Ghosts of Sewoon Sangga
Tivon Rice
The cathode ray tube, now an outmoded technology, occupied a strange space in the history of visual production. Displaying an endless flow of cultural images, they servednas endpoints for commercial broadcasts. For viewers, they were portals into other worlds and other times, both real and imagined.
When networked with closed-circuit security cameras, these screens take on an entirely different aesthetic, which may be considered an aesthetic of impending disaster. Natural human vision is replaced by the ever-watching gaze of the surveillance camera, fixed upon a doorway, a stairwell, or the aisles of a grocery store. The architecture doesn’t change, and people enter and exit the frame inconsequentially, except in rare moments of violence, theft, disaster, or beauty – moments that may never come. Periodically, the system’s memory is erased to make room for new recordings.
However, with its gaze fixed on the same scene for years or even decades, a different kind of memory is written upon the television screen. The phosphors are permanently burned-in with the image of the spaces observed, while people disappear or become
ghosts. The old television becomes a repository of memory, even when unplugged or forgotten in a dark corner of Sewoon Sangga, itself an architectural repository of cultural
memory etched across downtown Seoul.
Rice assembled this archive of images during weekly walks through the market, a notorious commercial/residential architecture built during South Korea’s dictatorship. Each image shows an unplugged television screen that broadcast the same image for so long that it is now permanently burned into the phosphors. Documenting the ghostly traces of the spaces they once observed, the project reflects on surveillance, commerce, architecture, non-human memory, and decay.
This project was made possible with the support of DXARTS – The University of Washington Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media.
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Tivon Rice is an artist and educator working across visual culture and technology. Based in Seattle (US), his work critically explores memory, representation, and communication in the context of digital culture and asks: how do we see, inhabit, feel, and talk about these new forms of exchange? How do we approach creativity within the digital? What are the poetics, narratives, and visual languages inherent in new information technologies? And what are the social and environmental impacts of these systems?
These questions are explored through projects incorporating a variety of materials, both real and virtual. With recent films, installations, and A.I. generated narratives, Rice examines the ways contemporary digital culture creates images, and in turn build histories around communities and the physical environment. While much of Rice’s research focuses on emerging technologies, he continuously reevaluates relationships with sculpture, architecture, photography, and cinema. His work then incorporates new media to explore how we see and understand a future thoroughly enmeshed in new data/visual/production systems.
Rice holds a PhD in Digital Art and Experimental Media from the University of Washington, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. He was a Fulbright scholar (Korea 2012), SeMA Nanji Artist in Residence, and one of the first individuals to collaborate with Google Artists + Machine Intelligence. His projects have traveled widely with exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, Taipei, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, and São Paulo.
Tivon Rice
The cathode ray tube, now an outmoded technology, occupied a strange space in the history of visual production. Displaying an endless flow of cultural images, they servednas endpoints for commercial broadcasts. For viewers, they were portals into other worlds and other times, both real and imagined.
When networked with closed-circuit security cameras, these screens take on an entirely different aesthetic, which may be considered an aesthetic of impending disaster. Natural human vision is replaced by the ever-watching gaze of the surveillance camera, fixed upon a doorway, a stairwell, or the aisles of a grocery store. The architecture doesn’t change, and people enter and exit the frame inconsequentially, except in rare moments of violence, theft, disaster, or beauty – moments that may never come. Periodically, the system’s memory is erased to make room for new recordings.
However, with its gaze fixed on the same scene for years or even decades, a different kind of memory is written upon the television screen. The phosphors are permanently burned-in with the image of the spaces observed, while people disappear or become
ghosts. The old television becomes a repository of memory, even when unplugged or forgotten in a dark corner of Sewoon Sangga, itself an architectural repository of cultural
memory etched across downtown Seoul.
Rice assembled this archive of images during weekly walks through the market, a notorious commercial/residential architecture built during South Korea’s dictatorship. Each image shows an unplugged television screen that broadcast the same image for so long that it is now permanently burned into the phosphors. Documenting the ghostly traces of the spaces they once observed, the project reflects on surveillance, commerce, architecture, non-human memory, and decay.
This project was made possible with the support of DXARTS – The University of Washington Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media.
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎
Tivon Rice is an artist and educator working across visual culture and technology. Based in Seattle (US), his work critically explores memory, representation, and communication in the context of digital culture and asks: how do we see, inhabit, feel, and talk about these new forms of exchange? How do we approach creativity within the digital? What are the poetics, narratives, and visual languages inherent in new information technologies? And what are the social and environmental impacts of these systems?
These questions are explored through projects incorporating a variety of materials, both real and virtual. With recent films, installations, and A.I. generated narratives, Rice examines the ways contemporary digital culture creates images, and in turn build histories around communities and the physical environment. While much of Rice’s research focuses on emerging technologies, he continuously reevaluates relationships with sculpture, architecture, photography, and cinema. His work then incorporates new media to explore how we see and understand a future thoroughly enmeshed in new data/visual/production systems.
Rice holds a PhD in Digital Art and Experimental Media from the University of Washington, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. He was a Fulbright scholar (Korea 2012), SeMA Nanji Artist in Residence, and one of the first individuals to collaborate with Google Artists + Machine Intelligence. His projects have traveled widely with exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, Taipei, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, and São Paulo.
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