DD2000: Miru Kim's Underground Art

The next talk I'd like to analyse is by Miru Kim, a South Korean photographer who moved to New York during the late 90s. Kim had originally set out to pursue a career as a surgeon, after she had discovered a seemingly dark interest in dissecting animals, discovering what may lurk underneath the surface. This philosophy led Kim into wanting to dissect the city, to see what was lurking underneath, upon which she discovered urban exploration, something I have always wanted to take up (there's rumours that Manchester is FILLED with underground structures).

It wasn't too long after taking a few photographs of abandoned structures such as sewers, subway tunnels, hospitals, factories, etc, that Kim decided the shots needed a sort of life, some sort of animation to them, so she began taking photos of these places including herself in the nude, so as not to be conforming to a cultural ideal. This set would come to be known as Naked City Spleen. The photos Kim takes include herself, very, very small in comparison the the rest of the shot; it's wonderfully subtle. 

Kim then goes on to tell us that her work hasn't kept itself exclusive to just New York, and that she has traveled the world, mainly cities like Berlin, Paris and London, possibly in order to achieve a more ancient, traditional feel to her work, in comparison to the relatively modern underground tunnels of New York. One such set includes the catacombs of Paris, which is littered with bones, some 1300 years old.

Kim has even made the big leap into film, with Blind Door, filmed with 16mm film in black and white, which brings over elements from Naked City Spleen. From what I have seen of it, it is quite interesting, containing extended scenes of Kim, nude, exploring abandoned buildings. It is as arthouse as it gets.

DD2000: Joe Sabia: The technology of storytelling

Okay, so DD2000 has taken a turn for the better this semester. Instead of writing another essay, I've been tasked with updating this blog according to a list of different fields. One such area is 'design discourse', in which I have to take a look at talks and conferences of various artists, designers, etc. I've already seen a decent amount of these talks, on websites such as ted.com and itsnicethat.com, so expect updates to come thick and fast over the next week or two. (Yeah, I'm actually updating the blog for once. Whatever next?)


So let's kick this off with a talk by Joe Sabia, in which he discusses the history of story telling, and how the medium has developed over the course of thousands of years.

Sabia begins by telling us, the audience, about a German illustrator named Lothar Meggendorfer, who could be described as a pioneer in story telling, by inventing the pop-up book. Sabia then goes on to show how such ingenuity and innovation has, over thousands of years, changed the way we pass on stories to each other, from when it was just cave paintings on walls, left behind by our ancestors, the neanderthals.
Meggendorfer decided to produce the pop-up book, as a way of breaking the conformity of a standard book, which at the time, was the pinnacle of storytelling. Soon after this, there was a resurgence in the way that people told stories, with traditional cinema on the way, and radio drama already making a stand. I think it's safe to assume that intellects such as Meggendorfer helped make entertainment in the 20th century boom, with the invention of the television, and even further down the line, the internet, which grants the average joe the ability to tell their own stories in a number of ways, from blogging to posting videos on Youtube.
It is worth pointing out that this talk is carried out using an iPad, which is one of the many devices out today, capable of accessing the internet, allowing people to share stories on the go using services such as Twitter or Facebook. This incredibly sophisticated technology can be very easily taken for granted, but when you consider that 7 BILLION other people, every single human being on the planet, could instantly find out what you had for breakfast, or who's annoying you on the bus or train... that's incredible. If you were to tell Lothar Meggendorfer that his ingenuity would connect the world in such a way, he'd have never believed it.


So by posting this blog, any human on the planet Earth can find out more about this marvellous figure, who unfortunately seems to have faded into obscurity, despite what he did for modern story telling.




(Just found out I was supposed to be in yesterday. Yikes! >.<)