“Salvation (Keyboard)”, Jae Hoon Lee
(DPAG Rear Window)
In many respects, the decision to rescreen Jae Hoon Lee’s 2006 moving image
work Salvation (Keyboard) in
2021 is as significant as the work itself.
Essentially,
Lee’s video pans a seemingly endless terrain of aged and modified computer keyboards. In 2006, the “salvation” of the work’s title could refer variously to Lee’s practice of collecting and recording (salvaging), to the technological salvation of computers in a functional sense (for speeding up communication and organising data), or it could offer cynical commentary on the fastfading utopia of the global village and mounting ewaste. In the relatively short stride between 2006 and 2021, however, — and particularly in the context of Covid19 — salvation necessarily moves beyond the functional to encompasses the social (mediated sociality) and the ecological (Covid19 as yet another symptom of climate emergency). Rescreening Salvation
(Keyboard) in 2021 is both timely and conversational.
From a social perspective, the computer (or digital device; the internet) in 2021 evokes the ambivalence, if not conflict, between screentime and atomisation, connection and alienation. From an ecological perspective, the mounds of ewaste have only grown larger and the internet provides a platform for commodity culture and the corresponding decimation of “resources.” In socially and ecologically precarious times such as these, however, the internet has functioned as a form of salvation for many. Yet what kind of salvation is technology if as (also) a vehicle of extractive capitalism it erodes the foundations of life?