Porosity Valley, Portable Holes

 
2017

single-channel video, 21 min 20 sec

 
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Written and Directed by Ayoung Kim
Assistant Researcher and Script Editor: Alexandra Pedley
Production Manager: Hye Seon Jeong
Exhibition Producer: Anabelle Lacroix (Melbourne Festival)
Original music, Sound Design and Mix by Dang-Khoa Chau aka D.K. (D.k. Chau) Represented by Edouard Langé (Savoir Faire).
Casting: Amélie Diogo
Camera: Hugo Bernatas (Khrôma Films)
Editing: Benjamin Large (Khrôma Films) and Ayoung Kim
Post Production: Atelier Pierre Pierre (Florent Pierre), Benjamin Large (Khrôma Films), Stanislas Becot and Ayoung Kim
Live Recording: Baptiste Mésange
Hair and Make-up Azusa Kato
Assistants: Bora Kwak, Haekyung Bae and Minsu Choi

Gatekeeper: Vincent Chaumont
Oceanic Magic Solution AD host: Jennifer Karen
Voice for Petra Genetrix: Lucie Louvrier
Magician: Mathieu Bich

Thanks to Rushdi Anwar, Franck Podguszer, Mileva Stupar, Gahee Park and many more

 
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Commissioned by Melbourne Festival
Co-produced by CAC Brétigny and Ilmin Museum of Art
Supported by Arts Council Korea – ARKO, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria
Video location supported by Ina.fr.

Events
— 2022 Earth Heat Flow: The Visitor Who Returns to Solar Time, from the 1st Beijing Biennial Symbiosis, Beijing, China
— 2022 Watch and Chill: Streaming Senses, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE
— 2022 Watch and Chill: Streaming Senses, MMCA, Seoul, Korea
— 2021 2018-2020 New Acquisitions Binge-watching 14284″, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea
— 2020 29.97 Moving Image and Cinema Study Group Screening, Busan Cinema Center, Busan, Korea (Screening)
— 2019 Korea Artist Prize, MMCA Seoul, Korea
— 2019 The Ouroboros, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
— 2019 Video Library as part of Rencontres Internationales, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
— 2019 Midnight Sun, Elephant Space, Seoul, Korea (Screening)
— 2019 The Ouroboros, The Cube Project Space, Taipei, Taiwan
— 2019 Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival (Co-organized by the Arts Council Of Mongolia and Goethe Institute Asia), Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
— 2019 Sharjah Film Platform (Organised by Sharjah Art Foundation), Mirage City Cinema, Sharjah, UAE (Screening)
— 2018 Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Executed by HONG-GAH Museum, Event Held at Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (Screening and Lecture)
— 2018 Imagined Borders, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea (Group Show)
— 2018 Post Institutional Stress Disorder (PISD), Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (Group Show)
— 2018 Petra Genetrixes over Portable Holes – A Guide to Speculative Fictions, Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, Korea (Lecture)
— 2018 Porosity Valley, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (Solo Show)
— 2018 Desk Set , CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge, France (Group Show)
— 9 Oct 2017, Boiler Room Lecture: Ayoung Kim – Porous, Perplex, Plastic, National Library Victoria, Hosted by Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (Lecture)
— 2017 Porosity Valley, Portable Holes in Melbourne Festival, National Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (Solo Show)

Porosity Valley, Portable Holes

“Petra Genetrix from Porosity Valley. Date of birth unknown, gender not applicable. Welcome to the Immigration Data Center (IDC).”

As a speculative fiction, Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017) unfolds narratives that encompass imaginary subterranean geologies as live things, in which a quasi-mythical entity named “Petra Genetrix” encounters practical problems while trying to migrate to another rocky platform. As an ever-migrant, half mineral composition and half data bits, Petra’s journey is a metaphor for the physical migration as well as the digital migration in the flow. The stories penetrate, push and pull through the porous spaces within underlying geological structures.

Known to be the “fastest mobile” tectonic plate on Earth, the Australian territory literally migrates about 7cm (2 inches) north every year. The Australian government has needed to modify the GPS coordinates of the territory by 1.5 metres in the last two decades. At this speed, the Australian tectonic plate will meet the South-Eastern islands in a few million years’ time. Influenced by this, the project exists as a critical and speculative commentary for both physical and data migration and the territory as a host under the conditions of the 21st century. The occasional emergence of the ‘portable holes’ – both the speculative and physical – let the stories, migrant/mineral and data particles penetrate through to encounter the unexpected things beyond.

The work suggests strata of various times and spaces, enabling multi-scalar and multi-temporal variations of the imaginations. Heterogeneous visual materials of CGs, 3D models and green screen-shot footage of actors, as well as live video shots collide and merge into a polyphonic coexistence with the multi-layered synthetic sound and voices. The work is prone to strange meetings of ideas while achieving the most of the thought experiment.

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Petra Genetrix, who lives in the imaginary space “Porosity Valley,” is a composition of minerals living in a gigantic and bizarre-looking rock crystal protruding from the rock face. As people – fascinated or overwhelmed by its bizarre figure – often visit Petra Genetrix to purify their thoughts, over the years Petra has developed into a kind of pseudo-mythical being, regardless of its own will.
One day Petra faces a situation in which it must attempt to migrate to another rock platform due to an explosion that occurred in Porosity Valley. In the process, as a would-be migrant, Petra faces various realistic problems unimaginable for a divine being. It is subject to an interview to confirm that it is a being appropriate for migration, and placed in quarantine for 40 days to rule out the possibility it is carrying any viruses that may pose a threat to the new platform. Later, it is presented with the opinion that Porosity Valley could be duplicated, as Petra’s mythological function has been found by the Immigration Data Center to be favorable to humans…