A three-channel videoart installation
New six-channel audio
Sound/image=Kasumi
Dancer=Chan U Hong

kasumifilms.com

An EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission 2009-2010
supported by The Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts
Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

The mysteries of cognition and the human ability to think in metaphor fascinate me and have become frequent themes in my work. I use traditional and modern media to imagine the complex processes of the human brain and to try to synthesize different methods of expression into a metaphorical language that not only resembles the stream of messages and subconscious connections making up human perception, but also examines the stream’s causes and effects. In this way, I think, form follows function in my pieces, and style follows theme: The point of the ways in which I manipulate and layer image, sound, light and color is to create a surreal universe in which moving bodies and shifting times and events coincide within a tightly enclosed space, cross paths and yet never touch. Their reality and meaning are sometimes deliberately ambiguous, which to me reflects our own uncertainty about ourselves and our place in the world. They pass in isolated bits of deconstructed time, strangely slow or too electron-quick to be entirely discerned, metastasizing or disappearing seemingly at random. Yet, I hope, they are also powerful, disturbingly familiar and alien at the same time, like free-associative impressions of our outer and inner lives and our real and virtual worlds: trapped and intermixed in the shaken bottles that are our own heads, and transformed by our desire for meaning into a story of deep and shadowy impact.

In “MO-SO,” I wanted to explore the impressions running through a man’s mind in the moments before his death: the sensation of time slowing down, of heightened bodily perceptions, and the simultaneous unreeling of an internal cinema of images -- seemingly unrelated – that create an unconscious narrative of personal history and emotion. The story in his head changes in the last seconds as the oxygen-deprived brain starts shutting down, speeding faster and faster, turning into a surreal, psychedelic collage of colors and primary symbols, the foundations of learned experience reduced to their individual blocks of information, electrified and dispersing like split atoms or dying stars.

Using three channels of video -- which the human eye cannot watch simultaneously, but has to concentrate on, fleetingly, one at a time -- allowed me to explore the peripheries of our perceptions. Even the Chinese characters have an impact more subliminal than conscious because, like imagery, they are not processed in the analytical language-center of the brain. This idea of combining simple symbols to create more complicated concepts lies at the core of my work: that, through seemingly accidental collisions and attractions, we can, almost without knowing it or detecting the process, derive feelings, thoughts and stories of rich significance.

kasumi
2010