Overly complicated setup to create a white projection: The most neutral color – white is projected on a white wall using three projectors connected to three computers, each displaying not-so-neutral red, green, and blue.
3 computers with 3 Projectors, 1280 x 1024 pixels
Yale School of Art, Fall 2008
MFA 2010: First Year MFA Students’ Exhibition
Yet another gallery signage for the first year MFA students’ show of Yale School of Art: By revisiting the basic functionality of a gallery signage, – inviting people in to the space – display type has rendered in wrong perspective so that one can see the right perspective view on the inside of the gallery.
Spary Paint and Paint 205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches
The idea started from a conversation with Rachel Berger, how circles are organic and rectangles are artificial. Circles are easy to find in the nature but rectangles are hardly seen. Also, the circle was the easiest thing to draw when thinking about drawing a shape with machines. So the simplest setup to draw circles (spirals) was set up to explore possibilities of the spiral drawing-machine and hopefully find an answer to the rectangles.
Toy RC Car and Lego Mindstorm with Sharpie Sizes vary
“For much of the past two decades artists have luxuriated in an abundance of resources new and old, and in mixing and quite often deliberately mismatching them in exemplary ways. An alternative also exists. Neither a return to the purist traditional concept of “truth to materials” nor to the purist modernist one of “less is more” such an approach tends towards pragmatic invention with whatever may be at hand, and responds imaginatively to the relative quantity or scarcity of it. It can be an art of “muchness” or an “ultra povera” art of extreme spareness, it can be lasting or totally ephemeral. In essence, though, it consists of anything the artist chooses to do while making do with with a given material of their choice. Those anyway are the loosely conceived rules of the game we have asked five artists to play at the Green Hall Gallery where they will come to work in situ for a week.”
– Robert Storr, Dean Yale School of Art
Laser Print, Vinyl and Cellophane Films 205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches
Each of the sixteen students at MFA Graphic Design Program at Yale School of Art gave a presentation of their thesis topic on September 2008. To reinterpret everyone else’s thesis topic to mine, I set up a blog using WordPress, parsed those scripts into smallest unit, so that one can rearrange them and find out interesting combination of units for their own purposes. Since it was all done in pre-existing platforms, there was certain amount of inefficiency involved and revealed during production.
Everyone’s Thesis Presentation Script and WordPress 1280 x 1024 pixels
Gallery signage for the show of returning students’ who are MFA candidates of 2009: There were both hesitation and excitement about getting closer to the end of school phase of their life.
Laser Print on News Print 205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches
Second iteration of the 50 Words in Relation, initiated by a questionnaire given from Paul Elliman. Exploration was started with the idea of putting 50 keywords in a three-dimensional field by each of their relation to my mind. Later development was aimed to establish a navigational system of a virtual brain, inspired by Johnny Lee’s Wii Remote Projects.
Processing with WiiRemote, Infrared LEDs and Constrction Helmet 800 x 600 pixels
Gallery signage and posters for the undergraduate senior projects show at Yale: The show consisted with the works of graduating students from four departments, panting and printmaking, sculpture, graphic design and photography. Each disc with four colors were attached onto a motor and individually controlled by a motion detector.
Inkjet Print and Motors 205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches
An exploration to indiscriminateness through a YouTube Search based on the monologue from Japanese animation, Paprika (2006, Satoshi Kon). The monologue is by a chief director whose brain is completely taken over by his own dream while developing a machine that can control someone else’s dream. The sentencing of the monologue is completely random but I found myself trying to make connections among those words even though they are meaningless combinations.
YouTube Videos 640 x 480 pixels
Yale School of Art, Spring 2008
Thoughts on Printing
A letter to all graphic designers at Yale, sharing printers.
The weather application for any given zipcode, translating the current weather condition to an ascii visual representation. Starting from the idea of me being affected and bothered by the weather, two major parameters – wind speed and humidity – are processed and used to draw and animate the visual.
Yahoo! Weather RSS, PHP with Javascript 1280 x 960 pixels
Yale School of Art, Spring 2008
50 Words in Relation
List of 50 words in response to the email from Paul Elliman:
“The question I’m asking has long term implications for your practice: What are the main themes, interests, formal recurrences, motifs, motivations, grinding axes, personal obsessions and spectral autisms inherent in your own work?”
Using Visual Thesaurus, 50 keywords are connected each other when they have common thesaurus, to group them by their relations.
One of the sketches of the Event Project at Yale with Susan Sellers and Keira Alexandra, focusing on the repetitive but pointless aspect of the activity that’s shown in “Double Standard”. The frustrating repetitive events in our life are written on cards and put in between mirrors to simulate infinite loop of the event.
Laser Printed Cards on Mirrors 12 x 12 x 12 inches
The Second iteration of the Event Project at Yale with Susan Sellers and Keira Alexandra. Books are cut into same height to simulate a situation of books being de-characterized and becoming an indistinguishable part of the system.
Hundred Days workshop with Michael Bierut. To capture the fragments of 8pm on any given day, three photographs were taken – one straight up, another straight down, and a screenshot of my laptop (sometimes connected to an external display). Photographs were displayed in chronological order with headline articles pulled off of New York Times to see how my daily life is alienated from variety of events of outer world.
