because it is a form of visuality that modern art avoids in that the support is an obscure illusion and gives rise to a groundless “feeling.” Moreover, the robot, chosen as the main character in the spotlight, is mistaken for the personification of an object, causing trouble once again—within the upheaval of new materialism, the personification of an object will be read as a worn out symbol of the art of the past. However, the shadow is not simply a theatrical element that stirs up a “feeling.” For example, if we pay attention to the fact that the robot in Club Golden Flower is a luminous body with a lantern grafted onto its face, the robot’s shadow makes visible the connectivity that organizes “the construct that includes itself, including itself.” Also, artificially enhanced lighting is an autobiographical symbol of power, self-consciousness, and pain in that it is the performance industry’s way of objectifying something. Therefore, the artificial light in his play is the robot’s prosthetic body, extended like another substance, composing a cluster of mechanical devices. The robot in the Korea Artist Prize 2023 repeats the political gesture that overheats the the human world’s networks, such as the ritual prostration, sambo ilbae (three steps, one bow). At the same time, however, the robot is broken down by light and the white cube into the movement of things or machines. What is maximized here is not the double representation or illusion of space through the mobilization of shadows, but the strange experience of materialization in which bodies and prosthetic bodies are mixed and scattered in uniform waves on the wall.

In his plays, sound is a special indicator. Unlike the experience of seeing or reading, listening has been regarded as a mysterious and individual experience. For modern people, the phonetic is the logos that needs to be overcome, and for ancient people, tone and scale were the forms connecting an indispensable ontology to the human world. People no longer believe that discerning “good” sounds is related to verifying the order of the times. In certain respects, technology and devices have dismantled sound. Today, all hearing becomes a broken code and inevitably passes through mechanical processes. Conversely, it means that the mechanical processes must reassemble the sound. For Byungjun Kwon, contemporary hearing is an exploration that embraces the power of these devices. The work of creating sound in a play that traverses space— Gyeongwon Line Marc (2014)—the work of recording and deciphering the beat frequency of a bell—Sobbing Bells (2015)—or the work of using a piano that can no longer be called a piano to intervene in the cityscape—Song for Taipei (2016)—all include the characteristic of sound as an indicator, the workings of technology, and concerns about incorporating performance.

 

The Forest of History

Collecting and editing sound came from his personal experience. Witnessing the “third impact” of ideology on campus in the early 90s, he lost his sense of direction and relied on sound. There were new deaths everywhere overshadowing the meltdown and collapse of the harsh old system. The desire for liberation that flared up in people was a harbinger of freedom that dominated all criteria. With the standard-bearers of the revolution responding to change faster than anyone else, the slogans dispersed and only sounds remained. Perhaps the sense of sound channeled through headphones at the end of an already worn out era was for him the only surviving sense of history. In his first presentation of Forest of Subtle Truth I (2017), this small ember-like sound remained like a murmur. This sound, which is like the stage whisper by an alienated individual or the sibilant whisper of history, is transformed into the sound of ideology, the owner which can no longer be known—Forest of Subtle Truth 3: Gyodong Island Soundscape (2018)—or the sound of refugees and migrants—Forest of Subtle Truth 2 (2018, 2019) and Forest of Subtle Truth 4: Lullabies of Multicultural Families (2019). Today, his robots gather in the lights with “some dozing off” and “some coughing from colds.” Like a scene drawn from the stanza of a poem, they evoke the most common image of the people, disciplining themselves to be useless, as each in their own way of being. However, the Forest of Subtle Truth is not just a home for humanoid robots that metaphorically represent humans, or a tomb-like resting place secured for them. In the forest that he has blanketed with sound, robots and humans are shadows that wander and struggle within their own channels. How are we to call that history again? Now everyone too easily says our narrative is over. They say that someone among us changed sides. Is that enough? If there is nothing more to commemorate, what trace is left in this place? He seems to want to talk about the stains that are still on us and will not easily go away. He is as unwavering and decisive as ever. His works are humane and romantic.

 

Kwak Yung Bin

 

 

Aporia of “Authentic A Cappella Music”

The term “a cappella”—literally “in the style of the chapel” or “in the church” in Italian—refers to a form of playing or performance that involves only the human voice without instrumental accompaniment. This musical form, which most of us could have heard at least once in high school, college, or church, or have experienced while taking a shower with no awareness whatsoever, has finally escaped the tiny confines of devoted music aficioados since the 1990s, when the American black vocal group called BoyzIIMen gained global popularity. Through a series of meandering occasions, I got involved in an a cappella group myself. Our groups was fortunate enough to sell nearly 400,000 copies of our debut album and release a few more before I left to study abroad. It was during this period when I came across the existence of a broad “a cappella scene” in the English-speaking world. The most striking thing I encountered then was the debate over how much artifice should be allowed in a cappella music. At stake was the idea that since a cappella itself excludes instrumental accompaniment, a song or album by a group with overly mechanical sound effects could not be considered a cappella. This argument was soon forgotten, however, as there is no recording without machines. If we remove the non-human elements to argue that only purely human voices constitute “authentic a cappella music,” then no recordings should be made, and we end up with the doomed self-contradiction that the songs of people living in different regions, countries, and continents cannot be heard except in person on the spot. The debate in question is absurd from the outset, in the sense that the phenomenon of sound itself is inaudible without the medium or transmission mediums such as air and space. This is not unlike the fact that the dynamic sound effects in movies like Star Wars, especially in battle scenes taking place in the vacuum of outer space, where there is no air, do not make sense in principle. Sound is inherently inseparable from its media. Allowing any sound to be made and heard in the last analysis, media amounts to the sound’s ultimate condition of possibility. Reverberations of this realization have continued to resonate in my exploration of the medium’s relationship to art in general, beyond the seven years of choir conducting at a small church while studying in the U.S.

