Another major curation of AGWF. A three-day journey of Exhibition and Workshop.

Exhibition
The exhibition champions the accomplishments and impending struggles of international artist currently residing in New York. The gloom of administrative and quotidian preoccupations can make the life of artists brash and tiresome. Depending on the circumstances of each artist, achieving status and recognition in the US can injure the development of creativity. Status! Status! Status! signals a superficial difference between friends, which can be overcome.

It is then the goal of this exhibition to present friends with cordiality. A respect for amity results in a tolerance of stylistic dis-ambiguities. Therefore, we present work from individuals sharing in a common contingency. The works exhibited will radiate not only with the poetics of their appearance, but with commonalities that perforate the daily life of their authors.

Workshop
When individuals are confronted with large scale administrative problems, a Do-It-Yourself, or a tutorial are not always enough. Instead, we suggest: Do-It-Together! Working together avoids the isolation and muteness that often accompanies international artists throughout their practice. Thus, the purposed events jettison these dismal situations for the opportunities of friendship, mutual aid, and problem solving.

Status! Status! Status! workshop is focused on cooperatively solving the mundane and logistical problems confronting international artists. We want a potluck of information on the process from both professional and personal experience; a moment for sharing tips, hints, tricks and advice among participants. Those involved are encouraged to bring anything which may be helpful. Together we can come to solutions, which are unexpected, innovative and empowering.

Exhibition Website

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Co-curation,
An AGWF Exhibition, in collaboration with Interstate Projects

Sketch of a small rod that enables tactile communication via push and pull across continents.

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Development in Progress

A headgear that reflects and detours light, thus potentially making subject transparent.

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Mirror, Wood, and Helmet
approx 20 x 20 x 20 inches

Realized with 1609 Dekalb Studio

The freedoms necessary for creative pursuits are not easily evoked when they are confronted with official institutions exterior to world of art. Bureaucracy, careerism and superficiality become intimate when cultural praxis becomes not only a spiritual, or psychological drive assumed within artistic subjectivity but instead enters it as a concrete variable, irregardless of the artist's motive. The works exhibited will radiate this dilemma not simply within the poetics of their appearance, but as anxieties that perforate the daily life of their authors.

The first curation work of AGWF, placed at the first AGWF gallery space, the White Flag.
http://thewhiteflag.org

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Co-curation, 2010
An AGWF Exhibition

The new visual identity of the MIT Media Lab is inspired by the community it comprises: Highly creative people from all kinds of backgrounds come together, inspire each other and collaboratively develop a vision of the future.

This unique offering of the MIT Media Lab is reflected in the logo design. Each of the three shapes stands for one individual's contribution, the resulting shape represents the outcome of this process: A constant redefinition of what media and technology means today.

The logo is based on a visual system, an algorithm that produces a unique logo for each person, for faculty, staff and students. Each person can claim and own an individual shape and can use it on their business card a personal website. The design encompasses all collateral, business cards, letterhead, website, animations, signage etc. A custom web interface was developed to allow each person at the Media Lab to choose and claim an own individual logo for his/her business card, as well as a custom animation software which allows to create custom animations for any video content the lab produces.

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Collaboration with TheGreenEyl

Creative Direction & Design: Richard The, E Roon Kang
Programming & Design: Willy Sengewald

Benoît B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a French American mathematician. [...]
Mandelbrot worked on a wide range of mathematical problems, including mathematical physics and quantitative finance, but is best known as the father of fractal geometry.

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Vinyl Letters
30 x 50 inches x 2

Exhibited in a group show, Between, at Between-Between London. (2010)

AGWF is a curatorial group based in Brooklyn, New York. It works to arrange shows on a variety of themes and types of artwork. As working artists themselves, AGWF works to discuss topics both in and outside the field of art.

Beginning with the affirmation that artists and their audience often overlap, AGWF surrenders the theater of a gallery’s display for the comfort and comradery of a studio visit. Being among peers underscores the desire to present a place for thought, action, and construction. Here a role of cultivation takes the form of progressive conversation. We are hoping to carry ourselves with a healthy and unburdened expectation.

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Co-organizer, 2010

AGWF, The White Flag

This project explores the cultural significance of data frequencies. Four projection surfaces display data feeds describing the intersections between seemingly mundane aspects of our collective everyday experience.

Numbers, colors, and complementary word pairings are scraped from Twitter, isolated from their original message context, and displayed in real-time, generating visual and temporal patterns intrinsic to the data. Each display represents a single dataset, juxtaposing past and present, the individual and the multitude, the frequent and the infrequent. The outcome is a conversation, and a space for contemplating the connections that may emerge from the overlooked moments in our lives.

