Spell on the City 

This outdoor screening project takes place in the media façades of Seoul Square, Hanbit Media Park and Sangam DMC Media Screen in conjunction with the Seoul International Media Art Biennale(Mediacity Seoul 2012), which opened on September 11^th at Seoul Museum of Art(SeMA). Expanding the theme of ‘Spell on the City,’ shown at the Mediacity Seoul exhibition, beyond the white cubes of SeMA to outdoor media screens, the project commences by employing social media(such as twitter) to ask: Are you happy in the city of Seoul? As individuals respond to this question, their thoughts are reflected on the city(media façades) as if to cast a spell on the city. Media façade and SNS interaction is an important starting point for the project in order to explore the new concepts of media-based ‘community.’ Different elements such as sound, visual images, social media and data are experimented, constructing a way for the users –artists and viewers- to share their aspirations for the city. The project approaches a variety of interpretations, through technology and social media interaction, which uncover themes of individuals’ sentiments, happiness, sharing and being-together from the following perspectives:

1.     Spell on the City: 이준, 김경미

The attempt to share and distribute in the way of Smart Grid asks fundamental questions about micro community, through which a momentary and virtual community is created via media façade and social media interaction. Sensibilities that are seemingly incongruous to technology(machines or data) are extracted and visualized, reflecting the artists’ attempt to establish a virtual space of momentary communication and being-together.

2.     Spell on the Play: 이정교, 이예승, 최석영, iHEAB_NMARA, Node Class

Media façades play, in a visual exciting way, familiar signs such as colors we see in everyday life in order to materialize a micro/virtual community of momentary being-together, through which the nostalgia for the lost world in expressed. 이정교 and 최석영 use color as their medium, 이예승 and Node Class achieving something similar to shadow play, and iHEAB creating a synesthetic effect by working on sound through visual images – the artists use these ‘plays’ to create façades as if to cast a spell on the city.

3.     Spell on the (Un)Familiar: 김형기, 백주미, 이상민, 정정주

In a media space like social media, a social ground where a reexamination of the (un)familiar can take place is created to experiment a new way of communication that is established by numerous anonymous strangers. Each artist portrays an urban space where ‘I’ and ‘we’ meet, conflict and coexist, and experiments how ‘I’ and ‘we’ are expressed in the given space. The image they construct in an artificial urbanscape.