The exhibition of Byungjun Kwon, the Winner of the Korean Artist Prize 2023, serves to summon this long-standing thread of memory, both private and public. It is not unrelated to the fact that this exhibition, and his entire body of work, is organized around two main axes: sound and machines. Let’s take the voices that have become familiar amid the acceleration of the AI frenzy since last year. Beyond the cover of the K-Pop sensation NewJeans’s hit “Hypeboy,” which sounded like it was sung by Bruno Mars, or the American musician Weeknd’s “Starboy,” which must have been sung by BTS’s Jungkook, there are various versions of BIBI’s hit song “Bam Yang Gang,” which made virtually everyone think of the superstar IU and comedian Park Myung Soo even when they did not sing it. These voices highlight how the so-called “natural voices,” once considered unique to humans or specific individuals, have become more indistinguishable from the artificial than ever before. Clunky rather than smooth, more manual than automated, Kwon’s works appear far removed from these cutting-edge, post-human sounds.¹ At the same time, however, his work does not maintain an intimate relationship with “natural voices or sounds” either. Paradoxically this remains a point that has been consistently overlooked in the emphasis on his ongoing interest in so-called “minorities,” such as Yemeni refugees and Korean multicultural families. To be sure, that he conceived of robots as the vanishing point of these heterogeneous beings, the “strangest stranger,” and presented them in this exhibition as “minorities and companions in human society,” recalls the self-evident fact that refugees and migrants are heterogeneous. Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue that refugees and migrants are literally “mechanical.” Mechanical things are heterogeneous, but not all heterogeneous things are mechanical. One must not confuse the two, for then we hastily reduce the entire construct that Kwon has been meticulously crafting and expanding for more than two decades to a crude statement calling for “accepting the Other.”

This is not unrelated to the fact that, albeit often conflated with “music,” sound is a larger category, and that machines, or automatons, are also often thought of as “humanoids,” i.e. robots based on human form and function, yet irreducible to them. This somewhat simple stipulation harbors important implications in correcting the biased response to the exhibition focusing mainly on the representation of robots² and capturing the broader resonance of Kwon’s oeuvre. This is not to say that robots are insignificant, but that the intrinsic relationship between the music in the expanded sense of the term, fed back through the concept of sound, and the mechanical in Kwon’s works must be grasped much more rigorously. For instance, it is true that John Cage’s 4:33 is the most famous example of the silence or “impossibility of perfect silence” that suggests sound beyond the narrow confines of music. Perhaps more relevant to the discussion of Kwon’s work, however, is the poignant recollections of Philip Glass (b.1937), a leading minimalist composer and film composer whose work ranges from the experimental ethnographic film Koyaanisqatsi (1982) to Hollywood films such as The Truman Show (1998) and The Hours (2000) to Park Chan-wook’s The Stoker (2013).

 

Bob Dylan, Philip Glass, or Byungjun Kwon

In 1967, shortly after graduating from the Juilliard School and spending three years in Paris, Glass returned to New York City. “The biggest thing I heard,” Glass admitted, turned out to be the “amplified music at the Fillmore East.”³ The Fillmore East, then a popular Rock and Roll venue, played music by Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa, among others, and he became “totally enamored with the sight and sound of a wall of speakers vibrating and blasting out high-volume, rhythmically driven music.” Of course, the watershed moment and impact of the amplified sound of the Rock and Roll had already come two years earlier. It was in July 1965, when Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Festival and played his 1964 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster. As is well-known, many fans felt utterly betrayed by Dylan at the time. The audience, feeling that Dylan had abandoned the image of a leading figure in “folk music” that he had cultivated during his two previous back-to-back festival appearances, expressed their anger with loud boos and insults. It is intriguing to note that the audience’s negative reaction was not unrelated to the fact that the lyrics of the songs, deemed central to folk music, were barely audible due to the amplified sound of the electric guitar.⁴ Folk-blues guitarist and music historian Elijah Wald even elevates the event to the watershed moment that split America’s 1960s in two. With Lyndon Johnson implicating the U.S. deep into the Vietnam War and the rise of “black power” rendering the whiteness of the civil rights movement acutely visible, the “communal feelings” of the first half of the 1960s had effectively imploded. It was at this precise juncture in which Dylan, then widely regarded as the head of that emotional community, exploded it, in terms of a flat-out, if compressed, rejection of the imposed role.⁵ This signifies that the overall effect of the amplification of mechanical sound on classical music lovers and folk music fans alike went far beyond the rupture of the core components of music, i.e., melody, harmony, and lyrics.

For example, Glass’s early works Music in Fifths and Music in Similar Motion were composed between June and December 1968, the year after he was busy frequenting Fillmore East. As with much of his work, they are often summarized in terms of mathematical structures and patterns between pitches, particularly in terms of addition and subtraction. Without denying this aspect, Glass nonetheless underscores that “a major part of the impact of the music comes through the amplification itself,” raising “the threshold experience to a higher level.” To those accustomed to later recordings capitalizing on the grand piano’s crystal clear sound, it may sound surprising. Still, Glass memorably recalls that “[t]here was a grunginess to them that came out of the technology that was available at the time— the electric pianos and the big, oversized boom-box speakers.”⁶ Grunge? The 1990s alternative rock of the “dirty” “Seattle sound” that combined punk rock and heavy metal, epitomized by legendary bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and, most notably, Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana? I don’t know how many people can imagine Philip Glass’s compositions sound like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Still, the mechanical sound that came out of the speakers’ amplifiers crossed the “threshold” of classical music in the narrow sense of the term.⁷