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Installed at Project No.8 and Project No.8b
through March 2010 as part of the Mannam exhibition series, organized by Hoon Kim and Andrew Sloat.

Collaboration with Christian Marc Schmidt

“Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter”

– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

SENSEable City Lab's Project Page
http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/

Why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little about the 'removal -chain'?

Imagine a future where immense amounts of trash didn’t pile up on the peripheries of our cities: a future where we understand the ‘removal-chain’ as we do the ‘supply-chain’, and where we can use this knowledge to not only build more efficient and sustainable infrastructures but to promote behavioral change. In this future city, the invisible infrastructures of trash removal will become visible and the final journey of our trash will no longer be “out of sight, out of mind”.

Elaborated by the SENSEable City Lab and inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, TrashTrack focuses on how pervasive technologies can expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Can these same pervasive technologies make 100% recycling a reality?

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

The project is an initial investigation into understanding the 'removal-chain' in urban areas and it represents a type of change that is taking place in cities: a bottom-up approach to managing resources and promoting behavioral change through pervasive technologies. TrashTrack builds on previous work of the SENSEable City Lab in its exploration of how the increasing deployment of sensors and mobile technologies radically transforms how we understand and describe cities.

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The project has been exhibited at MoMA (2011, BalkTalk), Seattle Public Library (2010) and the Architectural League of New York (2010), and also a recipient of NSF International Schience & Engineering Visualization Challenge (2010, First Place).

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Participated as a Designer and Research Fellow, 2009–2010
Project of SENSEable City Laboratory of MIT
Images/Videos courtesy of SENSEable City Laboratory

Another study on additive colors.
See Also: Study: Additive White

The work was shown at a group exhibition, Bibimbop: Unexpected Transformations (2010), Allegra Laviola Gallery, New York.

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Two projectors with color wheel
1024 x 768 pixels

Catalogue Raisonné

A book, by its definition, may not have changed very much over the past decade but the environment around it dramatically have. Most of my books are no longer from the corner bookstore but delivered home by Amazon through UPS. Same approach was applied to my MFA thesis book, a partial requirement for the degree, to submit three copies.

The process was designed to have the book purchased from Amazon and delivered through UPS to three different destinations on the due date: the graphic design administration office at Yale School of Art, Haas Family Arts Library Special Collections, and Yale MFA Graphic Design Show.

Visit Amazon's Product Page

This book is available exclusively through Amazon.com and available for pre-order starting March 30, 2009. The shipping materials delivered with this book are considered parts of the book.

The specifications of this book were derived from the average values of the one thousand most recent paperback publications available through Amazon.com as of February 15, 2009. For purposes of production and distribution, the dimensions are rounded off to the closest standard (A5) and the page count to the closest multiple of four.

— Preface, Manual: The Manual

The book was designed using LaTeX and printed by LuLu with their on-demand printing service. After purchasing copies from Lulu, they were shipped to Amazon's warehouse. The ISBN is generously given by the Winterhouse in order to have the book officially sold in Amazon. Due to the complex logistics and miscalculation, the production cost exceeded the MSRP. Therfore only handful of copies were produced, sold and purchased. Amazon's product detail page is still up and indicates that there is one more copy of the book in its warehouse.

Thanks to Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel to make this happen.

Poster for the visiting critic Paul Elliman. Quoting from his email a year ago.
The low-tech poster is unable to finish its revolution and repeatedly pulled down by gravity.

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Inkjet Print on Newsprint and Disco Ball Motor 24 x 36 inches

Spring 2009, Yale School of Art

MacBook Pro and OS X Password Dialogue

Yale School of Art, Spring 2009

Overly complicated setup to create a white projection: The most neutral color – white is projected on a white wall using three projectors connected to three computers, each displaying not-so-neutral red, green, and blue.

The work was shown at Platform in Kimusa (2009), Seoul Korea.

Study: Additive White is part of the self-initiated project that investigates the common misbelief of the technological advancement. It is typically assumed that technology’s mission is to direct us toward a more efficient state, and that this will result in a more efficient environment. However, the more I looked into the promises of systems, the more I saw their failures and flaws: some were funny, others ridiculous, and all of them a function of a kind of unavoidable inefficiency. I found irony, stupidity, excessive effort when none was required, unnecessary complexity, pointless acceleration, speed at the cost of solvency. This overly complicated setup to project nothing on a wall tries to demonstrate this futile aspect of a system, while using three different computers and projectors each displaying red, green and blue in synchrony to recreate white. Naïve assumption was made that this setup will project a complete white – as advertised by its manufacturers and as written in the first chapter of color theory books.

