The Units of the World According to ;Semicolon
2011
Single-channel video, stereo sound (12-channel sound for the premiere)
25 min 54 sec
In the story, The Units of the World According to ;Semicolon, there appear 12 punctuation marks, such as the :(colon), “ “(quotations), —(hyphen), ...(ellipsis), →(arrow), and ( )(parentheses), that have their own names and shapes but no sounds. These marks, which originally have specific functions and places in sentences but do not have particular sounds, are given “voices” to represent their respective characters. All stories are narrated with the tentative voice of the Semicolon, and the drama ends with a chorus of all the punctuation marks.
The three elements—image, sound, and text—are descriptively or symbolically connected yet, sometimes, disconnected. Invalidating the dichotomous perspectives of the immaterial versus material, invisible versus visible, and scientific versus artistic domains, the artist also uses an allegory of noise-play as a new way of understanding and rearranging the world through the awareness of the act of listening. The artist presents the arbitrariness of language, a conventional medium for listening, through a 'functional' narration by foreigners and gives new meanings and names to the marks that have been 'functionally' used in paperwork, where language is visualized.
- Excerpts from a review written by Eun Young Chae
(KR)
2011
Single-channel video, stereo sound (12-channel sound for the premiere)
25 min 54 sec
In the story, The Units of the World According to ;Semicolon, there appear 12 punctuation marks, such as the :(colon), “ “(quotations), —(hyphen), ...(ellipsis), →(arrow), and ( )(parentheses), that have their own names and shapes but no sounds. These marks, which originally have specific functions and places in sentences but do not have particular sounds, are given “voices” to represent their respective characters. All stories are narrated with the tentative voice of the Semicolon, and the drama ends with a chorus of all the punctuation marks.
The three elements—image, sound, and text—are descriptively or symbolically connected yet, sometimes, disconnected. Invalidating the dichotomous perspectives of the immaterial versus material, invisible versus visible, and scientific versus artistic domains, the artist also uses an allegory of noise-play as a new way of understanding and rearranging the world through the awareness of the act of listening. The artist presents the arbitrariness of language, a conventional medium for listening, through a 'functional' narration by foreigners and gives new meanings and names to the marks that have been 'functionally' used in paperwork, where language is visualized.
- Excerpts from a review written by Eun Young Chae
(KR)
#1-4 Video Still (by Sung Taek Lee)
5 min Video Excerpt