Repeatedly emphasizing “the new dimension added to the music by amplification,”⁸ Glass reminds us that “rock,” with its mechanized amplified sounds, was not considered “music” in the classical music world. Adding the simplicity of rock music’s bass lines as another “minus” factor, and by juxtaposing this simplicity with Indian music, Glass proactively redefines his own musical identity formation process. To him, the “rhythmic intensity” of Indian music, which he encountered through Nadia Boulanger, the “musician’s musician,” and Ravi Shankar,⁹ another master he studied with during his time in France, was not unlike that of rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll, a novel music form he met in his native country through this bizarre detour, became “a formal model” while “the technology became an emotional model.”¹⁰ This is a significant statement, not only for his oeuvre, which is often summarized or dismissed in terms of the dry structural play of “minimalism,”¹¹ but also for a more nuanced listening to Kwon’s work.

In fact, as Kittler’s exquisite observation rightly suggests (“Rock songs sing of the very media power which sustains them.”),¹² rock and roll is a mechanical and electronic prosthesis at its core. Just as a person who breaks or loses his or her glasses practically becomes blind, rock music, when reduced to melody and chords, stripped of the distortion and volume of guitars amplified to the point of tearing speakers, is no longer rock music to anyone. In this sense, it is worth noting that in 1971, Glass hired Kurt Munkasci, who would later become the sound engineer for the Philip Glass Ensemble and Glass’s film scores, and wanted him “to reproduce [sound] as loud as possible, but very cleanly, without distortion.”¹³ For, taking a rock-inspired sound and pushing the volume to the threshold of classical music while eliminating distortion is to open oneself up to the putatively plausible accusation that one is neither Classical nor Rock music. On the one hand, this can be seen as a move that is mindful of falling into the trap of mere formalism or instrumental fetishization, as in the case of Yngwie Malmsteen’s “baroque metal,” where classical music was played on electric guitar, which was later easily replaced by Vanessa May’s electric violin and Pachelbel’s canon played on gayageum.

The trajectories of Dylan and Glass, who used mechanical instruments and electronic sounds to transform the status and character of folk and classical music respectively, provide a relevant point of contact for the discussion of Kwon’s work. It is also not unrelated to the fact that this period coincides with the historical genesis of “sound art,” which was beginning to establish itself in art galleries rather than concert halls.¹⁴ This encounter, however, is fraught with historical parallax and ironies. The fact that the electric guitar—with which Dylan split the 1960s into half like, if you will, Jesus did the Red Sea beyond folk music—and the Rock music—which for Glass was a source of liberation for classical music—have in the meantime become a symbol and genre of an industry with a legacy that should not be treated lightly or overlooked, now weighed heavily on Kwon. This awareness that he was not “a musician who wanted to maintain… the tradition of Rock and Roll… and to keep his colors endlessly fresh”¹⁵ is largely overlooked in many discussions that uncritically link Kwon’s musical activities to his work in the art world.

The 1990s, when he was active in punk rock and modern rock, was a time when the aftermath of “grunge rock,” which Glass emorably evoked, reached Korea. His subsequent musical experiments, however, were marked by a keen awareness of the historical status and limitations of rock music, such as his move from distorted, guitar-driven rock to “minimal house music” with Dalpalan, his fellow traveller before becoming a well-known film music composer. Even this attempt that culminated in the album Mozo Boy [Fake Boy] (2004), I suspect, was perhaps ultimately deemed by him to be inevitably subsumed into the category of “music” as part and parcel of the industry. The well-known fact that he discontinued all his musical activities in Korea to study sonology at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and ultimately, worked at STEIM, a unique organization that builds experimental instruments for artists, is worth mulling over in this precise sense. For his work has consistently intervened at the point where the music or instrument is fossilized as part of a petrified tradition and heritage, an element in service to a narrow sense of “music.”

 

Détournements and Dérives of Image and Sound

Hybrid Piano (2013), for instance, is a work created two years after his return to Korea in 2011. It looks like a piano but sounds like a string instrument. It is the result of modifying an abandoned and weathered piano in such a way that the strings oscillate through the slightest tremor of the springs. As an extension of Windbell and Landscape (2012), which hung from the ceiling of the exhibition space, Kwon’s performance of Sobbing Bells (2015) at the Bell Museum in Jincheon was also an attempt to create sound by making the bells resonate using vibrating elements rather than the usual method of striking them. In this manner, Kwon’s instruments produce their own sounds. Nonetheless they are no longer something that anyone can play like a guitar or keyboard. The former effectively renders the skills of a pianist, acquired through years of practice, obsolete, and the latter makes the know-how of hitting bells acquired by humans evaporate, however momentarily. Let me take this one step further. Song for Taipei (2016) is a performance work that utilizes the “hybrid piano.” It was performed in an exhibition space nestled in the mountains outside of Taipei. Foregrounding the timbre of his modified piano, Kwon transmitted eight compositions composed on site to a panoramic view of Taipei in hourly increments. Played through two horn speakers on the rooftop of the exhibition center, the music was oriented toward the city of Taipei, mixing percussion and strings, as well as digital and analog axes. Did the audience in Taipei really hear this music, however? Was he not transmitting sounds to nobody, with on an instrument no one except him could possibly play?

