Light Barrier Third Edition, Concave mirrors, Projection, Scanning, 2016

The installations present a semi-material mode of existence, materializing objects from light. Light Barrier Third Edition is a new installment in this series that exploits the confusion and non-conformities at the boundary between materials and non-materials, reality and illusion, and existence and absence.

The 6-minute sequence employs the motif of the circle to travel through themes of birth, death, and rebirth, helping shift the audience into the new mode of existence. The artists use the circle often in their works to evoke the fundamentals of materials and the external connection between life and death.

The artists are interested in how impressionist painters were inspired by the introduction of photography to create 'viewer-less images'. The installation allows images to arise from the canvas, creating painting outside of perspective. It is a direct approach to the artists’ theme of ‘drawing in the air’.

In this edition, 8 architectural video projectors are split into 630 sub-projectors using a structure of concave mirrors designed by artificial nature. Each mirror and its backing structure are computationally generated to create a group that collaborates to form the single image in the air. By accurately calibrating each of the 16,000,000 pixels individually, light beams can be merged in the haze to draw in the air. 40 channels of audio are then used to build a sound field that helps to solidify the projected phenomena in the audience's mind.

The third edition of Light Barrier was commissioned by the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju. The technology is enabled by Rulr, an open source graphical toolkit for calibrating spatial devices, created by Kimchi and Chips.

Commissioned by Asian Cultural Centre, Gwangju , Engineering by Chung Youngjae, Studio Sungshin Sound design by Junghoon Pi , Videography by Kimchi and Chips Light Barrier Third Edition, Concave mirrors, Projection, Scanning, 2016

Light Barrier Second Edition, Concave mirrors, Projection, Scanning, 2015

Videography with Florian Koah , Sound by Junghoon Pi (junghoonpi.com) / Junyoung Park , Photos by Hanneke Wetzer (c) 2015 and Kimchi and Chips.

Light Barrier, Convex mirrors, Projection, Scanning, 2014

Additional images and video from Alexander Delovoy and Tom Higham.

Kimchi and Chips is a Seoul based art studio founded by Elliot Woods (UK) and Mimi Son (South Korea). The studio creates actions which superimpose material and immaterial modes of existence, suggesting new technical and artistic attitudes. These actions actualise fictional realities as physical experiences, often employing digital light and computation to manipulate physical space.

They formed in 2009 to combine the disciplines of code, form, material, concept and mechanism. Since then, they have created installations and dialogues which have been exhibited on four continents, developing natural interactions between people, nature and the possibilities of the digital network.

Kimchi and Chips

Seoul Clock A city-sized clock is drawn on Seoul, Korea. Its hour hand and minute hand are white and the second hand is red. When any of the hands passes one's location, s/he can see its color with the Void Drawing web application.

Void Drawing The aspen forest 'Pando' is a 4.3-hectare sized living creature. The trees of the forest are connected to one massive underground root. The structure of the electronic network is similar to the forest. If we think of a terminal or a communication device as an aspen tree, the whole electronic network system can be regarded as the forest. The electronic network is the largest artificial structure covering the earth and expanding to space. The Global Positioning System (GPS), a part of the electronic network, is filling the space around the earth with numbers in accordance with the World Geometric System. The numbers are a kind of air we live in and I call it, 'Numerical Aether'. Its molecule is composed of latitude, longitude and altitude values. This makes the real space as a screen-like space to be drawn in. Void Drawing uses location information of the real space (latitude, longitude and altitude) and color data to draw images in the real space. A mobile device running the custom web application can show the current location’s color of the image drawn by the works of the Void Drawing project. For example, a red rectangular covering Seoul City Hall is drawn and if you are inside the place your smartphone will display red otherwise it will display black. GPS covers the whole surface of the earth whose area is 510,072,000km². If we assume that the surface of the earth is square and the error bound of GPS is 5m, the earth can be thought of 142,838 x 142,838 pixel wide display.

Earth TV The work draws real-time TV stream on the surface of the earth. Each pixel of the image is allocated to its actual position of the earth. One can see the color of the pixel corresponding to his/her current location with the Void Drawing web application. The work was made with Openframeworks and Triangle(Delaunay Triangulator).

Code Drawing * Photographer: Kim Dongwon This work is a collection of images that show the concept of the Void Drawing project, which is about drawing images in the space around the earth using latitude, longitude and altitude as a coordinate system. Circle - Songpa-gu Point A: 37°29’51.53” N, 127°07’45.01” E, elevation 2.08 km, Point B: 37°30’37.68” N, 127°08’01.83” E, elevation 0.6 km, Diameter: 1.48km , voidDrawing.circle(37.497647, 127.129169, 2080.0, 37.510467, 127.133842, 600.0); // (latitude_A, longitude_A, altitude_A, latitude_B, longitude_B, altitude_B);

SUSEOK at Danwon Art Museum, Jul. 2017

Suseok, Dec. 2016 Interactive video installation. “Suseok” (수석, 水石) is the Korean term for small, naturally-formed rocks that are valued in accordance to tradition, also known as “viewing stones.” The letter “Su” stands for “water,” while “Seok” means “rock.”

B&P Jihoon Byun, Jaegon Lee and Mookyung Kang, May. 2012 Interactive installation for Hyundai Motor Group Pavilion, Expo 2012 Yeosu Korea.

Jihoon Byun

Void Drawing