Geumhyung Jeong, Real Bodies Fake Bodies
Mannequins, “body-machines,” human-shaped forms have been at the core of Geumhyung Jeong (b. 1980, South Korea) practice since ever. Elena Filipovic in conversation with the Korean choreographer and performance artist, discuss her dealing with “real bodies/fake bodies/objects/machines/devices” examining Jeong last project at Kunsthalle Basel and how it relates to her previous production as well as to our current hyper techno-culture.
“GEUMHYUNG JEONG: HOMEMADE RC TOY,” KUNSTHALLE BASEL, BASEL, CH. MAY 3 — AUGUST 11.
ELENA FILIPOVIC: You were trained in dance and theatre, and from your very first performances to the present, you have been consistently exploring the relationship between your living, fleshly self and inanimate things. Still, your newest project, “Homemade RC Toy,” is a departure for you in some ways. Can you say something about the connections between your previous pieces and this one?
GEUMHYUNG JEONG: Between them, there is a kind of progression. In my earliest performance, 7ways (2009), I was interested in transforming my body into different characters, putting a fake head or mask on different parts of my body, like one of my feet or arms. Later, I started to attach those heads onto other objects or machines, such as an accordion or vacuum cleaner or fitness machine. In CPR Practice (2013), I used a patient simulator mannequin, which looks like a human body and has a system built into it that generates realistic signals, like a pulse, while displaying vital signs on a patient monitor. I performed with another medical training mannequin in Rehab Training (2015), trying to assist the mannequin to practice daily movements, using various rehabilitation devices and techniques. In Spa & Beauty (2017), I created life-sized, human-shaped brushes. I implanted bristles into the bodies of mannequins and performed different spa techniques with them. For my most recent piece, “Homemade RC Toy,” I attached wheels and motors to a frame protruding with different mannequin limbs and a specialized mannequin head used for dental study. I equipped these homemade “bodies” with batteries, wires, electrical currents, and joy sticks so they would be humanshaped forms that could robotically move.
I didn’t plan it this way from the beginning, but it feels like there is a story that continues from my earliest to my most recent works, between real bodies/fake bodies/objects/machines/devices. The story is of a person who repeatedly tried to be friends with many different things, from household devices to mannequins, buying more advanced and expensive ones. Then, finally and slowly, she started to construct a machine in the form of a body by herself.
This progression, in a way, also seems to follow the advancement of our current hyper technoculture; year after year, distinctions between the human and the technological other are getting ever more thin...
If my previous work suggests that I had for years worked as a kind of puppeteer, with this project I became a maker of remote-control toys. And this is definitely related to the times we live in, since I am not alone in the desire for remote control. Today nearly everyone seems to want to control their devices (and lives) from a distance. Or we seem to want to do many things remotely, sometime for security and safety, to prevent danger; sometimes to save time; or sometimes just for fun or because of laziness. There are already a lot of technologies out there that allow us to remotely fulfill our desires and needs. And they don’t necessarily have to be very high tech either. For “Homemade RC Toy,” I learned basic programming in order to make a series of simple robots that I could try to remote control and make follow my commands. My performance with them is an attempt to make contact and share an intimacy with them, even if it is somehow elusive.
The devices we all have in our homes (and even hands) today are often spectacularly “smart” machines, but you mention that technology doesn’t have to be that sophisticated. Could that be why your freaky technological offspring look so much like the work of an amateur inventor, or a teenage science experiment? When I am outside of my country, I realize that for many people South Korea is a place associated with being the world’s most technologically advanced and digitally-connected countries, full of digital displays and mobile phones. And in Seoul, where I live, there are so many classes for children to learn programming and robotics at an early age. I could thus take classes alongside children to learn the basics, without having any prior knowledge about these technologies and without already knowing the language of programming. In
the process, I learned that programming is a lot like choreography: you have to carefully calculate the connections between things and their timing. To make two robots move in synch, for instance, you have to plan for the “conversation” between these two characters and it’s not unlike making a scenario for the stage. And then to actually construct the bodies of my remote-control toys, I brought together that knowledge along with elements from very different domains, which I sourced from E-bay or Chinese specialist sites, sometimes though trial and error: medical dummy torsos, hardware store parts, mannequin limbs, toy tires, electronics, rollers from massager devices, video game joy sticks, etc.
I find that your pieces are so powerfully captivating and so supremely strange in part because of the tension you build up between care, tenderness, and even, you could say, the erotic attention that you give to the various inanimate objects you perform with. So it should not be so surprising that you speak of trying to have a “relationship” or “friendship” with your robot sculptures. On the other hand, you once mentioned to me that “control” was actually an important starting point for you: how to control something from a distance and what that act of control does to the person controlling. How do control and gender and relationships play out in the new piece?
Yes, between these creations and I, it is like a relationship. It started with me being interested in the idea of remote control or controlling something from a distance. But specifically also in the remote controller itself as an object or even a body. Nowadays there are technologies that allow us to control things without a physical controller, but that was not my focus, nor was the sort of alienated touch-screen controller of a smartphone. I wanted rather to explore the fact that there is a “physical” aspect in having to touch something in order to control something else remotely.
Our attention usually goes to the remote-controlled objects rather than the controller. And yet the remote controllers cannot exist alone without being paired with the remote-controlled objects. The remote controllers need to be able to control something to be called a controller. My interest was thus about touching something here, in order to move something over there. In some of my performances, there are objects obviously representing the male body, while some of the other objects in my other works don’t represent a clear gender, and sometimes there are female characters as well. In both cases, the moment of the inanimate objects toward becoming animated characters through my movements or control is very fragile. I need to concentrate on doing both the roles of myself and the objects at the same time (the roles of the puppeteer and the puppet). I think the robots in “Homemade RC Toy” could be any gender, depending on how the viewer perceives them.
For me, the difficulty of controlling those robots of “Homemade RC Toy” in the performance is the complexity of controlling many of robots at the same time, connecting them by calculating the timing and their direction without touching or moving them directly, pushing buttons here and there without confusion. It would be already hard enough to control only one, as they do not always obey my commands. The batteries run out, the robots don’t operate as exactly expected, they don’t move smoothly, humanly… But that’s why I wanted to challenge this way of remote controlling and turn it into a choreography.