Seen in this light, Kwon’s work may seem like the daydream of an idealist. However, Kwon’s interventions, which seem to maintain the exterior of the given instruments, yet oscillate between percussion and string instruments, dislocating the place and position assigned to each, are reminiscent of the practices of the Situationists, a group of artists active in France after World War II. Not unlike Guy Debord’s friend who once wandered around the Harz region of Germany with a map of London open, following the directions on the map,¹⁶ they (in)famously sought to reconstruct reality through interventions such as giving old movies the wrong subtitles or leaving symphonies untouched but changing their titles. Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, has repeatedly stated that this iconic British group, widely regarded as the progenitor of the genre of punk rock, grew out of his study of the Situationists.¹⁷ Kwon’s works, which coincidentally began in punk rock, no less resonates with the modes of intervention that the Situationists labeled “dérive” and “détournement.”

Take Forest of Subtle Truth (2017–19) series, a crucial centerpiece of the exhibition. First presented in the 2017 exhibition Revolution is Not Televised at Arko Museum of Art, the series has been transformed four times, moving from the Seoul Museum of Art (Song of Yemeni Refugees) to Gyodongdo (Gyodong Island Soundscape), before concluding with Lullabies of Multi-cultural Family. In the case of Song of Yemeni Refugees, the tranquil surroundings of the museum were juxtaposed with the songs of their homeland that remain in the refugees’ memories, while in Gyodong Island Soundscape the sounds of the South Korean/DPRK propaganda broadcast collided with the frequencies of the beautiful landscape of Gyodong Island, creating a historical beat phenomenon.¹⁸ Which is more “real”: the landscape we see or the sounds we hear? Kwon’s sound works consistently ask this question without privileging one or the other. The series continued in 2021 with Neverland Soundland: Byungjun Kwon—A Sound Walk at the Children’s Gallery of the Busan Museum of Art, where, as in this exhibition, viewers and audience members wearing headphones could hear lullabies sung in the languages of Vietnam, China, Russia, Uzbekistan, and the Philippines. Anyone from these countries would have felt at home, but the question here is more about whether a lullaby sung in a language one cannot understand could “work” in an exotic landscape that is foreign to him or her.

The question of whether this characteristic of the work, in which images and sounds “bypass” each other and “drift” away from each other through a series of machines, including the headphones, is fully realized in the exhibition, is unfortunately difficult to answer in the affirmative. The auditory sensation of listening through headphones may have remained intact, but the heterogeneity created by the objects in the previous works in their dissonance with reality or natural space—or “objection,” as I will discuss later—seemed to function as “art” in the usual sense when confined to the dark ivory space of a museum gallery. Doesn’t it justify the robot-focused exhibition space and the audience’s somewhat biased reaction to it?

 

Light Looking After Darkness

For the time being, let me put aside this question, which we will return to shortly, and focus on Kwon’s robots. Despite their deceptive simplicity, they have some interesting features to ponder. The most impressive is their heads. It is familiar in Korea as a device for lighting, often called a “lantern” or “flash light.” The problem is that it is not attached to the robot’s head, but forms the head itself. Put differently, in these robots, the light replaces the face or brain, and there seems to be no function for it other than literal “lighting” or illumination.

This means that the robot’s movements, or “behavior” itself, is not “automatic.” It doesn’t have a brain or computer to calculate and determine its movements. The fact that its behavior is not autonomous suggests that it lacks autonomy, which means that it is dependent rather than independent. Then on what are they dependent? Primarily people. They are slow and clunky rather than fast and exquisite, but even their clunky movements are the product of the care of the human drivers who reside in the exhibition center. As human-dependent machines, Kwon’s robots are not fully automatic, but dependent. These human-dependent machines usually play the role of “tool” or “means.” A car takes us where we want to go, a printer prints the documents we need. But what purpose do Kwon’s human-dependent machines serve? This is also a question of what kind of “tools” they are, and it’s not easy to answer. The Dancing Ladders, for example, operate in a way that ignores the raison d’être of ladders, helping someone to climb to higher heights. They appear to be going forward, but in fact they are just going back and forth on a set track or going around a circular track. In this sense, their normal operation is already malfunctioning, and they are “useless.” This suggests that they may not be “tools.” Let’s recall that they are not fully “autonomous” but “dependent,” and that they do not have a computer or a brain. This question is then posed not to themselves but to a human being, in this case, the artist Byungjun Kwon. What makes him operate these useless machines? Why did he create them in the first place? Neither autonomous nor tools, what is their “raison d’être”?

It is at this point that we must recall that their heads are “illuminating devices.” Again, their head is merely a device for illumination. What does it illuminate? According to Kwon, they illuminate other robots. He calls them “half beings” for they are “one-armed,” and ultimately, through illumination, they become “complete” as two-armed beings. At this point, many readings usually jump to a concern for “minorities.” What is truly interesting here, however, is the fact that the perfection in question is achieved only in “shadow.” They now literally “look perfect.” Does this mean that their perfection is not real? Maybe. But more importantly, it is ironic that the ultimate goal of robots in substance is to create “perfect shadows.” They don’t “merge” like, say, Transformers. Then, no matter how perfect they are, aren’t they nothing but shadows, not the “real thing” after all? This counter-question makes sense, but it only does as long as one fails to consider the self-evident fact that a lantern is usually considered an item to prepare for some kind of emergency. The emergency in question, as you may have noticed, occurs usually at night rather than during the day, especially when the lights that make human life possible are not properly functioning. As emergency items, lanterns are used to dispel the darkness. Kwon’s lantern, however, is used to create shadows rather than dispel darkness. In other words, it turns his general “raison d’être” upside down. How about calling it “light looking after darkness”?

 

The Situationist Future

This leads us to another related question: what is light and darkness to a non-human robot? Just as the phrase “your face looks dark today” is not a compliment, “light and darkness” is a conceptual pair that implies the opposing values of positive and negative. As a matter of fact, Kwon provides a somewhat negative answer to a comment that light and darkness coexist in his work. Rather, he confessed, the robots in his work are the product of his own failed attempts to create some form of community, exhausted from his relationships with people.¹⁹ Again, it’s not that I can’t understand the desire to label his robots as “minorities” here. However, Kwon’s work facillitates prudence rather than impatience.