Digital Photos and New York Times Headline 1280 x 1024 pixels
Poster designed for the speech of Ann Hamilton, a contemporary American artist. The speech was held at Yale School of Art, directly related to her own works.
Inkjet Print, Digital Projector on Letter Sized Paper 24 x 32 inches
If I Were You: First Year Students’ Works Selected By Peers
Gallery signage for the Yale School of Arts MFA First year students’ exhibition: To communicate the idea of the show that the works were chosen by second years, the second year students’ names were overprinted on top of the first year students’ to screen them using red cellophane film.
Inkjet Print, Cellophane Film Rolls and Static Electricity 205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches
Gallery signage for the exhibition of the students’ works from undergraduate art classes at Yale 2007: Every names of each art class were broken down into the smallest units and reconstructed together to create a new name that covers the whole class disciplines of Yale School of Art. Overprinted on the Art section of the course catalogue of 2007.
Laser Print on Newsprint 205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches
The third iteration of the Site Project at Yale with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Based on the assumption of myself being in a vent-like situation, – in between English and Korean speaking culture – a vocabulary test was made using New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The words that I don’t know were blacked out to simulate the experience of not knowing those words while reading a newspaper followed by additional cheat sheet with the words in same position with Korean translations.
A Book designed as a participation of a national branding workshop held by Daniël van der Velden at Yale. To communicate the paradox of a country that has been nominated as one of the most effected countries from the climate crisis, but has virtually no participation in occurring the crisis. The book is divided into two parts, first part being a factual data about the country and the second part being a statistical prediction about what will happen, such as losses and remainders of the country after being effected.
Laser Print on Graph Paper and Lab Notebook 8½ x 11 inches
The first and the second iteration of the Site Project at Yale with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Spatial relationship between inside and outside was explored using the vent located in the graphic design atrium.
Booklet about real made from a workshop at Yale with Karel Martens. The idea rooted on the different interpretation of the world between traditional and new media. On the day of 9/11/2007 (6 years later from the event), page 1 to 10 of New York Times and top 10 search terms from Google Trends were displayed together page by page to raise the argument of comparing what we think we are up to and what we are actually up to.
In the capitalistic system we live in, almost every event of daily life consequently leaves a trace as a revenue or expenditure. Since it is possible to track one’s behavior pattern by investigating those traces, this documentary piece is intended to geographically patternize the money spending of myself.
It is a part of the ’self-observation series’ and it tracks down every transaction that was made through my debit card in the year of 2006. Based on the banking history of the Bank of America, account balances and each transaction details are described on the top panel. The bottom two panels of map represent the location of the transaction with red strings connecting each transaction to the physical space of it.
Inkjet Print on Newsprint, Maps, Map Tacks and Strings Dimensions vary
Personal financial report of 2006 in a newspaper format: Using data pulled off of my monthly bank statements of Bank of America, statistics of my financial footprints are displayed, including the top ten most expensive transactions of the year, expenditure distribution by categories. The actual data of transactions and account balance of the statements are displayed inside with earnings in green background. The sharp spikes of the account balance are tuition payments, ranked as #1 through #3 in top ten expenditures.
The end of Japanese imperial period and how it occurred: not in a consequence of Korean independence movement but as a result of Manhattan Project and the end of the Second World War. The timelines of three separate events – Korean independence movement, Manhattan Project, The Second World War – were mapped on a world map to analyze the cause and effect among those events. To add another perspective of looking at these relationships, decision makers of the events are also displayed and connected to the things occurred by their decision.
Accumulated itinerary of the week 40 of 2006: As a student, a week of time was a repetitive unit of my own life. To see the behavioral pattern of one week, the streets and subways that I took regularly are displayed and the amount of time that I spent on a spot was represented as a size of a circle around it. Conversations that I had are also presented in different color according to the communication protocols.
Sketch for an interactive map of all my possessions: Everything that I own lies on its context and there are certain connections among them - From a set of things that were given from my ex-girlfriend to the things that I have bought at a certain place over the past several years. To recognize and visualize these relations, every object that I have were categorized, photographed and tagged to browse and navigate through.
A book made out of selected photos taken from the road trip to the United States in the summer of 2006. Capturing the sense of urban typographic environment of the States was the purpose of the trip and it resulted 6,500 photos of inspirational snippets of visual communication. The color information of the photos was stripped down to black and white for the further investigation of their typographical treatments.
Photographic diary consisting 260 selected photos out of nearly 6,500 taken from the road trip to the United States with Jaekyung Jung during the summer of 2006. Abandoned street graphics and signs were captured, everything from a line drawing of a mouse poking out from a corner found at a rest room to an old, huge typographic advertisement on a wall of an antique building. The trip went on 45 days and visited 24 cities.
Visited cities in order: New York, NY, Baltimore, MD, Pittsburgh, PA, Niagara Falls, NY, Buffalo, NY, Jersey City, NJ, Orlando, FL, Cocoa Beach, FL, Miami, FL, Key West, FL, Everglades, FL, Tampa, FL, Jacksonville, FL, Savannah, GA, Atlanta, GA, Nashville, TN, St. Louis, MO, Kansas City, MO, Denver, CO, Hot Sulphur Springs, CO, Omaha, NE, Chicago, IL, South Bend, IN, and Providence, RI.
