.
Project Group: Contemporary Witchcraft
Contemporary Witchcraft is a new media art performance that embraces the improvisational and generative natures of digital media for exploring the complex, fluid and multi-cultural layers of femininity. The work represents the diverse, evolving and paradoxical images and sounds of witchcraft, using live music coding, body performance and live cinema. The three female artists (Project Group) come from various origins such as UK (Shelly Knotts), South Korea (Sojung Bahng), and Australia (Kirby Cas), and they use unique media, but it is synchronized in an improvisational way. The process of using various synchronized media is also an artistic exploration of the various concepts of femininity and witchcraft.
- Live Music Coding: Shelly Knotts
- Live Cinema: Sojung Bahng
- Performance: Kirby Cas
- VCA Art Space, Melbourne Australia, 26.04.2018
- Art Party Brunswick, Melbourne Australia, 19.04.2018
- SensiLab, Melbourne Australia, 11.04.2018
.
Live Streaming Ritual
The performance is telematics with each performer located in a different continent. Each performer transits a different medium which the others respond to, to develop and improvised performance. Shelly live codes music, Kirby transmits movement data and Sojung interweaves archive video footage with the live video stream of Shelly and Kirby’s performing. Kirby and Sojung’s video streams are projected in the performance space alongside the code interface and audio of Shelly. The performance combines sound, video and movement in a reflection on the interweaving of narratives on programming, bodies and mysticism. Narrative threads on programming, mysticism and digitally mediated embodiment act as a stimulus to the improvisation, freely interwoven, meshed, meeting and diverging. The performance is a condensed framework, a meeting of mediatized cultures, a relation between three mediated bodies distributed in space in a durational awakened process.
Digital Shamanism
The live cinema tells a story about a suppressed woman in the history of computing. The video shows the everyday female programmers and live coders and juxtaposes the collective images and memories of computing. The intertwined and intersubjective connections between past and present, collectives and individuals, and historyand routine create paradoxical sensations of reconstructing the fragmented but integral relationships between women and computing history.
Contemporary Witchcraft: Digital Shamanism by Project Group
- ICLC2019, Madrid, Spain, 01.18.2019
Fallen Angels : Pray for Hong Kong
The live streaming ritual is a prayer for Hong Kong. Videos of Hong Kong’s big protests, everyday lives and fading histories are encountered and connected. Immaterial but digitized relationships create the ritualistic remembering and mourning process across time and space. The real-time streaming from Hong Kong to New York reveals a moment of grief and the beauty of resistance.
Contemporary Witchcraft: Fallen Angels by Project Group
- ICMC2019, New York, USA, 21.06.2019
We all begin in Abstraction
Contemporary Witchcraft: We all begin in Abstraction by Project Group
The project explores the themes of female embodiment, error and algorithmically mediated life. The visual component consists of layers of live-streamed and pre-recorded video that contemplates algorithmically mediated embodiment. The live performance delves into the intricate threads that connect the female body, glitches and machines, weaving them together in a captivating audiovisual experience.
- Choreographic Coding, ICLC 2023, Het Huis Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 19.04.2023
.
Kimchi Bitchi
Kimchi Bitchi by Sojung Bahng
Kimchi Bitchi is a media art performance using video art, projection and live performance. The work explores the subtle and complex layers of oppression of Korean women, especially in Western countries.
When we type “Korean shy girl” on the Google search engine, many sexual porno links about having sex with submissive Korean women appear. This work begins with a funny fake porno criticizing and satirizing the sexual objectification of submissive/suppressed young girls/women. After the fake porno, the live performance reveals the layers of oppression hidden behind the sexual objectification. The live performance combines body movement and the projection of the historical and national images related to suppression and oppression.
Kimchi Bitchi has only been performed and toured in small, casual venues, such as art parties organized by individuals. This restriction was implemented to steer clear of, or diverge from, the institutional or formal context of Orientalism in art venues. Moreover, it aims to stimulate contemplation on the perceptions of Asian females in everyday encounters, particularly within Western contexts.