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3 computers with 3 Projectors, 1280 x 1024 pixels

Yale School of Art, Fall 2008

Photo from Samuso

The idea started from a conversation with Rachel Berger, how circles are organic and rectangles are artificial. Circles are easy to find in the nature but rectangles are hardly seen. Also, the circle was the easiest thing to draw when thinking about drawing a shape with machines. So the simplest setup to draw circles (spirals) was set up to explore possibilities of the spiral drawing-machine and hopefully find an answer to the rectangles.

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Toy RC Car and Lego Mindstorm with Sharpie Sizes vary

Yale School of Art, Fall 2008

Collaboration with Yasser Suratman
Workshop with Roel Wouters

Yet another gallery signage for the first year MFA students’ show of Yale School of Art. By revisiting the basic functionality of a gallery signage – inviting people in to the space – display type has rendered in wrong perspective so that one can see the right perspective view on the inside of the gallery.

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Spary Paint and Paint 205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches

Yale School of Art, Fall 2008

Collaboration with Yeju Choi

For much of the past two decades artists have luxuriated in an abundance of resources new and old, and in mixing and quite often deliberately mismatching them in exemplary ways. An alternative also exists. Neither a return to the purist traditional concept of “truth to materials” nor to the purist modernist one of “less is more” such an approach tends towards pragmatic invention with whatever may be at hand, and responds imaginatively to the relative quantity or scarcity of it. It can be an art of “muchness” or an “ultra povera” art of extreme spareness, it can be lasting or totally ephemeral. In essence, though, it consists of anything the artist chooses to do while making do with with a given material of their choice. Those anyway are the loosely conceived rules of the game we have asked five artists to play at the Green Hall Gallery where they will come to work in situ for a week.

– Robert Storr, Dean Yale School of Art

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Laser Print, Vinyl and Cellophane Films
205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches

Yale School of Art, Fall 2008

Collaboration with Yeju Choi

Each of the sixteen students at MFA Graphic Design Program at Yale School of Art gave a presentation of their thesis topic on September 2008. To reinterpret everyone else’s thesis topic to mine, I set up a blog using WordPress, parsed those scripts into smallest unit, so that one can rearrange them and find out interesting combination of units for their own purposes.

Visit 16x16 (www.eroonkang.com/16x16)

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Everyone’s Thesis Presentation Script and WordPress

1280 x 1024 pixels Yale School of Art, Fall 2008

Workshop with Linda van deursen

Gallery signage for the show of returning students who are MFA candidates of 2009.
There were both hesitation and excitement about getting closer to the end of school phase of their life.

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Laser Print on News Print
205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches

Yale School of Art, Fall 2008

Collaboration with Yeju Choi

Second iteration of the 50 Words in Relation, initiated by a questionnaire given from Paul Elliman.
Exploration was started with the idea of putting 50 keywords in a three-dimensional field by each of their relation to my mind. Later development was aimed to establish a navigational system of a virtual brain, inspired by Johnny Lee’s Wii Remote Projects.

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Processing with WiiRemote, Infrared LEDs and Constrction Helmet
800 x 600 pixels

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

Gallery signage and posters for the undergraduate senior projects show at Yale:
The show consisted with the works of graduating students from four departments, panting and printmaking, sculpture, graphic design and photography. Each disc with four colors were attached onto a motor and individually controlled by a motion detector.

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Inkjet Print and Motors
205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

Collaboration with Yeju Choi

An exploration to indiscriminateness through a YouTube Search based on the monologue from Japanese animation, Paprika (2006, Satoshi Kon).

The monologue is by a chief director whose brain is completely taken over by his own dream while developing a machine that can control someone else’s dream. The sentencing of the monologue is completely random but I found myself trying to make connections among those words even though they are meaningless combinations.

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YouTube Videos
640 x 480 pixels

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

A letter to all graphic designers at Yale, sharing printers.

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Screen Captures
480 x 480 pixels

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

The weather application for any given zipcode, translating the current weather condition to an ascii visual representation.
Starting from the idea of me being affected and bothered by the weather, two major parameters – wind speed and humidity – are processed and used to draw and animate the visual.

http://ernie.art.yale.edu/~eroonkang/networks/03/weather.php (deleted from the server)

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Yahoo! Weather RSS, PHP with Javascript
1280 x 960 pixels

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

List of 50 words in response to the email from Paul Elliman:

“The question I’m asking has long term implications for your practice: What are the main themes, interests, formal recurrences, motifs, motivations, grinding axes, personal obsessions and spectral autisms inherent in your own work?”

Using Visual Thesaurus, 50 keywords are connected each other when they have common thesaurus and groupped into four categories by their relationships. Interestingly the word 'clear' had the most connections (meaning that is the most unclear) and 'awareness' was the only one in its category.

