Tutorial (How to play)
Certain projects concerned with local areas tend to focus on forming related discourses, restoring an unregistered subject, reviving historical aspects, etc. in relevant manners to describe the area's specific stories and situations. 25hr sailing solely looks into the Euljiro area for image projection and picks out 3 vanishing points to focus on a particular part of Euljiro that has a certain cultural narrative; cinema business, printing companies and moon snails. The narrative of Euljiro culture is formed through research of data required to enable the 'immersion' into Euljiro.
“Once called the Golden Area in the days of the Japanese occupation, Euljiro was the important residential area for the Japanese and their capital flew into the neighborhood near Cheong-gye-chun. Thus the major district starting from Euljiro 1-ga(road) to 7-ga was divided into successful business areas. Especially, around Euljiro 3-ga, major cinemas such as Myungbo, Gukdo, Joongang and Scala settled down, opening the era of public cinema, along with Choongmuro area. As the promotion of the movie business was mainly done by paper-based media, the printing business grew bigger as well. This explains how the printing alley became the center of underground press publishing the truth of the 1980s. And this is how the moon snails(pronounced as golbaeng-i in Korean) enter the stage as the favorite menu for the printing workers and the underground press movement protagonists.”
Refraction of Representation
25hr sailing starts to juxtapose the present data and the past ones of Euljiro. The 3 axes of [cinema business-printing shops-moon snails] of Euljiro that have grown together forming a certain culture remain only as an afterimage of the good old days, due to development of block units. The cinemas do not show films anymore as they are supposed to, being abandoned just as a storage building or else they would totally disappear. The printing business mostly vanished with the wind of block development, leaving some shops maintaining their business with newly earned customers. The Euljiro moon snail bars have now become the place to reminisce about all these memories.
25hr sailing goes on round trips between [Euljiro read through available excerpts of data] and [Current status of Euljiro observed through experience] for the purpose of exploring the time that the 3 axes of [cinema business-printing shops-moon snails] have lost their ground. Between the data and the present; as 25hr sailing enters the realm where personal experience is not allowed but only instructions or explanations of others could be heard, we discover the situation of not being able to make an absolute representation of the real world, whether it is the data or reality. The reactions are all respective aspects of each witness' testimony that are being refracted and they are not always agreeing with each other. (People kept on changing their memories of the location of Chodong cinema since it has vanished and when we arrived at the spot, we could only have a guess.)
25hr sailing planned an installation work that allows a prototype of combination of aspects, parts composing the whole. The drawings, photos, video and sound become the media projecting the image of Euljiro as well as partially being the objects describing Euljiro's vanishing points, [cinema-printing-golbaengi].
Realism of the Vanishing Points
Even though memories fade and things disappear, time does not terminate itself. This is probably why, despite the disappeared reality, it still exists as afterimages and leaves things for many people to do(beyond history) and things to play with(beyond survival). There would have been some people who wanted to keep record of these vanishing visions and some others have constantly accumulated techniques needed to restore these afterimages. As a painstaking result, the faded memories and traces of objects have been revived in the data environment of 0.1 bit. How could this realism be seized in actual existence? How could it be accessed?
This kind of question would be the similar kind asked by 25hr sailing while approaching Euljiro with such data. Let's say we admit the reason why existence refracts is because of the vanishing points that are mutually different from each other and let's also add that these vanishing points are realized through bodily experience. Then, if a certain generation wishes to learn about the past history's data that is impossible to experience, how and where could this realism, gone beyond the boundary of feeling, settle down?
Sooyeon Kim (Assistant Curator)
