One Museum At A Time

Seoul is home to so many museums and heritage centres. Go crazy. I remember being dragged along to visit palaces that I didn't really understand as a 15-year-old. I still don't. But I'm keen on other aspects of Korean culture and lifestyle. There's a tiny Pulmuone Kimchi Museum right smack in town that I insisted the man must head to because he's kimchi-mad. I wouldn't be able to cover them all these exciting venues, but the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) is a must on my list.

The 7th Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul Mediacity 2012, themed 'Spell on you' is the current exhibition. Spread over three levels, the installations in the different galleries use different mediums to convey messages of hybrid realities and interwoven technologies today. Light beams, sounds, videos, photographs, short films, old typewriters, etc are involved. Something called 'CROWDRAW' by Hyunwoo Bang taps on the masses to create an art piece via an automated paint-ball gun splashing pellets on the canvas each time a text message is sent. So the audience, via their respective smartphones, is the collaborator, as well as the sponsor.

A pellet is shot out every five seconds or so.
The structure and colors of the canvas forming from decisions of the participating audience.

So many intriguing exhibits and messages created by various artists within and outside of South Korea displayed in one space. Instead of spending the intended two hours here, the man and I lingered for three hours, browsing the exhibits thoroughly. Most fascinating to me, is this sardonic and clever piece by US-based David Bowen- 'fly tweet'. So tickled by it. The information tag read,

This device sends twitter messages based on the activities of a collection of houseflies. The flies live inside an acrylic sphere along with a computer keyboard. As the flies move and interact inside their home, they fly over the keys on the keyboard. These movements are collected in real-time via video. When a particular key is triggered by the flies, the key’s corresponding character is entered into a twitter text box. When 140 characters are reached or the flies trigger the “enter” key, the message containing the accumulated characters is tweeted. Thus live twitter messages are perpetually sent in real-time based on the simple movements of the community of houseflies. These constantly accumulating messages appear as records of random activity within the larger sphere of social media and networking.

You gotta get on twitter to check out @flycolony to get a feel of it. Give these flies a keyboard, and they tweet. HAHAHA. I hung out at the area for a bit, just observing the flies, moved away to another exhibit, then return, all the while holding the phone refreshing the corresponding tweets. Oh, so many levels of hilarity.

What a familiar keyboard even though no brand is shown.