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Laser Print
24 x 32 inches

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

One of the sketches of the Event Project at Yale with Susan Sellers and Keira Alexandra, focusing on the repetitive but pointless aspect of the activity that’s shown in Double Standard. The frustrating repetitive events in our life are written on cards and put in between mirrors to simulate infinite loop of the event.

The work was shown at the Qompendium Time Capsule Series featuring Manystuff (2008), Qompendium Workshop, Berlin, Germany

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Laser Printed Cards on Mirrors 12 x 12 x 12 inches

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

The Second iteration of the Event Project at Yale with Susan Sellers and Keira Alexandra.
To avoid the perpetual activity, books are cut into same height to simulate a situation of books being de-characterized and becoming an indistinguishable part of the system.

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Books 24 x 36 inches (poster)

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

Hundred Days workshop with Michael Bierut.
To capture the fragments of 8pm on any given day, three photographs were taken – one straight up, another straight down, and a screenshot of my laptop (sometimes connected to an external display). Photographs were displayed in chronological order with headline articles pulled off of New York Times to see how my daily life is alienated from variety of events of outer world.

http://www.eroonkang.com/100days/

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Digital Photos and New York Times Headline
1280 x 1024 pixels

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

Observed by Design Observer, February 18, 2008

The first presentation of the Event Project at Yale with Susan Sellers and Keira Alexandra.

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Bookshelf and Masking Tape
720 x 380 pixels

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

Gallery signage for the Yale School of Art's First year MFA student exhibition. The works shown were chosen by second year MFA students, so their names were overprinted on top of the first year student's to screen them using red cellophane film.

Inkjet Print, Cellophane Film Rolls and Static Electricity
205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches

Yale School of Art, Spring 2008

Collaboration with Yeju Choi

Introduction to Advanced Visual Digital Basic Intermediate Introductory Medium-Format Color Graphic Figure Design Drawing Thinking Mold-Making Color Sculpture Image Typography Printmaking Photography Painting Video as Object Basics Studio 1 2

Gallery signage for the exhibition of the student works from the undergraduate art classes at Yale 2007. The name of each art classes were broken down into words and reconstructed together to create a new name that covers the entire class disciplines of Yale School of Art. Overprinted on the Art section of the course catalogue of 2007.

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Laser Print on Newsprint
205 x 107 inches, 35 x 72 inches

Yale School of Art, Fall 2007

Collaboration with Rachel Berger

The third iteration of the Site Project at Yale with Sheila de Bretteville. Based on the assumption of myself being in the vent-like situation – in between English and Korean speaking culture – a vocabulary test was made using New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The words that I don’t know were blacked out to simulate the experience of not knowing those words while reading a newspaper followed by an additional cheat sheet with the words in the same position with Korean translations.

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Inkjet Print on Newsprint
18 x 24 inches

Yale School of Art, Fall 2007

Motion Graphics
720 x 480 pixels

Yale School of Art, Fall 2007

A Book designed for the national branding workshop at Yale, held by Daniël van der Velden.
To communicate the paradox of Djibouti, a country that has been nominated as one of the most effected countries from the climate crisis, but has virtually no participation in occurring the crisis. The book is divided into two parts, first part being a factual data and the second part being a statistical prediction about what will happen, such as losses and remainders of the country after being effected.

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Laser Print on Graph Paper and Lab Notebook
8½ x 11 inches

Yale School of Art, Fall 2007

Workshop with Daniël van der Velden

Booklet about the theme 'real' made from a workshop at Yale with Karel Martens.
The idea rooted on the different interpretation of the world between traditional and new media. On the day of 9/11/2007 (6 years later from the event), page one to ten of New York Times and the top ten search terms from Google Trends were displayed alongside, page by page, to raise the argument of comparing what we think we are up to and what we are actually up to.

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Laser Print
8½ x 11 inches

Yale School of Art, Fall 2007

In the capitalistic system we live in, almost every event of daily life consequently leaves a trace as a revenue or expenditure. Since it is possible to track one’s behavior pattern by investigating those traces, this documentary piece is intended to geographically patternize the money spending of myself. It is a part of the 'self-observation series' and it tracks down every transaction that was made through my debit card in the year of 2006. Based on the banking history of the Bank of America, account balances and each transaction details are described on the top panel. The bottom two panels of map represent the location of the transaction with red strings connecting each transaction to the physical space of it.

The work was shown at the Meet by Accident (2007) at Space 35 Gallery, Chelsea, New York.

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Inkjet Print on Newsprint, Maps, Map Tacks and Strings
40 x 40 inches