Sae Oh
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Vanitas
Vanitas is a tribute to the missing pieces within the reconstruction of human memory, places, and data. It is a cartography of words, including home, apartment complex, reconstruction, mourning, archive, memory, memorialization, a god within, collective memory, cyberspace, omnipresence, meandering, heterotopia, alleyway, construction site, and mirror. I invite viewers and readers to meander in the map of relations and be lost in the topography. What can you discover when you meander? What happens when you renounce being a subject and become an object seamlessly blended into the topography?
What constitutes the integrity of existence? I believe it is the memories accumulated on the surface of oneself: numerous moments of our past pile atop our bodies to make us who we are, even though more than 90 percent of the human body is renewed within a year. Knowing that human memories are not a complete product but a continuous process and that they are what makes a space the place and a person the person, the ontology of both humans and places is “under construction.” The horizon of existence looks like a construction site. To remember is to construct, and to reside is to construct.
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Excerpts from Lossless Bits (2023).
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Virtual 3D model generated from a handheld video.
What can I discover when I translate a handheld video of my home into a glitched 3D model, or videos of me walking into movement-only traces? What do the glitch-only results mean? Surrendering to the loss of data and embracing the glitched results is, paradoxically, a tribute to what I have lost. By acknowledging what was lost in the process, I believe I can truly know, mourn, and become the place, memory, language, data, and self. I invite the viewers to meander within the cartography of the untranslatable, the by-product, and the missing pieces.
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Virtual 3D model generated from a handheld video.
when you type a type
imagine you are a language traveling as fast as perception
syllables segmented into quantum pieces
subject, verb, object,
adverb to phoneme,
a sound
a fraction
you pass the seabed and enter the desert
you are a dotted light, a click, a signal, an integer
you see the faces within the shapeless structure
and now you are each one of their names
you pass the desert and enter the seabed
you finally arrive and return to your shell
engraved with the faces of the stack
of each one of the names you encountered
then you surrender
when you wish to be everything is to wish to be nothing
when you wish to be something is to wish to be anything
so when you type a type
is to sentence the other
