Jihyun Paik follows a reverberation through quantum mechanics, experimental video art, the palpable language of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and more. 

 

Glimpses

To relent myself and my work to intuition is to give way to the feelings and emotions that seep through sedimented layers of knowledge. There come certain moments—in research, in conversations, in the everyday—when I am able to see the fraying edges of the knowledge I hold. Sometimes they come in the form of doubts or questions, sometimes as a long pause amidst a thought where I find myself lost for words, as if I’ve reached a vacuum that disorients, confounds. I slip away from what I know into a field of uncertainty.

Here is a place of suspension, between knowing and unknowing, between seeing and unseeing, between becoming and unbecoming. I find myself grasping at nothing but a feeling, trying to follow it to a place of unfamiliarity.

There is potential in this place, but there is also doubt, nestled between the uttered word and the silence that follows. And here in this place removed from knowledge, I think, is where the act of creation can begin.

 

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

I find myself drawn to physics, trying to make some kind of connection between the laws and theories of the universe and the experiences that come with living in that very universe. Admittedly, most of it is wishful thinking, some hopeful part of me imagining that there is some deeper meaning or relationship between the universe’s subatomic particles and our everyday experiences. But if there is anything to be gleaned from this, it is that even the scientists, in their efforts to gather more data and expand their knowledge, find themselves also amidst uncertainty, shrouded by unknowns.

I once made a short video ruminating on the feeling of being in a particular space, yet not knowing what you’re doing there and where you’re going. In it, I think about indeterminacy; ponder about concepts of time and space on a non-human scale.

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg postulated that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle with perfect accuracy. The more we know of a particle’s position, the less we know of its speed, and vice versa. This is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which speaks to a fundamental property of quantum mechanics. If an inherent part of quantum particles—the subatomic stuff of the universe—is that they are ruled by indeterminacy, then it might be a small relief that the uncertainty that so often shapes my creative practice is not mine alone. That what I feel as a feeling, in my head, pricking my nerves, is one shared between this body and the many others—human, quantum, or otherwise—that belong to the stuff of this universe.

 

 

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is also the title of an experimental video by Janice Tanaka, an artist I’ve admired, and whose works I’ve researched and curated. I’ve long since been drawn to her artistic style, where she layers images over each other, manipulates time, and distorts sound—which make her works feel as if they are glimpses of the artist’s memories and thoughts, densely layered and not wholly fathomable.

Tanaka’s Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (1987), like many of her other video works, doesn’t fail to stump me with images and sounds whose meanings flee my grasp. Visions of skyscrapers and mountains flash before my eyes, a waterfall creeps down a pile of rocks at an unnatural speed, and a choir of voices sings an opera throughout it all. Then, strange bodies—humanlike, yet faceless forms—appear and walk towards the camera.

Tanaka describes her Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a “video opera” in five acts that “demands to be read according to the title principle, which states that one must consider the whole while examining each component separately, remembering that each part reflects the others.”¹ Across these five acts, she experiments with footage of urban and natural landscapes, of children playing in rocky terrain, of adults running through a green open field, and of computer-generated humanoid forms, each comprising a central motif in a given act. I imagine that these audiovisual elements are the motifs Tanaka is alluding to, and how these elements, though seemingly unrelated at first (and still as such to me), are all somehow in conversation with one another, sending out a message that brings together these disparate parts into the whole that is Tanaka’s vision.

Though I am still unsure of what comprises this whole (is it the interaction between the bodies and the landscapes? Is it the coexistence of all of these different things in the universe?), I am drawn to this video in a way that I can only describe as the feeling of hearing the echo of a note that has, until now, been ringing inside my head alone. A reverberation, received and refracted back as if affirming the existence of something shared, something that isn’t just my own.

