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6/2/2004

Digital Utopia

Korean Cultural Service, New York

Julio Soto and Airan Kang

Utopia embodies two contradictory attitudes: while it reflects vain but unending dreams of perfect life in an ideal place, it stands for human efforts to remake man's environments and institutions. Yearning for an imperishable, labor-free, ideal world-naturally different from the present-has driven many to devise their own versions. As we have seen in an exhibition, Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (2000- 2001, New York Public Library, Manhattan), philosophers and artists, from Plato to Thomas More, and from an anonymous medieval scriber to Villemard, wrote or created what they thought would be beneficial and benign to other human beings. Yet their utopia could become other's hell, indicating the double-sided face of the concept of utopia. As much as the ideal world is a dream of happiness, most of utopias imply criticism of the civilization that served as its background. The idea of utopia is inseparable from escape of corruption and injustice, and hope for a better world. The will to overcome the unacceptable past finds a solution in dreaming or designing the future.
As Lewis Mumford once wrote in his The Story of Utopias (1922, 1962), utopia could be both "good place" and "no place," depending on who benefited from it.
Historical utopias seem to resort to unusual capabilities of human beings. Whether it were a world of supermen and superwomen or of technocrats, bureaucrats, or plutocrats, it was difficult to find a space for the ordinary, the imperfect, and the disadvantaged. Plato's utopia or the Republic was merely an elite-running system not a universal, ubiquitous country for all human beings. His Republic even tended to be dictatorial. It was in the Renaissance that more humanist view of utopia with lesser degree of hierarchy emerged. Thomas More's well-known book, Utopia (1516), represents such a humanist idea of utopia burgeoning in early 16th century. Conscious of the majority of human beings and influenced by Erasmus's idea of reforming traditional Christian values to fit in the need of the ordinary people, More's book helped disseminate more human concept of utopia, popularizing the term.
The unfading will to create utopia became revived as technological advances, specifically the internet and digital technology. The inundation of digitized information in the world wide web forces us to imagine the future world in a far more specific terms. As followers of Plato, men at the dawn of the twenty first century aspire to navigate the technological vista, exposed to unbounded possibility of creating the virtual world in a more real way than ever imagined. The result is not a monolithic, rigid, partial, frozen world but unfixed space that allows interaction between people, ideas and images. In the artistically reconstructed utopias, the nature and aims of the human beings are expected to maximize under the technological possibilities. Thus, new set of habits and values come out since demands on the better world would not perish as time goes by.

Julio Soto weaves such dreams and values using diverse narrative forms including video works, films and novels. His recent video works, such as Invisible Cities (2002, he also made another version in 2003 with a slight change in background music) and The Possibility of Utopia (2003), embody his mixed ideas-hope, doubt, and responsibility-to revive the driving force for a "better" place, using microscopic or aerial perspectives. In the Invisible Cities, Soto's camera wanders the city moving sometimes rapidly and standing still at others, looking for the residues of urban life; garbage and sewage, abandoned cars, stark buildings invading nature and etc. Under three subtitles ("Cities and Memory," "Cities and the Dead," and "Cities and Desire"), Soto dynamically organizes fragments of images that he caught with his realist instinct; yet they overlap, merge, and often become digitally altered in dark, non-local colors, tuned to the heavily technological background music with uneasy, unfamiliar sensation.
Soto's attraction to mechanically assembled array of scenes and images repeats in The Possibility of Utopia (2003). This video consists of excavated historical documents of three places such as Akademgorodok, a dream city designed by scientists of the Soviet Unions in the 1960s; Poole, a well-known resort harbor in southern England in 1971; and Pitesti, a newly-industrialized urban center in Romania in 1968. In addition to this, Soto envisioned New Jersey in 2013, a state bordering the Atlantic and suffering from constant flood. As if Soto hoped to remember the past endeavors toward utopias, he carefully selected known or not-so-well known urban places and memorialized the hopeful moments in the histories of those cities. Inspired by Archigram, a newly emerged architectural group in Britain in the 1960s, Soto transformed Poole (the town was once known for yachting and tourism, but became near to demolition after the World War II before intensive preservation and development process between 1960 and 1969) into a gigantic town swimming with robotic pedals. "Akademgorok, Siberia, USSR, 1965," his second story in The Possibility of Utopia, focuses on a science-driven city created in the eastern part of the Soviet Union. Images of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1965 with a blurry inscription, "Glory to the Soviet People" stand for Communist determination to create a city in which scientists could research Siberia's natural resources brought out Akademgorodok, far away from Moscow. The third is Pitesti depicted as another technopolice in Romania. Under the Communist regime, Pitesti housed the first Romanian car Dacia's factory and provided a dream of prosperous, self-sufficient community. Yet the industrial New Jersey in 2013 that Soto foresees is sunken into the ocean; arrays of fish pass by ruined buildings in the water. In this digital narrative of past and future utopias backed by techno music, he revived the almost forgotten, futile hope for a city that the earlier architects and urban planners had, through archeological searching and regenerating found images through computer graphics.

Airan Kang extends her private vision of a "good" digital world to disseminating methods of information and knowledge. Intentionally playing with the real and the virtual, Kang gradually pursues to envision the future of books out of her hope that advanced technology would serve to make books accessible. Since 1999, she has made resin-cast, electric-lit books coated with printed film or paper (or more precisely illuminating book containers without any content in it) as symbols of this hope. She carefully selected art or philosophical books for the cast models. In her early installation pieces such as Reality & Virtual Image I (1999), she wrapped or displayed these bright light books along with paper books on actual bookshelves or against photographic image of bookstore bookshelves. The contrast between the two types of books within her constructed environment often made the conventional books look obsolete and dead. Though digitalized content of her books were not yet available to viewers except the cover, those illuminated books signified or signaled the coming of new digital books that would go beyond paper-relying mass-produced book technology.
Kang recently shifted her focus on the virtual world of knowledge from the resin-cast containers to digitally-edited and controlled content. This change, which can be called the second phase of her digital book project, is evident in Digital Book Project (2003). Her new books are now readable and/or listenable if the viewers approach or touch the books on the table. Still relying on the familiar format of books yet utilizing sensor technology and viewer-required approach, Kang invites viewers to attend to her books in order to bring out the contents of books onto a vertical screen or horizontal plate. Illuminating books on the table are mere means to attract people into experiencing. Once touched, the book transfers the signal to the DVD player and the digital projector to play out the content for fifteen seconds, a temporal moment that virtuality and reality cross over.
Similar to Soto's, her work responds to the concept of disappearing reality into virtual reality in the age of digital technology that Jean Baudrillard proposed. While Soto is caught with the idea of cities as fallen utopias, Kang dwells in the world of knowledge via the medium of books, epitome of human civilizations. Yet the two contribute in a way to New Babylon, an imaginary city that the Situationist Constant dreamed, in which nomads drift and mingle without the cycle of demand and supply but with freedom and creativity before they leave for another borderless, limitless place.

February 6, 2004 - March 20, 2004
Opening Reception: Friday, February 6, 6-8 p.m.

Gallery Korea
Korean Cultural Service
460 Park Ave., New York NY 10022
(212)759-9550

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