My upcoming project is about an imaginary scene which is technically ‘unseen’ by physical eyes and it raises the question of how we perceive time and sensation in a continuous time line.
As part of this project, I will develop my own wearable apparatus which can detect my eye blinking at the moment so it can give a signal to take a picture while looking. Thus, the device will do capture an instant picture instead of closed human eyes. The artist will be equipped with his device for hours so I could get an archive of the unseen images during the day. These collective images could be constructed as a continuous film and its length would depend on how many times the eye blinks. These continuous scenes are resources that are never seen by the person but also images which will remind the past or a determinate experience during the day. Considering that we forget most of the incidents that happen during the day, it will be interesting to see that unseen images can stimulate a person to recollect memories. Also, as I wish to produce the film which is consists of 8 to 24 frames per second, it will reflect and reconstruct our personal way of experiencing time. In other words, during the times I blinked my eye a lot it will play slowly in the produced film but the times I blinked eye less it will play very quickly as there would not be many frames.
The projects that I have developed recently combine both my backgrounds as an engineer and artist and reflect my curiosity on invisibility. For instance, these last few years I worked to detect meteors in different ways. And for Hiroshima, the ambient sounds of the city were live transmitted and reconstructed at the site. As I developed the installation including a radio-wave transmitter and mixer, not only the artist essay but also the technical information became a material for the publication.
Youngjae Lih was born in 1984 and raised in Seoul and now lives in Malmö, Sweden. Previously, he studied and worked as an electronic engineer in the semiconductor industry. Whilst working, he kept exploring different fields and decided to finally turn his passion for art into a profession in 2010. Focusing on the nature of existing objects and the interactions between them, he is interested in the syntax and formation of new narrative strands. In this sense, the majority of his works developed in different mediums share an obvious grammatical and linguistic structure. He has shown his work in Norway, Sweden, Japan and South Korea. And he has also presented his work at conferences and festivals in Berlin and Seoul.