I feel it is a stretch to say that my fascination with theoretical physics and my fondness towards Tanaka’s work (and experimental film, by extension) are related, even remotely so. But in some way unknowable to me, these two seemingly disparate things came together, and I found myself at their intersection as if by accident, for I had neither planned nor foresaw these two things as connected. And yet they still came together, in my interaction with another artist’s work, hers also an exploration of things unknown.

Unpredictability surrounds those things I am attracted to—like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the inscrutability of Tanaka’s images and sounds, words with a distinct poeticism. Yet for all the fascination I find in these things, I find also an unresolved tension that comes with unknowing—that is, not knowing what it is about these things that I find myself so drawn to, what these things are leading me towards. I follow this feeling as I would a thread, with a certain faith that they will guide me towards a clearer answer, or perhaps, meaning. I follow, but what I find is not an answer, only more threads entangled and connected in unknown and unpredictable ways; through names, people, communities, and histories that are not as scattered, not as disparate, as I had thought them to be.

Tanaka on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “The philosophical implications of this principle are profound when applying its basic tenets to the way in which we perceive and interact with each other and the world. We are not neutral entities that are insensitive to or nonreactive with the environment or others. Who and what we are cannot be accurately predicted.”

We find ourselves attracted to certain things that, eventually, draws us—our thoughts, our visions, and parts of ourselves—together.

 

*   *   *

 

Interferences Imperfections

Janice Tanaka worked extensively in video art during the 90s, when video artists, along with the then-emerging new media artists, were becoming increasingly recognised in museums and other major cultural institutions. Tanaka herself (with her 1992 video Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway?) was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 1993, along with contemporary video and new media artists like Sadie Benning, Lourdes Portillo, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Barbara Hammer, Kip Fulbeck, Shu Lea Cheang, and Roddy Bogawa, many of whom explored—and explicitly so—issues spanning race, gender, sexuality, and the AIDS crisis in their work.

And for these very reasons—in its pronounced departure from the institution’s previous curatorial direction, in the lack of white, cis male artists, and in the unprecedented representation of video, new media, and installation works—the 1993 edition of the Whitney Biennial remains as the single most controversial one in the institution’s history.²

What I find is that this biennial, along with the controversy it prompted, illuminates the intersections between experimental film and video art, social and institutional criticism, and a desire, on the part of the artists, to contend with the identities that historical and political contexts place upon them. For these artists—for anyone, as a matter of fact—to do so suggests a deep awareness of their respective positions in their society, an understanding that they are not, in Tanaka’s words, “neutral entities” that transcend the social and historical conditions that bind people together in one way or another.

Unpredictability is present in any creative act, perhaps all the more so for these artists, whose works explore new technologies and creative languages. But their works, in travelling from small seeds of inspiration to more complex ideas, and then to fully-fledged and externalised bodies of creation, accumulate layers of their artists’ worlds, like the social issues and material conditions present in their daily lives, or the inspiration they draw from other artists and creatives. And when these artists’ works are brought together in conversation, they begin to echo and iterate upon each other’s voices and intentions, almost as if they create fractals through which I can glimpse historical and cultural moments distant from my own.

Just short of thirty years after that controversial exhibition, I found myself in the very same space, which now housed the 2022 edition of the Whitney Biennial, Quiet As It’s Kept. Here, I came across the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for the first time and felt a distant and palpable ringing behind my ears, which I can only describe as something, perhaps a thought or an intuition, being nudged. Part of me must’ve held onto that feeling, letting it take up space in some corner of my mind and haunt my thoughts. Just about a year later, I decided to do something with that feeling and take it as the starting point for my research, during which I found the works of Janice Tanaka and other artists working in experimental film and video.

 

 

Disappearing, Reappearing, Redisappearing

If I am to scour my memories to locate exactly where and when I first felt that feeling, I arrive at a small television monitor, placed at the centre of an enclosed space exhibiting Cha’s other works. Playing on the television was Vidéoème (1976), a five-minute video that may very well be one of Cha’s most minimalist works in the medium. In white text, the words “VIDÉ O ÈME,” “sound,” “see,” “empty,” “to see,” and “emptied” fade in and out against a black screen. When the screen is blank and void of text, Cha’s voice fills the silence, uttering the words displayed on the screen moments ago.