In this light. his latest work From Cheongju to Kyiv (2022) must be scrutinized in detail. As the title suggests, the work is set against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine following the Russian invasion. At a time when interest in foreign wars has all but evaporated, the artist confessed to feeling that such indifference is not unlike the indifference prevalent in Korean society itself. It was in this context that he decided to collect the sounds of construction sites, where the crunching of wood and roaring of machinery have become commonplace, instead of the direct sounds of war. As the headphone-wearing viewer approaches a building with lots of windows and glass, the sound of glass shattering and spilling out is mapped, or glass on the floor breaking in time with their steps. These sounds, like being drenched when walking under a water tank, are of course virtual. Still, this virtuality should not be mistaken for mere imagination or a matter of “empathy” for Ukrainians suffering from war.

More subtly and crucially, it is worth noting that the sounds in question are detached from both the actual places of Cheongju and Kyiv. The glass in the storage building of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Cheongju is not broken, the water tank is far from leaking, and the sounds do not simulate the actual situation in Kyiv. Does this mean that we can only estimate the disaster in Kyiv through the hypothetical disaster in Cheongju? Yet this presumption begs a question: can people in other parts of Korea, such as Seoul, Busan, or Jeju, immediately relate to a hypothetical disaster in Cheongju? Just because we are Korean, do we empathize with disasters in different cities and regions? Or rather, has the situationist’s “detour” and “drift” not already been accomplished in a paradoxical sense? What if Debord’s friend, who flipped through a map of London and followed the directions to the Harz region of Germany, has been replaced by a Tesla shareholder who flipped through a real estate map of New York or Berlin from Seoul? Are we truly living in community, or has it already been shattered into pieces?

 

Heterotopia and Psychogeography

The French filmmaker Robert Bresson once distinguished between conventional cinema, or “cinema,” and what he called “cinématographe,” writing that in the latter “a sound should never come to the rescue of a picture, and a picture should never come to the rescue of a sound.²⁰ It should be emphasized in this sense that Kwon’s entire exhibition (mal)operates within this separation between image and sound. The numerous robots that catch the viewer’s eye operate in strict separation from the series Forest of Subtle Truth (2017–19), which is responsible for the axis of sound. The ceiling-suspended Windbell and Landscape (2012) only further emphasizes this disjunction.

His previous work, Self-sounding Town Resonant Village (2019), is perhaps the most effective at allaying any misgivings this separation might suggest. The artist’s specially designed headphones are designed to mix one’s own sound with the sound of the other depending on the physical distance. And the audience is invited to exchange sounds by bowing their heads in acknowledgment. Considering that the headphones serve to separate the individual from others rather than fuse them together, this is quite impressive. Nonetheless, the work no less presents the self-evident irony that this beautiful resonance is achieved solely through the medium of headphones. This point is not to be missed.

In retrospect, it wasn’t until 2017 that he began using headphones as a major element of his work. The exhibition at the Arko Museum was organized around sound, and with more than 10 teams working together, there was a problem. For the gaseous, wispy nature of sound implied that each sound leaked across the boundaries of the space and interfered with the others. While the original idea was to circumvent this difficulty, the function and implications of headphones in Kwon’s works would later become more and more prominent. In fact, poet and architect Sungho Ham, in an impressive essay on Kwon’s oeuvre, points out that “Kwon’s spaces can be called “non-spatial specificity” as they are not fixed in any particular location,” before concluding that “[t]he sound of the headset that erases the physical location is the most important aspect of Byungjun Kwon’s work.”²¹ This assessment is intriguing, but it also raises questions. Aren’t all headphones de-locating and re-locating? Where do the people laughing and talking loudly while wearing Bluetooth earphones on the subway or street actually exist? Kwon’s headphones’ unique location recognition function is interesting in this regard. He uses RTK (Real Time Kinematics) technology rather than the GPS we are used to, and this allows him to operate what we might call “heterotopian sound art.” As you may recall, the characteristic Foucault called “most essential to heterotopias” is that they are “an objection to all other spaces.”²² In this sense, Kwon’s headphones are distinguished from both the way the sound installed in a particular place works when the viewer approaches it, and the way the viewer is freed from the place through the headphones. Kwon’s headphones are a way of ensuring the autonomy of the individual viewer as they move from place to place, but also activating sounds that are not inherent to a particular place, but are differentiated from it and “contest” it.

This “dissent” also extended to vast physical space. We will have a serious night” by Ghost Theater (2021/2022), a performance work that took place in the Namsan Hanok Village and Hongdong Reservoir in Hongseong. Operating with a radius of 2–3 kilometers, rather than in the gallery space, which is usually only a few tens of meters, this performance work amounts to a full-fledged evocation of what the Situationists called “psychogeography.” The artist released all sorts of sloppy robots, which loosely filled the main exhibition space of MMCA, into the local neighborhood. As Sungho Ham points out, they all looked like “cheap artificial humans”—“one-armed, oneeyed, drunkards,” as he puts it—and one could trace them all the way back to his earlier work, Burning Eyes of Lonely Wanderer (2011). As the title—a riff on the lyrics of the theme song—suggests, the Japanese anime Galaxy Express 999, which Kwon used as his main reference point, is itself a story about an android in search of eternal happiness.

