Sound Chamber : 0101헐1010

Tacit Group
0101헐1010
2025, Audiovisual Installation, 4.2-channel sound, 10'10''

Since its opening, the Ulsan Art Museum XR Lab has been creating an environment in which research and exploration of technological media’s potential can continue while functioning as an experimental space supporting artists’ art-making activities. On an extension of that experiment, Sound Chamber: 0101헐1010 presents the audiovisual piece 0101헐1010 by the Tacit Group, who note the organic relationship between sight and sound while crisscrossing the two senses’ boundaries based on algorithms. Visitors are led to the marvelous experience of hearing, seeing, feeling, and responding with their whole bodies in an immersive space where the sensory transition of “seeing” sound and “hearing” images occurs.
 

In that process, the sensory environment technology produced presents new artistic possibilities transcending simple audiovisual stimulation to expand human perception and imagination. However, art mediated by technology frequently rouses an ambivalent emotion. It is because we simultaneously feel the anxiety that technology might threaten people’s positions even as we are fascinated by technology’s sophistication. Sound Chamber: 0101헐1010 departs from an encounter between these contradictory emotions. What artistic attitude could we have when technology is perceived as an entity threatening people’s positions while simultaneously becoming a means to expand human creativity? The Tacit Group responds to this question with their own delightful and clear formative language, which is neither too heavy nor light.
 

As much as they have long been interpreting Korean texts with sound and rhythm structures, this time they imagine a conversation method of people and machines with a focus on onomatopes, which are a sound language. Onomatopes are sounds before they are words and a language in which emotions and rhythm are condensed, and they become a clue for audio-visually resolving the tension between mechanical order (0101, 1010) and human senses (the exclamation “헐” [heol]). Realized with multifaceted video and spatial sound, this work pays more attention to the echos and rhythms than to the textual significance, and it guides viewers to experience the possibilities of a new artistic language while responding with senses instead of decoding the meaning.
 

Sound is a sense that arrives before language. By filling a sound chamber with the original energy of precisely that sound involving the echos before being turned into words, formless vibrations, and the tactile senses they leave on the body, this exhibition forms a synaesthetic space of immersion in which sound and sight harmonize.
 

Such an attempt experiments with a sensory structure in which humans and technology respond and become connected in new ways, and it lightly and clearly shakes the boundaries. With sound language as the medium, the relationship between people and technology is converted to sensory play and human emotions vividly come to life even in mechanical order. Sound Chamber: 0101헐1010 is ultimately a space delightfully suggesting a new rhythm of coexistence humans and technology create together as we hear with our bodies and think with our senses.