Youngho Lee, Film Machine_Flip Flap Loco, 2021, Multimedia, C-stand, hologram screen, speaker, HD video, 6 min 30 sec, dimensions variable © Youngho Lee

Between the film projector and photographic images, multiscreen projections and projector-based installations overlap one another, further layered with virtual images generated through AR augmented reality in interaction with viewers. Within processes of projection and reflection, even the subtle temporal dislocations of the images are calculated and controlled, establishing a carefully orchestrated order.

The optical-mechanical devices densely filling the entire exhibition space are synchronized as a single system, while the cascading movements of projected images and the sounds of operating machines themselves become familiar signals of sensory excess.

The exhibition may be described simultaneously as a media collection, an act of archiving, and a kind of media collage experiment encompassing both modern and contemporary eras beyond simple photographic or video collage. Historically contingent technological apparatuses trigger chain reactions of fragmentation among heterogeneous immaterial entities, while, as meta-machines, they evoke the negative dimensions of reality’s multiplicity, as well as notions of progress and rhythm.

The uniform rhythms and images emerging from the tension between creative operation and malfunction lead viewers to trace the sociocultural meanings of machine civilization through multilayered references, while also revealing the ruins paradoxically produced by the advancement of high technology as a modern invention.

Such moments point toward the absurdity that cinema or AR, originating from our optical machines, might become inhuman weapons of mass destruction — or that a single electrical blackout can instantly plunge everything before our eyes into darkness.

Youngho Lee’s solo exhibition 《Forced Rhythm》 spatializes the artist’s long-standing and intensive inquiry into cinema and the recontextualization of its mechanisms through years of engagement with film loop machines. In this sense, the exhibition resembles a condensed version of 《Black Maria_Film Malfunction》 (2022), which functioned almost as a comprehensive multimedia display environment.

Through increasingly ambiguous and complexly fused collages of mobiles, photography, moving images, and virtual imagery, alongside mechanically enforced sounds presented through the exhibition title itself, the work traces the interrelationships among apparatuses.

In particular, the viewer’s attitude shifts from an ontological anxiety toward instability and malfunction caused by the dismantling and displacement of organic film machinery into immersion within cinema’s continuous movement through the experience of the work Mobile.

Furthermore, with the addition of the AR work Flip Flap Loco, the viewer’s spatial perception expands into a sensory experience shaped through the active exploration of movement and pathways. Regarding the prominent role occupied by media within the work, the artist responds by emphasizing media as “a new field of perception in which technological conditions and social conventions form a matrix,” as well as a kind of “convergence platform.”

Yet the strategy of grounding the work in the medium of cinema ultimately reflects a struggle not to lose its fundamental axis.

Film production has already become digitalized, and film loop machines have turned into rare devices, fading from the memory of contemporary society and increasingly treated as archaeological media. By exploring the optical invention of the film projector alongside the evasive nature of light, Youngho Lee traces transformations in systems of perception.

As with cinema itself, she utilizes footage from Daehan News documenting the historical evolution of the roller coaster since its emergence in 1895, layering these images with visuals reminiscent of military robots deployed in futuristic wars. Through archiving instances in which technologies shifted from entertainment to military application, the work penetrates the reality that even AR — itself an optical medium — may ultimately become a weapon of the future.

At the same time, the artist questions how environments evolving into metaverses of fabricated reality, accompanied by both positive and negative implications, may transform the direction of our everyday lives.

Simultaneously, through the irreversible “forced rhythm,” the work demonstrates how humans, having adapted to the speeds of modernity, assimilated cinema as an invented media environment into cinematic humanity, and are now once again adapting to new forms of speed as beings situated within virtual environments and post-digital conditions.

Human beings themselves are explored as substitutes for machines, or as machine-environment humans equipped with machinery, searching for the intersection between mechanical emotion and human sensibility.

This inevitably recalls the strange electronic music of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), which emerged alongside the golden age of high-quality synthesizers and the musical instrument industry in the 1990s. YMO, of which the recently deceased Ryuichi Sakamoto was a member, actively embraced new technologies while simultaneously breaking away from the conventions of popular music.

Their experiments extended even errors and noise — elements opposing mechanical efficiency — into music itself, while incorporating effects and imagery derived from film and video games, ultimately achieving broad popular resonance.

What seems to have especially inspired the artist through this exhibition is the active attitude and perceptive understanding demonstrated by so-called MZ generation viewers. Perhaps, across generations, we are already being drawn into the rhythms of future machines existing on another dimensional plane altogether.

References