Copyright 2025 Ahram Jeong
Ahram Jeong diffuse spirits
Sarah Butler
Ahram Jeong’s is the vision of photographs no one sees. Like the paradox of a performative essence that might be captured only in bodies’ inaction, Jeong’s is the stuff of the blind seer; the baroque minimalism of the digital age.[i]
In exhibition at Momenta Art until December 5, 2011 Jeong has installed two works: her Hunter College graduate thesis work, and a new installation that uses similar apparatus–all triggered by the humanity that grounds them. No More Picture with a Dead Body (2009), for example, confronts the visitor unawares, first with an ambush of flashbulbs, later with ambiguously placed projections of their capture. The work, initially, is all about mystery, unapparent sources, undetermined triggers, ambiguous results—ultimately life itself. A camera on the right projects on the left, and vice versa, in a tangled crossfire of cause and effect, all determined by the bodies of artists and participants[ii] laying still on low podiums in the centre of the gallery.
The second work, Staying Alive (2010), is Jeong’s registration of her heartbeat abstracted into musical notes, which are simultaneously amplified into a clamoring, jangy and stopped drum improvisation. All of this emerges from the artist in the process of digging her own grave. For Jeong, the object is a diffuse spirit, which retains its force long beyond confrontation—perhaps as a perpetual coming to face itself. The objectified subject circles back through its sources, however transmogrified into symbols, sounds, words, notes, photographs and videos.
Superficially very simple while conceptually, technologically, incredibly detailed, these works take as material the anonymous lightning that makes us go. In one version of a still emerging posthuman concretism, Jeong places the body-machine metaphor into and beyond the virtual; and, by taking the self whole with its organs and extensions, merges more completely self and things, persons and technology.
The artist’s approach to sound demonstrates some essential contradictions: the visceral immateriality of presence expressed in absence; that “sound exists only when it is going out of existence.”[iii] Much like life, music here “has nothing but mediation to show for itself”—we are further and further abstractions, all the way down.[iv] Neither work negates the analog or digital, bodied or not, but elevates, explores, and conflates them, as aspects of a growing, amorphous technological apparatus that is the sum of echo, subjectivity.
These and other of Jeong’s works demonstrate a degree of technological determinism as Superstudio might have proposed. Yet for however extreme, Jeong is always also dialectically nuanced. Hardware: podium, muscle, screen; and software: the underpinnings of a work fusing subjectivity and technology; synapses, programming, projection. These all are free of hierarchy as equilateral feedback resonances flow from dirt to heart to registration; to note, to sound, and back, to dirt. A magnificent tangle of the mysteries at first sight:poises.
As the gallery text notes, throughout this exhibition the performer/audience relationship is complicated. The rhythm of heartbeats directs the intensity of sounds, flashes and movements throughout. In No More Picture, camera control is absurdly redirected to the artist’s and participant’s core. In Staying Alive, the grave is illuminated with the clash of efforts that will eventually, inevitably culminate there, for every one. The quiet of an open field, the white cube, and empty grave, resound with unseen movement. Images, sounds, videos, as well as the coursing of blood, are here shown to be but singular elements in an infinitely triangulated network.
sb 11 2011
Ahram Jeong is at Momenta Art until December 5, 2011
[i] See also Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Dartmouth
College Press, 2006).
[ii] I found myself thinking of savasana, the corpse, which from the outside is so exceedingly simple, yet effortful surrender.* Beneath the stillness is intense concentration, as finer and finer layers of habitually tensed, or uselessly frenetic muscles are worked loose. Freed energy ricochets, spirals around the limbs from the plexus. All at once imperceptible and incredibly obvious. In time, networks of nerves as minute as those behind the eyes; in the ear canal, and sinuses, become open, are accessible. Like unplugging vampire appliances, by finding and relaxing these electrical dams, energy is rerouted, builds. Our being, the source of all of these so called technological revolutions whirling about the weight of meat bodies and their knowledge, what may be really the only ways that totally conflate 1 and 0. And yet here, in this context of multiplying flash bulbs, bleeping battery signals, and labyrinthine repetitions, just to be―really all you can do―is excruciatingly precarious.
*See especially Ann Weinstone, Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
[iii] Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (London: Routledge, 1982), 32.
[iv] Antoine Hennion, “Music and Mediation: toward a new sociology of music,” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, eds. M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (London: Routledge, 2003) 83.