What Cha was experimenting with in this work was the relationship between video and audio in the then-new technology, which enabled image and sound to coexist as waves and signals. And with the novelty of this technology must have come challenges—unanticipated glitches, frequent interferences between audio and video signals—that Cha likely grappled with, while navigating issues of language, displacement, and migration in her creative explorations. But it is perhaps exactly the mediation between technology and art, between material and conceptual, that enables Cha’s work to evince the creative possibilities of experimenting with such an unpredictable medium.

The imperfections of early video works often occurred as byproducts of video technology’s ability to read both audio and video signals interchangeably, in such a way that external audio frequencies could be picked up as video signals and rendered as grainy static on screen, and vice versa. I refer to these audiovisual interferences as imperfections, but to be clear, I do not consider them as flaws but rather as the slight schism between the then-novel technology and the sleek, refined aesthetics of today’s digital mediums. Slight as it may be, though, that gap, and the interferences that make their appearance there, is what comes across to me as the beauty of early video art.

Cha’s experimentation is, as ever in her other works, meditative and poetic (part of the title, “-O ÈME,” suggests the French word poème; poem). This is how I find myself approaching many of Cha’s works—as poetic explorations of form, content, and medium, or perhaps as poems themselves. For Cha, the medium of video is one of the many languages she experiments with, dissecting, fragmenting, combining, and juxtaposing them to the most material, palpable degree.

This is the very fibre and bone of Cha’s language, material and palpable. It is something that can be split apart, cleaved open, and peeled back with two hands to reveal something hidden underneath. Her language brings me to look at my own words, the thoughts and visions that arise from my mind, as something inherently wrought by my body, a body that is rooted in this world and all the things I perceive and interact with. What I have seen with my own eyes and felt with my senses can become something material and palpable, something I can breathe life into with my own mouth and shape with my own two hands—such are these words here, which embody my feelings of Cha’s work.

I feel Cha’s language most materially in her work Re Dis Appearing (1977), created a year after Vidéoème, and which I curated in a film programme two years after seeing Vidéoème. Re Dis Appearing is even shorter than its predecessor, yet Cha’s poeticism is ever as rich, her artistic style even more pronounced. In it, Cha captures a pair of hands placing a bowl of water in front of the camera. As the water sways back and forth, Cha’s voice emerges in the form of multiple audio recordings, duplicated and layered over each other. Speaking simultaneously in English and French, Cha’s words become increasingly unintelligible, and I can only make sense of a few words: “tea,” “water,” “sleep.” It’s not just words that intercept each other—the image of the bowl, too, is intercepted by a series of different images, like the rippling surface of a water, sand on a shore, and some kind of surface dotted with particles.

Re Dis Appearing is packed with images and sounds I cannot comprehend. Like the water swinging back and forth, just barely contained by the bowl, Cha’s layered words are precarious and fluid, their form in a constant state of flux. Still, yet, I perceive another layer, on top of Cha’s images and voices, that flickers in and out of my senses’ grasp—the signals that produce the buzzing sound of the static and the grainy lines across the screen. This is video’s language, its language inscribing itself into the material condition of Cha’s creation and making an interference in my experience of it.

 

 

I am reminded of Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” which, despite her having written it fifteen years ago, still surfaces in my thoughts as I behold the visual and sonic artifacts in Cha’s video.³ Steyerl’s poor image is “a copy in motion,” that is, it is poor because it has been reproduced, passing through numerous channels of (re)distribution that slowly chip away at the integrity of the original artwork. Of course, the version of Re Dis Appearing that I viewed fits this description, as it was digitised, uploaded to the web, and streamed as a video file on my laptop (not to mention my rediscovery of Cha’s other video works on Ubu Web). But unlike the poor image that Steyerl describes, the poor image of Cha’s video is not an accidental byproduct of mass reproduction, but rather the very condition of the technology that she worked with, which is to say that Cha’s image was poor from the onset, the video artifacts a given material constraint.

