Yonng-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

www.yhchang.com

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a Seoul-based Web art group consisting of Marc Voge (U.S.A.) and Young-Hae Chang (Korea). Their work is characterized by text-based animation composed in Macromedia Flash that is highly synchronized to musical score, typically jazz.

I first encountered their work was at the New Museum in New York last winter. In the lower gallery, there were couple screens in which poetry-like sentence or conversation were flashing in the form of black and white, text-based animation. The music accompanied by the text was electronic jazz which was very attractive.

There work deal with the fundamental relationship between language, technology and contemporary culture. It likes a digital version of language-base conceptual art.

Here are some quotes from their interview:


YOO: If you hear about a digial poem, you associate it immediately with a combination of the moving images and text, one that is often animated in a Flash program. But YHC HI only uses pure text, also in Flash.

YHC HI: In the beginning of Net art, we were struck by how ineffective Net artists were in communicating information -- words, images, sound. This was in the mid-90s, when few people had broadband. Typically, Net art was an image with some words that took an eternity to download and appear in the browser. Music? Forget it, it was too heavy. And when it came to streaming media such as Flash and QuickTime, the image became tiny.

We wanted to use streaming media and audio -- to use the Internet to the maximum -- probably because we wanted Net art to be as entertaining as TV. The relationship is there and can't be avoided. As for Net art's interactivity, we thought it was laughable, not unlike channel surfing. By eliminating the image and just using text, plus the small miracle of mp3, we were able to create Flash pieces of from one minute to 25 minutes that fill up the browser and start playing after just a few seconds via a 56K modem.

http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2005/2/Yoo/index-engl.htm