 

In the Beginning was a Medium/Machine

Here we get to confront the fact anew that Kwon has always been working with machines or mechanical things. One that comes to mind is A Small One to Have All (2010). For this performance, which Kwon described as his “first full-scale solo performance,” he prepared the following artist’s statement

I would like to talk about why a person who experiments with new gestures and performance possibilities offered by a new instrument, and who finds more joy in playing an instrument on stage with someone and communicating with music, cannot help but stand on stage with a machine.

Why was the machine indispensable to Kwon? Why did he want to talk about “why he cannot help but stand on stage with a machine”? First, as discussed above, it is worth recalling that Kwon was a musician who worked in a wide range of genres, from experimental punk rock to minimal house music. Before he became active in the art scene, he was active in the Korean pop music scene, appearing on public radio, and machines were integral to both his performance and his work. Of course, one might counter that there must have been “unplugged music.” Still, as an extension of the “authentic a cappella music” discussed in the introduction, this dissent cannot escape the irony of the question: “Does a recorded unplugged performance remain analog?”²³ In a world where the global music industry has been increasingly reorganized around streaming service, the status and implications of the listening experience that accompanies a recording, even if it is played on vinyl, are given relative to its relationship to the

“digital infrastructure.” The naïve attempt at neatly distinguishing between “digital” and “analog” and “natural” and “artificial” needs to be further scrutinized as it is directly related to the implications that Kwon’s work has been (mal) operating in detail.

Let’s consider Windbell and Landscape (2012), which was placed in the air in front of the viewers entering the exhibition. This work utilizes the Pyungyeong, or Chinese lithophone, a traditional instrument with 16 notes. Not only is it remotely controlled, however, the sound itself is electrically modulated. The source is clearly analog, but the sound it produces is not. We must not be lazy enough to think of it instead as a simple synthesis of analog and digital. While Glass sought to transform classical music intrinsically and structurally through mechanically amplified or modulated rock sounds and simple bass lines, Kwon, as we have seen, allows image and sound, digital and analog, human and non-human, to “bypass” each other and “drift” away from each other through mechanical and electronic means.

For example, the main difference between most of the machines in the main exhibition hall with their “lantern” heads and the “six mannequins” in the right corner of the exhibition revolves around their heads and faces. The latter, with its scaled-down full-body mannequins and a normal-sized mannequin head, is a “humanoid” that iconographically immitates the human form. Of course, you can find a head on the former. However, it is no different than, say, identifying an insect in tersm of “head-thorax-belly” or mistaking the rounded bulge of an octopus’s body, which is actually an abdomen, for a human head.²⁴ This constitutes an important marker for the head, or more precisely, the face, is usually perceived as the most important plane of the human “interface.” Recall the so-called “uncanny valley” phenomenon or the sci-fi movie Arrival, where aliens pay a sudden visit to Earth. In fact, one of Kwon’s earliest works, InterFace (2010), radically questions the identity of the face, or more precisely, the relationship between the face and (vocal) sound: seven men and women (the “dirty sound orchestra”) with magnetic sensors and magnets attached to their eyebrows and cheeks make ridiculous facial expressions under the direction of a conductor, while the sounds the audience hears are more like frogs, toads, or birds, electronically modulated. The “ridiculousness” of this work is not unrelated to the gap between the face and the voice, which is modulated by a machine.²⁵

Relevant here is his earlier performance work, This is Me (2013). It is a representative example of his overall concern with the elements of the (non-human) face as well as the (vocal) sound, in the sense that it simultaneously engages with the elements of the (non-human) face, a concern that extends to this exhibition. The performance begins with a whistle from the artist seated in a chair, who has the camera read a drawing of a face on paper, which is then recognized by a facial recognition program as the basis for mapping the face. His face is then projected onto a canvas of white powder coating, onto which the faces of celebrities such as Nam June Paik and George Bush, Marilyn Monroe and Kim Gu—Former Head of State of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea—are projected in real time on a large screen behind him. On the one hand, the performance recallswell-known projection works by Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, who said to Kwon in person that “We are all strangers.” On the other hand, it embodies, separately and together, the concept of “per/sona,” which I have elsewhere characterized as the “originary gap” between image and sound, face and voice.²⁶ In what sense? In the fundamental sense that each of us is defined by this gap and heterogeneity prior to our relationship to the other. This is also true of the behavior of robots that appear to cross wooden bridges, sit and stand up, or meditate on their own. In the paradoxical sense that, unless they are autonomous beings, as we have seen, all of these behaviors would literally appear to us, humans as such.

 

Outro

At long last, we are left with the work in the right corner of the exhibition. Due to the spatial arrangement, most viewers are supposed to see it after viewing the works in the main exhibition hall. Akin to the abstract of a poetic essay, it serves to summarize the exhibition, as well as to summarily recall his previous works. The first thing we notice upon entering the space is a series of mannequins. Above them is a giant hand manipulating them like puppets. The format is reminiscent of Russian dolls, with a doll inside a doll and another doll inside another doll. The face of another mannequin watches this spectacle with its back to us, and we, as humans, look back at it. In other words, there are four layers. But that’s not all. In addition to the docents who are supposed to protect the work in the exhibition hall, we are constantly exposed to the gaze of CCTV cameras mounted on the ceiling. Of course, they are not part of Kwon’s work. However, this inference itself is a product of the meta-gaze that his work triggers. To be sure, this line of reasoning does not go on indefinitely. This is because the end of the line of reasoning, or purpose and use, is posited.

