Happy New Year, 2024.
A single channel game engine video and sound, 13mins.
"Happy New Year" is a cinematic installation that utilizes a game engine to create a fictionalized landscape. Amidst the cheerfulness of celebrating the New Year around the world between December 31, 2023 and January 1, 2024, the piece reminds us of situations around the world that are suffering from war, disaster, and climate crisis.
The work reflects on the paradoxical situation in which the positively biased virtual worlds created by today's AI technologies can make us even more blind to the darker realities of our apathy. The fictionalized utopian images in the work are reminiscent of Chaekgeori(Korean traditional still-life painting that depicts books along with various other objects) and Western Cabinet of curiosities, connecting our world of war, disaster, death, and ruin to the Buddhist Wheel of Reincarnation, where heaven and hell, birth and death, coexist.
The work reflects on the paradoxical situation in which the positively biased virtual worlds created by today's AI technologies can make us even more blind to the darker realities of our apathy. The fictionalized utopian images in the work are reminiscent of Chaekgeori(Korean traditional still-life painting that depicts books along with various other objects) and Western Cabinet of curiosities, connecting our world of war, disaster, death, and ruin to the Buddhist Wheel of Reincarnation, where heaven and hell, birth and death, coexist.
Narrative of Happy New Year
December 31st, 2023, minutes till midnight. 16-year-old Harry Pitman stabbed in Primrose Hill, London. Fireworks bring in a happy new year. A blinded crowd. Cries and cheers.
No one heard the Smiling Buddha sneaking up. From his sack spills out daydreams packed in abundance. Rubbed by those who gaze into a boundless void, the statue is open day and night.
May 18th, 1974, India’s first nuclear test. For it happened on the day Buddha was born, the code name was Smiling Buddha.
A phantom burned men, beasts, and forests. Unextinguished for 3 millennia, Chimera became a dancing flame.
It’s an ecstatic form of disappearance.
Jean Baudrillard’s Desert For Ever.
It’s an ecstatic form of disappearance.
Jean Baudrillard’s Desert For Ever.
October 24th, 2017, Saudi Arabia announces the NEOM project. It’s the parting of the Red Sea.
You see desert, we see opportunity.
At the end of the line reflecting the desert is a vanishing point.
The crack in Olympos lives.
You see desert, we see opportunity.
At the end of the line reflecting the desert is a vanishing point.
The crack in Olympos lives.
March 11th, 2011, 9.1 earthquake in Oshika of Japan. Friday death toll of 19,759. Saturday, nuclear power plant unit 1 explodes. Monday, unit 3 explodes. Tuesday, unit 4 explodes. January 1st, 2024, 7.6 earthquake in Noto. 245 dead.
But you’re in such a hurry to get to the laughs you’re already in fits over the coach crash. Marguerite Duras in the Telly and Death. The disco ball scatters collective illusion.
A six-molared white elephant enters the womb from under the right arm. A white brilliance blooms into a life called Shakyamuni.
Cherry blossoms in full bloom is when beauty peaks. As when the wind blows beauty scatters and is pressed to the ground, only a fine line exists between life and death.
Petals are in the wind. A world of void is in the wind.
November 29th, 2016, a girls’ dormitory in Adana, Turkey. Fire and a closed exit. 12 dead. March 22nd, 2024, a concert hall in Moscow, Russia. Guns and a closed exit. 145 dead.
Greek Hermes asked, O son, how many bodies have we to pass through, how many bands of demons, through how many series of repetitions and cycles of the stars, before we hasten to the One alone?
Life and death, a merry-go-round, a pendulum. A Korean poet indicated fate as a harness. Push the swing, like sending a boat far out to the sea. But the sky remains one far away. As the red and black garden stretches on, you can almost smell the flowers.
Tibetan monks answer if one is able to recognize the clear light as reality, one immediately achieves liberation from samsara, the cycle of rebirth.
With the desire of men to walk on clouds came disorder. The Birds by Aristophanes.
Then I instruct you first to make a single city of birds; then encircle the whole atmosphere, all the area between the earth and sky, with a wall of big baked bricks, like Babylon.
Then I instruct you first to make a single city of birds; then encircle the whole atmosphere, all the area between the earth and sky, with a wall of big baked bricks, like Babylon.
1783, the Montgolfier balloon rose past the city of birds, toward the city of Gods.
March 9th, 2016, AI defeats man in a game of Go. It’s the start of cannibalism by data. Like cows eating flesh and bones.
January 1st, 2024, first jackpot of the year hit in Michigan. Worth $842.4 million.
December 31st, 2023, bombs dropped in Gaza Strip. 48 drawn overnight. 21,800 body bags in all.
Charles VII King of Hearts, leads the Hundred Years’ War to victory. Julius Caesar King of Diamonds, defeats Pompey. Alexander the Great King of Clubs, conquers Egypt, Persia, then attacks India. David King of Spades, steps on Goliath.
Late 1990s, two alleged reincarnations of Dalai Lama appear. To be spiritual, reveal that you’re the reincarnation of a Lama. To be sacred, pay the price. Tickets to ecstasy are for sale.
January 18th, 2024, BBC reported that the Spanish police have arrested 18 people alleged to be involved in a shamanic organisation that sold hallucinogenic drugs to its members.
Come, let us build us a tower whose top may reach unto the stars! Welcome to the new Tower of Babel in the Metropolis. To the new Tower of Babel - to my father - !
The unfinished monument of collective utopia becomes souvenirs of personal dreams and vision-filled voids are displayed on individual shelves. As Roland Barthes says in The Eiffel Tower, the Tower is there.
"What a beauty.” Sipping on Sderot beer in the Sderot cinema. Old sofas, garden chairs, battered car seats and upturned crates provide seating for the spectators. July 20th, 2014, The Guardian.
Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, those photographed are forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged. Planted there in aeternum by those who reside in the Garden of Eden.
Eyes witnessing decadence are islands of paradise. Clenched between its teeth, an airy feather on the verge of freedom. Set on its forehead, a flame ready to drift as smoke. Ecclesiastes 1:2. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
A soaring dragon and the spirit of the new year on its back. The roar of a passing plane and a muted sob. A polar bear’s wail and a rising pool of dark caramel. A drowning ship, screams of terror, and frozen darkness swallowing both.
Here is the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection. The Souvenirs, miniatures of the originals, are collected and displayed in the cabinet of curiosities. And behind it steadily rotates the Gigantics that cannot be called originals of the miniatures.
While the point of the souvenir may be remembering, or at least the invention of memory, the point of the collection is forgetting. Take a few steps back from the personal picture-perfect miniature and see the gigantic landmark ahead. On Longing by Susan Stewart. We want the antique miniature and the gigantic new.
Her torch is a lighthouse of hope for those lost in the dark, a flame of freedom. But what awaits those lured by the light of liberty is a mere delusion. Fly over oceans into her burning mirage but stay lost in the Six Realms. Like a moth to a flame. On how to step down from the alluring Ferris wheel, the Tibetan Book of the Dead points to dwelling in serenity as the only way to avoid reincarnation within the Six Realms, Samsara. On bones is a candle and on it flickers fragility. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.