On the Border of Natural and Unnatural……

We can read a form of a troubling thought on the border of natural and unnatural from such words of Edmund Leach, "We human beings are making unnatural borders here and there, which in fact is a gapless continuum as long as it can stay natural." Not only natural/unnatural, the world of conflicts, including pure/impure, centre/outskirt, art/technology, real/fake, reality/virtual, is achieved by a border-division, and in between the border-division there exists a chasm. The border-division is not, however, something clear and specific but rather vague and flexible.

Now various kinds of borders, built through a long history of human kind and thought as something unbreakable, are now beginning to fade away and each territory is changing its appearance to something that cannot be called A or B, and can at the same time be named as A and B. Now we have a brand new frame of a understanding which has never been experienced before. When we understand something as real or fake, where has that border of true/false come from? To attain an answer to this query, I went back to the past along the long river of history. And I became to have a belief at the very beginning there was no border anywhere in this world, and the world stayed as a borderless continuum. To think back, isn't the creation of human culture achieved by us forcefully making a border line? We human beings make culture by endlessly drawing these borderlines, but it is never easy to configure where the origin of that border really is. On the moment we admit that there is not border anywhere in the world, and try to pull down those lines, the order kept for centuries starts to get shaky. Yet our trials are bound to get criticized that we are 'breaking down customs', and get stubbornly blocked by those who agree with a custom. Are we not perhaps forgetting that if we restrict ourselves by a custom or squareness of an ideology and have a narrow way of thinking, it could cause to restrain our freedom and creativity……. 

Technology, with its development speed accelerating, in a way provides a starting point for my thoughts on borders, but at the same time a thread to understand the border itself. Especially as a great turnover from analogue civilization to digital revolution began to gain a wide recognition from the general public, images created through this new system are sometimes put in an imaginative world of senses intervened by a real world of consciousness, or the other way round. This can be described as the real world of consciousness has expanded itself by the imaginative world of senses converse into reality. After all this is a manifesto for an invalidity of a border dividing unreality/reality, and can be understood that the virtual and real world have now been located in a mutual relationship, validating an exchange between them.

In a matter of human expression the era when the natural light used to reign over with absolute power has now come to an end, and an interface, the algorism that programmes the combining system of mechanical codes, is now expanding its areas. Space/time has been an important factor to those images produced so far by traditional forms of art because they have been formed based on a space and that they expose their reality of artistic meanings in the flow of time. However the time on which new technological media-produced digital images depend develop within its own independent boundaries, therefore has a totally new meaning indifferent to the time of past/present/future that forms our life. Now images exist, but they do not exist actually but only ideologically. Seeing on the aspect of reality, this image obviously does not exist. After all I meet a paradox where presence-reality cannot be established without satisfying absence/unreality.  

What is the meaning of those things we call absence or presence? This question can be replaced by asking "What does the past mean, and what does the present mean?"  Comparing to the present, the past is something already gone and absent at present. There is a huge accumulation of countless events inside a massive safe of time. Yet whenever I take something out of it, it views in many different ways. When I try to recollect the images I drew as a student, that romantic village landscape of Constable, or Mona Lisa in the format of  Da Vinci Code, or the bohemian self portrait of  Durer with long curly hair, a transformed data different from the actual paintings views itself with a total new look. Those great masters exist as the same image as in the past, but after all I myself have changed. The past does not simply pile up in a massive safe of time or disappear, but really becomes the past with my recollection. The past meets with various changes and those things produced on the process become the present. Eventually the present is 'the past created' and the future is 'the present that will be created'.

In my video installation work, in order to express the time of the past and the present effectively, I use still photo images and a digital collage that repetitively cuts and pastes moving picture images. Whereas moving picture images are recognized as something present no matter how old they are, still photo images are understood as something from the past no matter how recent they are. I use a digital college in order to expose this mystery of human recognition. Through this method I will fundamentally continue to ask new questions on borders of pure/impure, real/fake, reality/virtual.   

                                                                      Works by Kim, Yong-Ho

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