The purpose of the exhibition camera seems self-evident. All that remains is the mannequins and us looking at the hands that control them. A strict cyberneticsist might recall what von Forrester called the “cybernetics of cybernetics,” the axiom that “that is, we have to observe our own observing, and ultimately account for our own accounting”²⁷ In this sense, there is no difference between mannequins and humans. Would Kwon follow this stance, however? At the very least, we have followed a similar line of inquiry. We’ve found that Kwon’s imperfect robots with lantern heads, neither fully autonomous nor fully instrumental, illuminate each other, and in doing so, create “perfect shadows” rather than dispelling darkness. If we can call it a purpose, “light looking after darkness” is arguably their “raison d’être.” Is this light or darkness for us? Is it okay to follow this? The problem is that we define “Aufklärung/Enlightenment” and “Enleuchtung/Illumination” as what literally dispels darkness and awakens us from folly. This means that Kwon’s robots that “fail” to fulfill the role of the ladder may be at odds with the Enlightenment program, which promotes growth and contributes to improvement. This is again emphasized by the fact that their failures are not accidental, but are programmed to be “repeated.”

Take, for instance, Samuel Beckett’s famous quote, “Fail Better.” The chronic habit of still treating this as a “literary rhetoric” of the old, healthy common sense of “I’ve done better than last year, last month, yesterday, so I’m on target” does nothing to capture the essence of this exhibition or Kwon’s oeuvre. Rather, the “failure” that Beckett evokes refers to a yet-to-be-arrived opportunity to question the very criteria that distinguish “success” and “failure,” and to seize the capacity to radically redefine its own self-evidence. In the radical sense of forcing a given value judgment to redefine itself, what matters is thus not the best, but “the worst,” and the more delicate splitting and pushing of the latter. As in the paragraph below, which Beckett himself deemed almost untranslatable, the hair-splitting bundle of sentences below, like a single strand of hair, turns the idiom “For lack of a better word” upside down, so that it reads more accurately as “For want of worser worst [options] than [this].” Less best. No. Naught best. Best worse. No. Not best worse. Naught not best worse.

Less best worse. No. Least. Least best worst. Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worst. With leastening words say least best worst. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.²⁸

Bergson’s assertion that laughter is a kind of “warning” to the flexible “élan vital” to break free from mechanical rigidity is well known.²⁹ With all due respect to him, the repeated “mechanical failures” of Kwon’s robots are more like “exemplary failures” in this paradoxical sense. If Kwon’s “light that takes care of darkness” can be a guide for us, it is not because there is no light in our era. Rather, it is because it makes failure and darkness utterly colorful in an age that seems darker than ever before, born of the abundance of lights competing to blind us. His call for “expanded music”—“robots are my instruments, and the process of expanding music and exploring movement can be considered a performance”³⁰—should be listened to more carefully in this precise sense.

 

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1 For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Yung Bin Kwak, “Replicants, Holograms, and the Voice (or Sound) of AI,” in Reading Blade Runner in Depth (Seoul: Psyche’s Forest, 2021), 183–204.

2 Most of the media coverage regarding Kwon’s winning of the Korea Artist Prize were predominnantly fixated on “robots.” “’Robot Artist’ Kwon Byungjun Wins National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art ‘Korea Artist Prize’ 2023’,” SBS, February 8, 2024; “Robot Performance Kwon Byungjun Receives National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art ‘Korea Artist Prize’,” The Korea Times, February 8, 2024; “Robot Synthesis Theater Dancing in the Exhibition Hall…”Drawing the Future of Living with Strangers,” Munhwa Ilbo, February 14, 2024; “A Human Face on a Steel Pipe Leg… A Successor to Nam June Paik’s ‘Robot K’,” Hankyoreh, March 21, 2024; “Robot K’s ‘Korea Artist Prize’ Exhibition: Kwon Byungjun’s ‘Korea Artist Prize’ Exhibition,” Hankyoreh, March 21, 2024.

3 Philip Glass, Words without Music: A Memoir (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2015), 229.

4 “I couldn’t make out what they were singing… If I had an axe, I would have cut the cables [connecting the guitar and speakers to the power source].” Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna, Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, & Revolution of the Electric Guitar, foreword by Carlos Santana (New York: Doubleday, 2016). I consulted the Korean translation, The Revolution of the Loud Bang: 100 Years of Popular Music Through the Eyes of the Electric Guitar, translated by Ho-Yeon Chang (Seoul: Music Tree, 2019), 258. The live footage in question is captured in The Other Side of the Mirror (2007), a documentary about Dylan’s three-year run of Newport Festival performances from 1963–65, which is also available on YouTube.

5 Noting that the decision to use an electric guitar was only made the day before the show, Wald does not argue that Dylan consciously planned everything. Still, in contradistinction to his previous way of chatting with the audience in a cheerful and friendly manner, his demeanor on the night, playing only three songs before leaving the stage without comment, could be seen as a stark response to the audience, who were “looking for answers” to the turbulent times from the “hero of folk music. “50 Years Ago, Bob Dylan Electrified A Decade With One Concert,” NPR, July 25, 2015; Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties (New York: Dey Street Books, 2015). The performance, often characterized as “punk folk,” is reminiscent of the September 1997 incident in which Kwon, then the vocalist of the punk rock band Pipelongstocking, stuck out his middle finger during the live performance. The incident, which resulted in the band’s suspension from the show and a massive public outcry, went beyond his growing alienation from the rock music form and industry. It was perhaps an “innervation” in advance of a historical course that would be formalized a few months later with the IMF crisis. This notion, which Walter Benjamin sought to forge in its relationship with technological media, is grounded in Freud’s idea of the transfer of energy, or translation of often overwhelming and incompatible mental excitement into something somatic. Benjamin focused on film and photography, but this discussion could be extended more effectively to the relationship with music. Cf. Matthew Charles, “Secret Signals from Another World: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Innervation,” New German Critique 45, no. 3 (2018): 39–72; Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 132–147.

