9/4/2024
Hi Song E,
I hope this email finds you well,
I will continue to share the work I have with you.
In this sharing, you'll see an installation with 52 postcards that I made for The Bevilacqua Foundation of Venice in 2018.
It's a workaround for the meaning of depression and the attempt to positively re-signify this experience through the actions of people.
I attached the synopsis
here you can find the postcards:
Take care
Rob
I tried to leave
Installation site-specific, 52 pieces
101° Collettiva, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice
This is a work on suffering that arises from suffering.
Anyone who suffers feels the need to give meaning to their pain because the only way to tolerate suffering is not to believe it is
useless. The project was born from the attempt to positively re-signify a negative experience.
“I tried to leave” opens with a story and a box:
Ivan had moved to Venice; Ivan loved Venice.
One day, he locked himself in his room; “I wanna try to leave this place,” he said.
And no one has ever seen him leave the room since then.
A long time later, an old box was found among his effects.
The box was full of postcards that had never been sent.
Sometimes, the choices we make betray us; sometimes, the ones we don't make turn against us. Other times, we deceive
ourselves when we don't know what we desire.
Ivan represents all those stuck in unhappy situations - chosen or not - from which they cannot escape.
Building an alternative future means having creativity but also the means to make the necessary changes and the courage to
implement them. Not everyone is lucky enough to own this magical triplet. We often endure our lives with fatalism or
learn strategies to live peacefully with our daily anxieties. We look for escapes, or narratives, to bear the weight of difficulties
because we seem to have no alternatives.
Ivan's story is the story of those who can no longer bear the burden, not even that of their narratives.
Those who enter depression enter a reserved, intimate space, away from shared places and away from others.
It's like staying locked in your room while everyone else plays in the garden.
Like Ivan, I remained locked in my room for a long time. And I, too, like Ivan, risked never going out again.
I dreamed of leaving, but I stayed where I was, collecting journeys into the lives of those playing in the garden.
This is how postcards were born.
Description of the work:
Postcards were never sent from a trip that never took place.
Collection of 52 pieces: one postcard a week for a year.
It is a playful revisitation of the rise of a depression that attempts to resolve itself in a weekly getaway from Venice.
Every escape ends where it was born, and Ivan never leaves the room again. But the postcards must travel: each person must take one with
them and send it. Only by sending the postcards can Ivan's journey be completed.
Depression, seen as a negative, as the elimination of oneself, finds its optimism in the elimination of postcards. Only
through the dissolution of the postcards, Ivan's journey come to an end: the work must be exhausted within the
performative act until the last piece.
Description of the drawings:
Venice, from a simple city, transforms into a chameleon reality: narrow but infinite, always different but always the same.
Over the skeleton of its bridges and buildings, the fabrics of a hundred other countries and a hundred other destinations are tied
together to create the body of a new path, which moves from the external world towards the internal one.
The design of each postcard presents three different levels, distinguishable by different colors. There's a corner of
Venice superimposed on a place never visited and on a place of the heart, a memory. And on the back of each piece, there’s a thought,
a poem, a diary page.
9/5/2024
Hi Song E,
How are you?
I will share with you my last work.
I started this project a few days before we met in Venice. And I'm still working on it.
It's a collection of images that recalls a Medieval Bestiary. But it is about Media.
It's a reflection of the normalization process through social media and information.
Here are the drawings (at the moment, they are 36):
And I attached the article with the synopsis!
A big hug,
Rob
What forms does all the information we receive from the Media take in our minds?
How do we manage to assemble so many different inputs?
How do we integrate our concerns with concern for the rest of humanity?
I have always been fascinated by Medieval Bestiaries, their insertion of any
element in a flat, ornamental, framed background, and the use of bright and
luxurious colors, in stark contrast to the fact that the Middle Ages are
considered a “Dark Era.”
I have always seen medieval iconography as a powerful narrative.
Capable of enchanting through images and communicating depth without resorting to the third dimension. Its simplicity continues to move me without
losing its effectiveness.
I have also been fascinated by the ambition of the Bestiaries to collect all
human knowledge without separating it from what is magical or
fantastic. Alongside the snake and the horse are the griffin and the
unicorn. This may seem curious if you compare the bestiaries to today's
encyclopedias of knowledge. But if you compare their language to the graphics we
are continually exposed to (through cell phones, computers, and televisions)
perhaps they might seem much more understandable and much closer.
The bombardment of images – of specific images – accustoms the gaze to a particular
type of vision. The lexicon of colors in the Apps and media iconography
refers to an early childhood palette: shock pink, highlighter yellow, and pastel
blue. The colors of play, of joy, of lightheartedness. Another chromatic legend,
this one, contrasts with the climate of our historical period.