Cha envisioned her artistic practice with this technology and with others, as that of an alchemist. The artist’s path, she writes, “is that of a medium. [The artist’s] vision belongs to an altering, of material, and of perception… Through this attempt, the perception of an audience has the possibility of being altered, of being in constant change. Re volution.”⁴ Through Cha’s work and her medium of video, I find my senses in a state of reaction, my perception in a place of disarray. In this place of constant change, uncertainty gives way to new discovery, where senses and feelings usurp knowledge and intellect.

Revolution is the song of Cha’s work.

 

Index Cards

I map my uncertainties onto paper, which becomes a list: neatly organised, cascading lines of bullet points, each one beginning its trail from left to right, left to right. For the most part, I feel this note-taking practice to be a cerebral, sobering one. I am wary that it might be no more than a half-hearted attempt at intellectualising (and perhaps oversimplifying) what are some of my most vulnerable thoughts, doubts, and questions. Yet time again, I am drawn to this form and to what it reflects back to me: the fragments of my thoughts, laid plain and bare before me. And there is something about these fragments, or perhaps the possibility of something interesting being born of fragments that draws me in and compels me to begin somewhere.

Then it is not so surprising, my fondness towards experimental films, many of which strike me as fleeting fragments of light and sound. Not long before I started my research on this very subject, I fortuitously came across Moyra Davey’s collection of essays, journal entries, and notes.

“I’m drawn to fragmentary forms,” writes Davey, “to lists, diaries, notebooks, and letters. Even just reading the word diary elicits a frisson, a touch of promise.”⁵ Entitled Index Cards, Davey’s collection itself is composed of fragments that resemble her photographs and films in their postcard-like ability to capture the fleeting, yet poignant snippets of her personal life. As I peruse Davey’s collection again this time around, I am once more taken by how her fragmentary form provides the freedom for her voice to speak candidly and frankly, for her words to be as poetic as they are plain.

In her writings and photography practice, Davey is interested in accidents—a concept she draws from theorists like Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Janet Malcolm. For these theorists and for Davey, the idea of accidents speaks to the serendipitous nature of photography, to the chance occurrences that a camera can capture that our eyes may sometimes overlook. But Davey’s writing—her index card-like entries and the fleeting snippets of her mind and her life that can be found within—are also steered by those same accidents. Davey wanders, tracing her uncertainties and doubts as words on paper. But she is not lost, for she ultimately puts faith in accidents and their potential to guide her work.

Accidentally (or perhaps serendipitously), Davey’s uncertainties lead her to seek and find solace in other artists and writers, her vulnerabilities making room for the honesty and intimacy that I admire about her work.

In a similar vein, I embrace intuition, which, I suppose, is another way of laying bare your vulnerabilities—and yourself—to accidents, to the serendipity of creation.

Davey: “Finally, there is the accident of words: what wells up when we make space for such occurrence, when we lie on the bed in morning sunlight and bring laptop to lap.”⁶

 

Vulnerability as Language

I ask myself what it means to be vulnerable in my work, to make room for accidents. I wonder what exactly I mean when I say that I embrace intuition. Rarely I am certain of where I am going when I begin something, whether it’s a laptop on my lap, a camera in my hands, or words in my mouth. Even as I write now, I’m not quite sure of where I’m going or where I’ll end up. All I can say for sure is that I’m in a state of uncertainty (about my words, my work, the future), and that I’m writing about uncertainty, not too unlike Davey’s metacommentary on accident or Cha’s video addressing video technology.

As I usually do, I made myself a list before I began writing as a way to have some sense of what was on my mind, how they might fit together in my writing, and what direction this essay would take. For the most part, my list has served me well, seeing that I’ve been able to stick to most of what I’ve jotted down. But while writing, I’ve also veered off course on multiple occasions, my mind suddenly (and accidentally) swept away in a frenzy by something I (again, accidentally) came across and found intriguing.