6 Words without Music, 240.

7 Words without Music, 230.

8 Words without Music, 240.

9 His real name was Rabindra Shankar Chowdhury (1920–2012). A master of the sitar, a traditional Indian instrument, he had a profound influence on Western popular and classical music, especially after World War II, including Beatles member George Harrison and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, to name just a few.

10 Words without Music, 229.

11 An accomplished pianist and author of The Classical Style: The Musical Language of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, a modern classic recently translated into Korean, renowned musicologist Charles Rosen summarized Cage and Glass’s works as nothing more than a “neutral musical ‘surface’” overlaid with a few “classical formulas” that stripped classical music’s scales of their original meaning and function. It’s an “interesting“ moment but ultimately an “impoverished music,” he dismisses. Charles Rosen and Catherine Temerson, The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking: Conversations about Art and Performance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 57–58.

12 Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose Verlag, 1986), 107; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoff Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 111.

13 The phrase “to reproduce as loudly as possible, but very cleanly, without distortion” belongs to Munkachi. Quoted in David Allen Chapman, “Collaboration Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976,” University of Washington in St. Louis, PhD thesis (2013), 92. Glass’s fascination with “distortion-free roar” also provides an interesting point of contact when compared to the later tendency of hard rock and heavy metal, whose mechanical sound textures and enormous volume serve to reinforce the myth that “authentic rock and roll” is an “inherently masculine form of music” Cf. Christopher R. Martin, “The Naturalized Gender Order Of Rock and Roll,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 19, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 71; Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “Rock and Sexuality,” in S. Frith and A. Goodwin (eds.), On Record (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 371–389.

14 Sound art researcher Caleb Kelly considers 1969 to be a watershed year in which sound art in North America and Europe was foregrounded through galleries, citing the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ Materials (May 19–7.6, 1969), in which Glass and Steve Reich were key members, as an exemplary example. Caleb Kelly, Gallery Sound, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, esp. 111–123.

15 “Kwon Byungjun | Artist Interview | MMCA Cheongju Project 2022: Urban Resonance,” MMCA, October 7, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =7jVf_gTwvCc. Accessed February 7, 2024.

16 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 37.

17 “Sex pistols, the invention of punk,” France 24 April 16, 2010; Fergal Kinney, “Did Punk Start as a Situationist Stunt?,” Jacobin, May 3, 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/05/did -punk-start-as-a-situationist-stunt; Uncreative Writing, 39.

18 Beat phenomenon revolves around a pulsation that occurs when two waves with slightly different frequencies combine.

19 “Kwon Byungjun | Artist Interview | MMCA Cheongju Project 2022: Urban Resonance,” MMCA, October 7, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=7jVf_gTwvCc.

20 “Un son ne doit jamais venir au secours d’une image, ni une image au secours d’un son.” Robert Bresson, Notes sur la cinématographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 63; Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin. With an Introduction by. J. M. G. Le Clézio (New York: Green Integer, 1997), 62. This sentence, taken from my catalogue essay to the solo exhibition of Joon Kim, an important contemporary sound artist, is arguably the core axiom of sound art. Along with Kim Seo-ryang, he was one of the two sound artists who participated in the 2022 exhibition in Cheongju, where Kwon presented From Cheongju to Kyiv. There are many other interesting contemporary Korean sound artists, such as Youngsup Kim, who studied under Christina Kubisch, one of the first generation of German sound artists; Young Eun Kim, who won the Song Eun Art Prize for sound art before Joon Kim; and Ryu Han-gil who are preoccupied with the relationship between noise and music, and Seo Sohyung whose work has probed the relationship between silence and music. Due to time and space limitations, an extensive discussion of Kwon’s relationship to them and the contemporary sound art landscape will have to wait for another time. Some clues can be found in the following. Yung Bin Kwak, “Per/sona after Cinema, or Sound-based Art Beyond the Logic of Mask and Revelation: On Joon Kim’s Artistic Oeuvre,” in Joon Kim: Tempest JOON KIM: TEMPEST, exh. cat. (Seoul: Song Eun, 2022), 32–38; Yung Bin Kwak, “(Not) Showing and (Not) Hearing the Asymmetry of Sound and Image: On Seo So Hyung’s Artistic Oeuvre” (2022).

21 Sungho Ham, “Beyond Existence— Unknown Places and Nameless Times: Focusing on ‘We will have a serious night’ by Ghost Theater— Hongdong Reservoir, 2022,” https:// drive.google.com/file/d/1gPQGVcme V0dfIDagsJLhQLiYTopFtNX4/view.

22 Michel Foucault, Heterotopia, translated by Sang-gil Lee (Seoul, Korea: Munhwa Geosungsa, 2014), 24.

23 On this, see Benjamin Peters, “Digital” in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), esp. 101.

24 The head of an octopus is the small part that connects the body to the legs, and is actually between the legs and the belly.

25 “Inter-FACE by Byungjun Kwon [STEIM] & The Dirty Electronics Ensemble,” PACE Studio 1, DeMontfort University, Leicester, 20th Jan 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =SrNjNlaPg48

26 Yung Bin Kwak, “The Compulsion to Repeat History as Per/sona: Im Heungsoon and Audio-Visual Image,” The Korean Journal of Arts Studies 21 (2018): 197–222.

27 Heinz von Foerster, “Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” in Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer, 2003), 285–286.

28 Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1989), 118.

29 Henri Bergson, Le rire.: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Éditions Alcan, 1900/1924).

30 “Robot Synthesis Theater Dancing in the Exhibition Hall… Drawing the Future of Living with Strangers” [in Korean], Munhwa Ilbo, February 14, 2024.