jeanyoon.ch@oi ~ % cd /oi

Welcome to jeanyoon.ch/oi

Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

You can learn more about my:

↑ ↓ select · enter open · or click / tap
artworks projects experiments research about texts contact

jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat de-semantising-semantics

De-semantising Semantics

2024-04-04

This idea emerged while listening to the speech in Philippe Parreno’s exhibition at Leeum. The exhibition image accompanying the original note was a record of that encounter, not a direct illustration of the proposed work.

We live among incessant demands for meaning. Language models add still more apparently meaningful text to the world. I want to try de-semantising semantics: making an escape from this prison of interpretation.

Start with a serious text—an academic argument or a philosophical passage—read aloud with complete seriousness. At a particular word, another screen takes its signifier in a different direction. In a sentence about an ‘empty shell’, for example, the Korean word for shell or outer skin could divert into an image of grilled pork skin. The argument continues, but its words keep escaping into other associations.

Descartes’s movement from doubt to ‘I think, therefore I am’ offers a useful test. The original passage proceeds through the unreliability of the senses, errors in reasoning and the uncertainty of dreams before arriving at the existence of the thinking subject. Its structure depends on following that sequence. What if the audiovisual system refuses to follow?

‘Accordingly’ becomes an accordion. ‘Seeing’ becomes eyes. ‘That’ becomes a pointing arrow. ‘Our’ becomes a collective anthem. ‘Senses’ disperses across five screens. ‘Sometimes’ triggers a familiar pop-song sample. Each local association displaces the philosophical argument into another register.

This would require many channels. Some associations could be found automatically, but the purpose would be to loosen the original semantic path rather than illustrate it accurately. I recalled a possible hypertext-related work by Hito Steyerl while writing this note; I had not identified the reference and do not want to treat that recollection as a confirmed precedent.

Eventually the participant encounters an audiovisual collage without necessarily recognising the text that generated it. Something highly semantic has become an exuberant flood of digressions. There is an irony here, but also a resemblance to associative thought.

Hypertext thinking. Hyper, hyper, hyper! The repeated word in my original notes performs the very excess I am trying to describe.

↑ ↓ select · enter open · or click / tap
Read original notes back to ../texts ../ back to oi