KA HEE JEONG FEAT. REECE COX – PROJECT INSPIRED BY DYSTONIA

Artists Ka Hee Jeong and Reece Cox were invited to engage with recent neurological research by the Movement Disorders and Body Control Group at Charité Universitätsmedizin. With no instruction other than to reference the movement disorder of dystonia and current research, Jeong and Cox independently produced radically divergent projects. Dystonia is a complex neurological disorder wherein the affected person suffers involuntary muscle contractions leading to movements and abnormal postures.

Jeong’s piece, Oceanic Feeling, is a video and environmental installation. Jeong approaches the research at Charité with a focus on corporeal experience, or more specifically, the sensation of a body that acts against itself as in the case of dystonia. In Jeong’s video, a section of digitally rendered ocean floats in abyssal black space. A sparse, emotive soundscape grows in intensity as Jeong delivers a monologue of fear and anxiety induced by one’s own body, “I turn my head repeatedly. Eventually, my head will spiral out of my shoulders.” While the intensity of the video rises and falls, the room is heated and cooled, heightening awareness of the viewer’s own body. Jeong complements Oceanic Feeling with an additional video work, which portrays the god Pan as the bearer of panic, and further artifacts that document the natural distortions of materials through time.

Cox’s work, Variable Synthetics, takes an altogether different approach, drawing from the research process in order to produce a piece of original music. The research carried out at the Movement Disorders and Body Control Group produced an enormous amount of data in the form of long spreadsheets filled with numbers. While scientists examine the data in hopes of discovering novel truths, Cox instrumentalizes this process to new dramatized and speculative ends. Cox invents means of transposing the data, rendering them into a musical score. Using synthetic sounds and room recordings taken during select experiments, the resulting composition is a colorful, experimental sound piece riddled with psychoacoustic phenomena, elevating the subjective nature of the work from its status as empirical data.