Sangjun Yoo: „Untitled“

My video artwork looks back the existential and progressive nature of human contemplation, which seemed only a smooth and flat surface, was being created. I intend to overlay images from each timeline of site and route via Google Streetview at a different speed and duration to minimize any doubt for its existence and subjectivity. Repetitively overlaying fragments of images will consider the one-way interactivity from the streaming culture as a barrier, and a topological landscape, which reveals the multiplicity of patterns and signifiers in the site while mitigating its site-specificity. The image processing aims to recreate the still images on Google Streetview into an animation that has a nonlinear timeline, reforms the original purpose of navigation or documentation use and express the oscillation of each individual’s cognitive attachments, which do not get transformed nor recycled. The image processing used in this project creates a compositional viewfinder that demonstrates the possibility of intervention to the sites that were structured due to their practical reasons; similar to the landscape painters in the Romanticism era, whom attempted to find an independent perspective that transcends the distance of limited time and space with the notion of topological understanding, rather than rupturing the existing continuity and apperception of the site. At the same time of the overlaying, the chosen snapshots of the site with the geopolitical objects appear in a freeze frame, in order to locate the transitioning subject matter that travels the boundaries of geo-locations that were not transformed nor repurposed over time, but resident’s memory and vision shifted. I want to become a protagonist or an explorer to put an effort on laboring heuristic approach in search of what is seen or unseen.

The sample video from this work used Google Streetview images from Broadway in Manhattan New York City, as if capturing the side views while driving the routes. By scrolling the routes back and forth like an endless panoramic travel, experiencing the represented reality in the virtual space, the video processing utilized the fragments of images in between frames for the horizontal movement that appears borderless and continuous in time. This location is geo-politically important in New York City for its topological appearances and unique site-specificity, the overlaying two streetviews represents the mundane perspective and cognitive proximity to these sites, through visible road system, public transit, architectural style, pedestrians and temporal objects in this area.