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2018_1 winter; PLACEBO

2018 winter MAAT lab Study: 2018.01.15 – 19  (MAAT BOOK 24)

Placebo

Dear my researching comrades,

This winter schedule is very tight for me, and we cannot do the study for a month or several weeks. I designed a new way of studying: tight and speedy by enough preparation period.

We will contact main issues on materiality in this winter, which we have forgotten for a longtime in our era. So called, endeavors on the immaterial and the virtual have made our materials, in particular our bodies, decayed and faded from our main considerations. Well, someday, the hologram body might replace our real bodies for our eternal lives, or even our sensoria might expand into a new world in the favor of future technologies. Who knows?

Whenever we approach, so called, contemporary leading-edge technologies more and more, we find out that we minimize and epitomize our existences into more tiny matters’ connections, such as DNAs, neurons, connectomes, even a small part of a chip, etc. Or rather, we are minimizing our material existences. Fortunately, we have several ancestors who have thought about these issues in depth and multilateral approaches.

One day, one of our MAAT alumni visited me, and asked about a research topic related to her artworks on the text. Three black dots are just dots, but when you approach the work, each dot is composed of many scribbling writings. In fact, three black dots are multi-overlapped written names. The viewer cannot identify them until only when the artist let him/her know what they are. Well, careful erasing and other techniques might be able to reveal those names, or the artist could tell you that your name is on it, even though those identifiable names are already transformed into a graphite or ink material. How will you retrieve them? How, not what.

I am providing the precious material to you in advance, 1 month before the schedule. Enjoy the reading, and we will share our own embodiments.

Best,

Dr. Yoon, 2017.12.01 

Soongsil University, Information Science Building (No.21) room 606

369 Sangdo-ro, Dongjak-gu, Seoul, 156-743, Republic of Korea

tel. 82.2.824.0718      fax. 82.2.822.3622      www.maat.k