Strangely enough, though, I find now that all of these different things—the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Janice Tanaka, the Whitney Biennial(s), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Moyra Davey—are somehow interconnected, having come to me at different moments and circumstances but all linked together in unpredictable ways and through winding paths. Like Steyerl’s poor images, these moments and these ideas may be fragmented, incomplete in themselves. Yet when I think about them together, they tell me of the “real conditions of [my] existence: about… fractured and flexible temporalities” whose ripples fold into each other, leaving layers of afterimage behind my eyes.⁷

 

 

Let me indulge, one last time, in accident (or imperfection, or interference, or intuition).

At some point in the middle of writing, I wandered elsewhere outside of my thoughts, perhaps guided by a thread of intuition, a seeking feeling. I found myself roaming the websites of video distribution organisations, searching for names, titles, and words that spoke to me. On Vtape’s website, I come across Tram Ahn Nguyen’s short video entitled to boyhood, i never knew him (2022), whose visual language is strikingly reminiscent of other older video works that I had studied in my research.

It’s an assemblage of found video footage from the artist’s childhood, with lines of plain white text that drift from one side of the frame to the other, overlapping and intersecting as they do. Pixelated and glitching, these images are as poor as it gets. The frames move asynchronously with the audio, different scenes blur into one another, and the lines of text are sometimes entirely illegible. I feel as if I’m looking at a moving, living version of all the lists I’ve created, all the bullet points laid out on top of blurry, nearly inscrutable images.

 

^{Video: Trâm Anh Nguyễn, to boyhood, i never knew him, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.}

 

But this video, which I had no plans of writing about, is what brought me to Steyerl’s essay on poor images, to thinking about vulnerability as a mode and language, and to the importance of form to a work of creative expression. Whether it’s Davey’s fragmented writings, Tanaka’s five-part video opera, or Nguyen’s disarray of images, sounds, and text, each artist’s form is a glimpse into their thoughts and the shape that they take.

Somehow I’ve found a shape for my own thoughts from these others. It is not so clearly defined, but then again, it was this very feeling of precarity that led me to these artists and writers, to find in their works fleeting glimpses of myself. And then from there, a small but acute sense of joy.

 

 

The title of this piece is inspired by Jayshawn L Lee (@jayshawnllee), a poet who I crossed paths with at the High Line in Chelsea, NYC, while I was in the editing stages for this essay. He was writing poems for passersby on his typewriter and wrote one for me as well. This line resonated with me and this essay: “I am a delighted beat / amidst the obvious.”

Jihyun Paik is a writer, reader, and emerging creative who works with words and moving images. Her research focuses on experimental film and video of Asian American artists from the 1970s to the present day, with a particular focus on postcolonial bodies, language materiality, and memory. Her creative practice centres on curating, filmmaking, and occasionally, poetry. Outside of her independent projects, she works with the Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) in New York City. She recently completed her BA in Film & Media Studies and Art History from Amherst College and is currently based in New Jersey.

 

 

Notes

^{1. See Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle entry on Electronic Arts Intermix, accessed October 2024, https://www.eai.org/titles/heisenberg-uncertainty-principle.}

^{2. For more information on the 1993 Whitney Biennial, see “Whitney Biennial 1993,” “The Pleasure Principled,” “How Identity Politics Conquered the Art World,” “The 1993 Whitney Biennial,” “At the Whitney, A Biennial with a Social Conscience,” and “Third Space: Reflections on the 1993 Whitney Biennial.”}

^{3. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux Journal Issue #10 (Nov 2009).} 

^{4. Cha explores the meaning of the artist in the introduction to her MFA thesis.}

^{5. Moyra Davey, Index Cards, 33.}

^{6. Ibid, 51.}

^{7. Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”}