British-Korean artist Soa J. Hwang (web, insta) takes visitors through a spectacular <Time + Machine> in an incredible new immersive, interactive video installation.

For 5 days only, visitors to the Back Room gallery space will be able to control their relationship to time.

No viewer will experience the same story. Using a depth camera to read the presence of each visitor, the large sumptuous projections are conjured from a bespoke algorithm, programmed to respond to the time that the audience spends with the artwork.

Prescience and movement will manipulate how the narrative unfolds across eight short 3 minute ‘virtual paintings’. The length of their attendance will impact on their sensorial experience, encounters, and standpoint. They will each affect their association with the speed and scale of images, shapes, pattern, and objects. Meaning, colour, forms will weave together, dissolve, ebb, and flow in a vivid fragmentation of memory and matter.

• Visitors will enter the Room of Time, a sensational wall of time, marked by a central totemic 3D visualisation of the Grasshopper escapement – a classical rendered clock movement, perversely displaying the current local time. The hypnotic swinging pendulum stuns and locates the viewer in the gap between the virtual and real.
• Light Shine Through is a beautiful respite for those that have endured the darkness. Situated in an imaginary ‘church like’ set, the stillness is punctured by coloured light streaming through stained-glass windows. A computer-generated sun is programmed to simulate the rotation of the sun throughout the day, fabricating the jewel like fractals of light and shadows, changing tone and position as they would in real time.
• The Cosmos is a celestial interactive film that evokes a metaphorical sense of gravity and intimacy, inspired by the notion of a relationship as the cosmos, in which one’s presence enlightens the other and how relationships can form the universe for each other. It becomes more luminous as the viewer gets closer.
• Kalachakra was inspired by Kalachakra mandala, a meditative drawing practiced by Tibetan Buddhists to learn the cyclical nature of time. The manipulated painting is a beautiful hypnotic mirror of the endlessly repetitive pattern we have experienced in recent months, programmed to appear for one minute at every o’clock.
• House is a beautiful, cacophony of swirling beautiful imagery, distorting, securing, or imprisoning, depending on the viewers movement and perception.

All eight works have been created utilising gaming software, computational technology, and machine language as a hybrid tool to ‘paint’ with.

Hwang deliberately reinvents and extends the boundaries and experience of painting, embracing it as an evolutionary medium.

This new body of work reflects on the life cycle, the myths, and ideologies we create to understand reality and each other. Hwang conjures digital illusions, morphing fact and fiction through deceptive images that reveal our slippery relationship to identity, people, place, and
the truth.

Image credit: Soa J. Hwang, Million drops of tears: [Manipulated_Painting#14], 2020, Interactive Installation, Courtesy of the artist.