Sae Oh
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.
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.
Image
Virtual 3D model generated from a handheld video.