The setting of television programs and advertisements imposes a sudden passage of
information of a highly heterogeneous nature: next to the news on the war
between Russia and Ukraine, there is an advertisement for the best cat kibble;
after an episode of crime news, here is some gossip about a celebrity. There is a
report on the victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, followed by an
advertisement on holidays in the Maldives; an activist publishes some content on
the environmental disaster, next to which there is an app for online shopping at rock-bottom prices; there is a documentary on the great history of the
Mediterranean while the news of yet another shipwreck scrolls below on the title
bar. These are just a few examples of this information assembly line.
This Bestiary collects a series of creatures spawned by man's relationship with
the Media.
Just as medieval fantastic creatures reassemble parts of different animals into
a single body, so the creatures of the Media Bestiary are made up of different
and contradictory messages captured by news broadcasts, zapping, advertising, and
Social Media in the space of a few minutes, using the same colors and graphics
of the most popular Apps.
The normalization process is a phenomenon that makes certain concepts normal -
that is, acceptable and shared - through repetition and inflation, through
icons, words, and recurring images. That is, through media bombardment.
There is a lot of talk about the normalization of violence, but I think we should
also start reflecting on the normalization of happiness, which represents the
other side of the coin.
Behind the bright colors, the clothes sales, the dream holiday, and the photo with a
thousand views, the promotion of happiness is seen as the only standardized
individual purpose. Promotions and platforms seem to say: “It's okay! We need to
be happy!”. But the happiness they propose is "normalized" happiness, which
ignores violence, denies it, and places itself on a pedestal, far from people's
most intimate desires, far from the bitter contrasts that reality continually
places in front of us.
9/10/2024
Dear, Rob
I am very tired of the show.
Now, I am done. I checked up on your work. ^^
Let’s keep discussing the project.
Take care,
Song E
9/15/2024
Songe
Dear, Roby
How are you doing? How is school?
I think you're busy. I'm slowly starting to prepare to promote your project. The drawings are already prepared, so don't feel too much pressure about the writing. It's okay to post only pictures occasionally.
I will announce and inform you of our collaboration project. Before that, I want to know your schedule for several years. I need to make an extensive framework for long-term planning. Please let me know when the semester ends and when the vacation is, as well as the timetable of what you do for your income. We have a lot of time left until 2026, but we don't have that much time because we have a lot of work, so we have to plan our time well. It's okay not to be accurate. We will change our plans and proceed with our work.
Then let's contact again.
Take care,
Song E
9/17/2024
Dear Song E,
I hope you are well, too.
You guessed it right. I'm swamped, but I'm thrilled to hear from you and send you my calendar in the next few days!
A big hug
Rob
Best,
9/18/2024
Dear, Roby
I realized we had worked on a similar idea to the postcard project. You already know my QRcode postcard exhibition in 2010. I sent a postcard with a QR code to someone who had never met the person with me. The code has a message. The person who gave me the postcard has to reply to me.
Do you understand that process?
This is how we wanted to communicate and transmit our hearts and share something invisible through the network with people we've never met. Still, in the mail, which is a traditional and old-fashioned way, we wanted to share our emotions with our bodies as physical.
I saw your postcard work and realized it aligned with mine. I thought it was connected to the process of the work we are doing now.
What are your thoughts?
I attached part of my thesis about Code art.
Best,
Song E,
Next, we would like to examine the work of 'code and network' using bar codes. [Figure 19] is a photograph of the researcher's performance work. It is a one-dimensional barcode consisting of 13 numerical information, which expresses the appearance of being caught by a barcode recognizer wherever human beings go. This scene was conceived from a system that sounded an alarm when a product theft prevention recognizer was installed at the store entrance. In the one-dimensional world, only coded numbers, such as 'information' rather than 'emotion' or 'communication,' are factors that judge an object. However, with the advent of QR code 17), a matrix-type two-dimensional code developed by Japan's Denso Wave in 1994, code could serve as a medium for containing and communicating various information. [Figure 20] uses these two-dimensional characteristics to generate the code of information that the author and the viewer want and exchange letters classically. First, the artist finds an object to communicate by exchanging letters on her SNS. Applicants who wish to receive a letter will forward their mailing address in an online message. A few days later, he received the author's QR code in his mailbox. The recipient can open it on their smartphone. The information stored in the code varies depending on the recipient, which is specific to only one individual who receives the letter. When the recipient opens the code, infinite spaces such as images, text, and online links will open. The recipient also mails the reply to the author by making it a QR code.
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As a result, expands its meaning to infinite space and becomes an essential medium of human interest and love through individual communication. The researcher said in the introduction, "We look at the development of visual art over time as a process of change in communication technology and think that today's art is functioning as a medium that connects the physical and spiritual dimensions." In this way, the development of communication technology that delivers information can materialize non-material emotions, meanings, and contents or move codes into materials such as paper letters and stamps to non-material systems, which are infinite spaces. Therefore, the researcher communicates the "form" of exchanging letters through this work by the artist himself. I'm trying to talk about the 'content.'
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