Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, My Life as a Bloody Sheffield Butterknife, 2014.
FUCKING. WALTZED. 0UT. T0 THE. CAR,. LEANED. IN. AND. TURNED 0N. THE. IGNITI0N,. READY T0. HIT THE. R0AD. – “Dakota” (2001)
“Dakota” (2001) – one of two works showing at Sheffield Doc/fest by the Seoul-based net art group Young-Hae Chang’s Heavy Industries – is a blistering concrete love story set along the boozy road from Dakota to South Korea. If you’ve wondered what would happen if Charles Bukowski and Jim Dodge had a piss up on Adobe Flash, this is probably a close estimate. Part of the festival’s interactive strand, set in pseudo-geodesic inflatable domes up in Sheffield’s Millenium Gallery, “Dakota is as good an introduction as any to their work, which is important considering the more commercial and narrative expectations of a documentary film festival. “Dakota” also keeps the road clear for the longer and more complicated new piece, “My Life as a Bloody Sheffield Butterknife” (2014) – a work specially commissioned for the festival and which has its world premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a net art collaboration between two artists: Korea’s Young-Hae Chang (an artist-academic with a Ph.D in aesthetics from the Université de Paris I) and the American poet Marc Voge. Both live and work in Seoul, but their work crosses continents at rapid-fire speed through the internet and exhibitions. They’ve exhibited everywhere – MOMA to the Whitney, Centre Pompidou to the Tate. A documentary film festival in Sheffield is only the latest. In 2001, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries won a Webby award in the art category. As Mark Tribe noted in Frieze in 2006, their work displays and celebrates “many of the historical and relational dynamics of new media art: an experimental engagement with emerging media technologies; the use of new media to reach audiences directly, without art-world intermediaries; collaborative production; and a global perspective.”
An alcohol-soaked ‘road movie’ narrative, “Dakota” is an under six-minute text-based animation that rumbles from Dakota to South Korea with trouble in its wake. For all its black and white, tidy textual visuality, it is a Pop Art-rich story of love and travel across countries, referencing Marilyn and Elvis alongside greasy noodles and pissing on car bonnets – all set to the afro-beat of Art Blakey And The Afro-Drum Ensemble. Typical of their work, it explores the intermedial dynamics between – and imaginative potential of – text and music, hovering indeterminately between web art and digital literature.
“My Life as a Bloody Sheffield Butterknife” displays many of these traits. Once again, rapid-fire text-based animation speeds across the screen, pushing at the limits of illegibility as you struggle to race along with the country-hopping narratives, all the while tapping your feet to their drum-heavy soundtracks. Often the text is black on a white background, here it’s red overlaid on lo-fi film footage of street scenes in Seoul. The backdrop to the story is also familiar – violence, rage, food, sex and immigration, with the Sheffield landscape in its midst. This is a story about E.P.N.S. (Electro Plated Nickel Silver) and immigration, about the wayward child of George Butler & CO., Ltd. at Trinity Works, Sheffield. We follow the story of a butter knife’s bust ups, hardship and even his improvised tracheotomy. We hear about the butter knife’s journey from Sheffield to meeting Young-Hae and Marc. The story is strange but engaging – an unusual way to celebrate Sheffield’s traditional industries (no mining here).
Multiple narratives, global reach through internet channels like Youtube, and multiple languages (displaying both artists’ backgrounds as translators), Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a celebration of global art – accessible without being stupid, violent and visceral, crisp and funny. I’m not always sure about having one or two pieces of token “art” in a film festival context, but with the global scope of a documentary film festival buzzing with delegates from around the world, this is the boozy, bloody sort of new media art you’d want to showcase.
The 21st Sheffield Doc/Fest took place June 7-12 2014.
Text by Sophia Satchell-Baeza