Emma Kwok
Media Studies / Anthropology / Folklore
VISUAL ART 2019 - 2020
In my third year at UBC, I experimented with a wider range of media to create conceptual art.
ESSENCE
2019. Audio. 1 minutes and 58 seconds.​
My idea for “Essence” began with a question. I use Spotify regularly, and it generates personalized playlists for me every day based on the data it collects from me. Spotify’s algorithms should know me, in a sense, and should be able to recommend content that I like; yet, I am often dissatisfied with the songs they suggest. If these algorithms are designed to figure me out, why do I feel like they haven’t?
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To explore these questions and findings, I constructed a collage of recordings that I made with my phone and edited with Audacity. This piece begins with a recording of my breath moving through my windpipe; the next, my heartbeat. Finally, I spell out my name (my identity) broken down into digestible parts. With these data I share a collage of some of the most personal parts of myself with my audience. As these three elements fade, however, how much has my audience truly learned about me? Also, the recordings I used are imperfect, mediated reproductions of noises. By the end of the collage, has my audience actually heard me, or have they merely encountered an echo of me?
CHAINS
2019. Video. 3 minutes and 48 seconds.​
“Chains” grew out of my frustration toward Jean Baudrillard's idea that people live in a surround of simulacra where nothing seen is real, but an image of the real. The concept is like onions to me: filled with layers and bound to overpower the senses.
Inspired by Mel Bochner's work with synonyms in his exhibition Strong Language, 2014, I decided to explore layers of remediation by repeating a sentence about onions over and over. During a class lecture on Baudrillard, my professor claimed that once an object is documented, that object is no longer real; it has died. I then decided that the phrase I would repeat would be “I died inside an onion hide.”
Trying to decide on how to present this sentence led me to delve into the histories of performance art and video art. I came across Martha Rosler's “Semiotics of the Kitchen” and learned that when Rosler created the piece, video art was popular among female artists because it was too new to be dominated by a history of famous male artists. Hoping to explore how meanings could arise from the connections between my work and another artist’s, I chose to complete this piece using performance and video like Rosler.
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To further play with the idea of a hyperreal and test the extent to which layers of simulacra might depart from a referent, I filmed the video of my performance, and then filmed the video of the first video, and so on, many times over.
UNTITLED
2019. 5 Digital Images. Various Sizes.
Click image to see it up close.
While researching Situationist International, I read that the group believed “The world we live in is governed by unexamined and unrecognized cultural forces, which can be undone through engineering radically different situations from which to reflect.” One of the ways they achieved this was by using détournement, or using the juxtaposition between an insignificant object and a strange context to create meaning. Additionally, I read about Asger Jorn’s modifications: art made by covering an amateur academic-style image with bizarre additions.
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Drawing these elements together, I took screenshots of five random articles from Wikipedia (a public space for sharing amateur, academic-style knowledge). Then, I removed the informational text from each screenshot and replaced it with Lorem ipsum: meaningless text used in formatting as a placeholder for meaningful phrases.
What I am curious to see is how replacing user-inputted text on Wikipedia with Lorem ipsum comments on the conventionality of knowledge, as well as on the freedoms permitted by public spaces. For instance, if I were to push against some of Wikipedia’s graphic standards using strange fonts, what could I discover about the nature of the space it offers to users? What could I discover about societal expectations regarding credibility?
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A LANGUAGE LESSON
2019. Happening. 2 minutes and 21 seconds.​
My idea for "A Language Lesson" came from trying to think of examples of copies without originals, a prompt assigned by my visual art professor. In class, I learned that some of the works by artists such as Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono fit this description. Kaprow turned the viewers of his happenings into participants. Ono often leaves the completion of her works to her audiences, allowing their choices to determine the outcomes. Thus, Kaprow and Ono’s interactive artworks never occur the same way twice—even if they are repeated, since participants and environmental factors change. This reminded me of spoken words, which disappear after they are said. They can never be reproduced as the exact same vibrations in the air. In turn, pondering the impermanence of spoken words led me to think about Saussure’s ideas on the arbitrary relationships between signifiers and signifieds. To Saussure, these relationships are conventional, structural, and cultural.
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Interested in exploring these elements and their relationships, I asked some friends to participate in a happening with me. During this event, I would say, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” I would ask my friends to repeat this odd, yet grammatically correct sentence after me. In the process, I would display both written and pictorial representations of the words we would use: Buffalo (a city in New York), buffalo (an animal), and buffalo (a verb meaning “to bully” or “to confuse”). When we performed the happening, I filmed it for documentation. I also wrote instructions for it in a style inspired by Yoko Ono’s "Grapefruit" (1964) so that it can be performed again, although subsequent performances will never be exactly the same as the original.