BAKU

February 10 to March 5, 2023

Arcade Project Curatorial
56 Bogart Street #122, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Gallery Hours:
Friday – Sunday 12-6 pm (and by appointment)

Acetylcholine neurons fire high-voltage impulses into the forebrain. The impulses become pictures; the pictures become dreams. But no one knows why we choose these particular pictures.

— Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

Arcade Project Curatorial is pleased to present BAKU, an exhibition of digital hybrid and video works by Seungjin Lee.

In Japanese folklore, baku are tapir-like creatures known for eating the dreams of unwary sleepers. The contemporary digital landscape — a procession of disconnected images on our screens — induces a trance-like passive nihilism, a dream state resulting from algorithmic self-hypnosis. These images and frameworks from our screens rewrite and redefine our interior lives.

Our dreams are a string of signifiers pointing at fragments of memory containing data scraped from our thoughts and lives. Our brains struggle to combine these fragments into a narrative whole as it fills in the missing data gaps. In programming, a "null pointer" occurs when a program tries to reference a memory location that doesn't exist, seeking an impossible number from outside the range of the machine's memory and triggering "undefined behavior" — a glitch.

Seungjin Lee's GP Paint series embraces the glitch's undefined behavior and unpredictable nature. Lee paints abstract canvases by hand, photographs them, and “domesticates” the glitch by running the photographs through glitched image editing software. Lee then re-paints the resulting distorted images — “domesticated glitches” — by hand once again. While these glitches appear random, computers are deterministic systems with no room for random behavior. What we call "glitches" are simply processes that lie beyond the scope of human control or understanding, running microtemporally at a billion cycles a second or the output of a tangled, unreadable web of self-referential code.

Lee's 36-foot-long work Eterner (2016-22) is a seemingly endless digital and analog dream, consisting of hundreds of small drawings, paintings, and prints rolled up into a continuous stream of images. This not only recalls how many of us consume commodified digital images — scrolling through a social media feed or a camera roll — but also how dreams present themselves to us: a procession of fragmented images that the brain coalesces into narratives.

About Seungjin Lee

New York-based artist and organizer of DigiAna Group, Seungjin Lee, uses multi-sensory digital and analog media to create works that focus on augmented reality and the cultural intersections between human-felt experience and a virtually impelled world. Lee was born in South Korea, spent his formative years following his parents as they repeatedly moved between Japan and South Korea, and received his BFA from Tama Art University Japan. Since moving to New York in 2014, Lee has organized and participated in many art events with the DigiAna group, including gallery exhibitions, art fair booths, and virtual events.

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