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

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat real-time-archiving-art

Real-Time Archiving Art

2024-04-18

How does the sum of many small actions differ from each action considered alone? How might a real-time archive make that difference visible or audible—and how would seeing the whole change the experience of contributing a part?

Imagine a live display of mobile coffee orders. Orders that seem occasional from one customer’s perspective occur continuously across a large network. A map, or a more abstract audiovisual field, could register them as they arrive. Delivery services suggest a similar structure.

These are portraits of technologically mediated convenience and everyday consumption. An individual makes a seemingly reasonable choice; the aggregate becomes enormous, perhaps chaotic. I imagine something like watching a fire, but for the activity of a platform economy. Andreas Gursky’s Frankfurt photographs come to mind: a magnified view of the whole changes our perception of the part. Watching endless cars cross Hannam Bridge produces a related sensation.

Two earlier ideas extend this towards expression rather than consumption. In Scream Propagation, someone screams into a phone and the event reaches a shared screen. An abstract audiovisual response registers an anonymous scream somewhere in the world.

In Stress Propagation, a large, soft, keyboard-like object can be struck. An embedded sensor sends a WebSocket signal to a screen in a lobby or exhibition. Each strike produces a response and joins a live record of other strikes.

These sketches ask whether expression can become collective without demanding a personal confession. In a strongly individualised society, everyday frustration is often kept private. My notes connect this isolation to a wider concern about distress in Korea; that is a motivation for the work, not evidence that an installation could resolve it.

We may not want to explain our stress to people close to us, yet still want to express it somewhere. Anonymous communities suggest that tension. A multi-device artwork could let someone know that their scream has entered a public space without revealing who they are. They would not know the particular person receiving it, only that it can be encountered in another lobby, exhibition or part of the world.

That is a poetic possibility of web technology: an archive that is not simply stored after an event, but made and shared as events happen.

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