Discover Time of Korea

Rebel9 made the epilogue media ‹Discover Time of Korea›, a permanent exhibition of the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History. In this media work, we will be the medium of the collection of the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History. Visitors to the museum reconnect and reconstruct today’s time and the time held by the collection. ‹Discover Time of Korea› is a space composed of “Wall of Time”, “Making a Calendar” and “Gallery.” And each refers to countless “Now Times (Jetztzeit)” in history, connected to each other.

The history of today’s museums is a complex pile of memories. And the numerous materials collected by museums exist as objects we should remember. But if you look at the memory of each material, perhaps the time of history is not just one sentence to memorize, but sometimes more like color, shape, and very abstract feelings.

So in this media work, we saw the process of visitors meeting their collections as a “Play with time and memory.” Instead of looking into memories with a list of linear history and artifacts, we hope to meet new memories of Korea by exchanging time for coincidences and debris that visitors have found.

Discover Time of Korea / Rebel9

Wall of Time

Walter Benjamin (1892~1940) says in “On the Concept of History (1942)”, “Establishing the present concept as the present time (Jetztzei) with fragments of Messianic time.” The way “Wall of Time” in “Meet the Times of Korea” shows a pile of records is passing an infinite number of present times. And the short story never returns. Rather than creating a structural necessity to search for something and produce a result, we visualize the contingency of each fragment. It is a device to prevent a repetition of images of the same pattern and is implemented with a recursive algorithm. The program code of the recursive algorithm creates squares of various colors, and inside the function, the function keeps calling itself, constantly repeating, breaking, and breaking the squares of this time. At this time, the audience faces fragments of different colors and sizes every moment in front of the “wall of time” that reaches 5 meters. All the squares projected on the wall represent the relics curated at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History and the “calendar image” created by the viewer, who can pause these images with a gesture of touching the wall.

Wall of Time

Making a Calendar

The “Making a Calendar” kiosk of ‹Discover Time of Korea› is the starting point for experiencing the epilogue and is the point where the epilogue content is created. Visitors select color, shape, and word step by step, and receive the relics of Korea’s time as a single image. The paused time is marked as ‘history’, and the viewer expresses the moment of personal emotion and memory by transforming or adding an image on it. The work thus created can be sent to ‘Wall of Time’, ‘Gallery’, and e-mail.

Making a Calendar

Gallery

The “Gallery” allows visitors to watch the history created by the viewers, or browse the collections of the newly created the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History through the participation of visitors through search. Above all, the gallery media can output the work created by the viewers, and only the moment when it is printed, the past time away from the current time is displayed as the sum of countless days. However, the length of history and time in ‘play with time and memory’ is meaningless, and only the color, shape, and emotion of the memory looking at the time remain as an image.