JeeHyun Oh: DIY GORI: seed_1216976400

Title:

DIY GORI: seed_1216976400

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Artist Statement:

The World Wide Web is an open environment capable of distributing information in a decentralized manner, allowing participation and the constant transformation of its content. DIY GORI focuses on the very nature of the Internet as ‘Open Source Culture’, the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created contents; and it experiments with the idea that objects exist as evolving pieces of digital data in cyberspace where they are continually remixed by users.

As a first experiment for DIY GORI a ‘seed’ was prepared for distribution throughout the Internet. The term ‘Gori’ means open hook in Korean and is often used to refer to the ‘fastening’ and ‘loosening’ of human relationships. The seed to be planted in cyberspace is a blueprint for GORI, a new media plant of physical computing, growing up or dying, fed by network data, connected to the Internet by USB. The blueprint is published on a Wiki site to introduce the project development process and technical details to the net-public/the self-evolving environment for free distribution that any net-citizen can browse and design on their own. At ISEA2008, a selected version of the blueprint is presented as an installation where its Wiki contents are printed and exhibited on a more traditional medium. Seed_1216976400 is the name of the installation and the 10 digits ‘1216976400’ indicate one specific point in time of Wiki history, as a still frame of the seed evolution. It is in fact the converted Unix time stamp of 2008-07-25 00:00:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) which is the first day of ISEA2008.

Other Information:

Collaborating with: Laboratory of Control and Mechatronics. The artist would like to thank Arts Council Korea, Fred Lee, Mirae Seo, MIRAGE@KAIST, National University of Singapore and ISEA2008.