Yeyoon Avis Ann

Outdoor Blu

Jean Baudrillard argues that society has “replaced all reality and meaning with images, symbols, and signs,” making human experience a simulation of reality. Though his book Simulacra and Simulation was published in the 1980s, his ideas resonate with our contemporary world. During a summer trip to Korea, artist Avis was inspired by the emotional responses to Seoul’s neon street views and flamboyant sceneries. She contemplated the notion that reality consists of the images at its facade. Rather than lamenting a lost reality, Avis sought to reframe our understanding of a world dominated by images.

When making Outdoor Blu, Avis started by manipulating images, layering and editing them to create a new flow. Outdoor Blu intends to generate a speculative reality where the images are thinly layered walls that present themselves outwardly and loudly to the viewers while their insides are hollow. The video delivers the story through four chapters: “Intro,” a narrator (fish) speaks about how s/he swims through the images every day and looks at them. To him/her, the world is seen as a bunch of digital images; ”Frustration,” the images of a city with painfully vibrant lights explain that they are just like the images: great facade, but hollow inside. The feeling is intense, it’s as if the images are screaming. It feels like a hollow wail; “A wish,” a protagonist wishes for the erasure of the threshold that divides inside and outside of the image layers; and “Swimming,” a protagonist wishes the image layer to be liquified and to dive into it. Avis produces the music of the video using Ableton and adopts the same logic like her style of video editing—assembling the free sound fragments online, remixing and composing them into an entire new piece of music.