| Metronome Ahn, Soo jin -A systemized world seen through systems- We are living in systems. School, work, or family might be examples of systems. Familial relationships, friends or some strange visitor could be a system, too. It doesn¡¯t have to be a cold machine. Systems are everywhere. Let¡¯s just think about the complicated procedures that we have to go through to have a contract completed. Following the precise logic and order of meridians and wefts, you will feel later that you are drawn in a system. The product of a regime or the product of power system is a structural order (Faucault calls it 'Episteme') created by intellectuals who thinks themselves to have the ability of free and autonomous judgment. Modern intellectual society is not aware of the structural process of defining oneself and producing a discourse. They are deceiving themselves. Thus, one aspect of intellectual society is that it molds the subjects of an era like commercial goods. This is also the power that pulls the conservative system. The living and moving system, the closed system that only sucks but never emits, the oppressive system that goes hysteric when the basics of its mechanism is threatened, the system that shows great autonomous power to support an other as a network once it realizes that they share one common target. Right there in the system, human beings lose individuality. I said in my first solo exhibition program, ¡°The society is overwhelmed by the atmosphere of conspiracy by a strict contract.¡± What is familiar to you is just what you are used to. When you enter a new world, the society demands you a price for it. This might seem to be a general characteristic of capitalism. But what I want to focus on is that the ranking order of a system is limitlessly open toward the top (just like the expression of Vilem Flusser that a system evolves like an organic body) and that the operators-the rulers, who do not know the inside of the system, are after all under the control of the system. The system exists as a medium that watches over the world. The system has intentions and meanings. It is never inactive. The system, which is open upward, has its one leg in the past and the other in the future, with power, violence, unreasonable hopes, and the present as sureties in the background. The system dreams of the network of massive systems and reproduces the desire which serves only for the existence and multiplication of its own mechanism. Even within the system, there is an insecure feeling between antipathy and sympathy. This exhibition is a description of the past 20 years of Korean society. After the tyrannical 80¡¯s when I was a university student, people say now that the true democracy has been achieved. However, we still have degrading behaviors of various devices of the system. So far our history has failed to create the true democratic spirit, which we had longed for so much, as if it is only reflecting the world it wanted so much to deny. Looking at the connections between diverse systems, I recall Einstein¡¯s saying that energy chooses the fastest way. Should I call it the continuity tendency of history? The grown-up son is resembling his father more and more. The formal changes that I attempted at in this work may be found in the symmetrical structure. As if I was conducting a formal interrogation, I wanted to talk about an individual who becomes other even to him/herself in the system that has dismembered him/her by placing a symmetrical world in one spot: the authority¡¯s interpretation of the past and the future; the left wing and the right wing; the 386 generation and the new generation; and the reformation and the conservatism. |