Yun Lee

What visual and sonic compositions can arise from a boxing drill? For many, boxing is just a brutal sport where two people try to knock each other out. For others, it is considered a more elegant martial art, sometimes even compared to the game of chess. Although there is a set number of moves and counter moves, the seemingly endless combinations of jabs, hooks, head movement, and footwork work together to form an unexpected dance. This performance explores dodging, one of the many drills that boxers practice to hone their craft. Three electronic pendulum instruments swing back and forth while the performer dodges them. The proximity between the instruments and the performer creates the basis for the choreography and music composition. 

 Developed during a residency at CMHK with support from iii, Stroom The Hague, and Performance Technology Lab. 



The two performers engage in rituals of protection before facing off in a fight to exhaustion navigating the lines between attraction and repulsion, intimacy and violence. The commentary starts off narrating the fight before shifting into generated text on capitalist masculinity, and melting into nonsense.

The argument for biometric technology such as facial recognition and fingerprint scanners is that they can objectively extract data to accurately identify people for contexts ranging from prison systems, welfare, and marketing, to commercial products. Although conversations around algorithmic bias, accuracy issues, and data privacy have encouraged positive changes to when and how biometrics are used, the damaging consequences for a growing minority still linger. As biometric technology becomes more accurate and increasingly makes its way into our daily lives, the stakes also get higher. In this workshop, we will go through a survey of facial recognition, emotion recognition, and adversarial tactics, informed by case studies, ideas and research developed in the fields of technology, law, visual culture, cosmetics, media theory, and military camouflage. Through exercises and discussions, we will also confront the human assumptions encoded in algorithms, discuss how machine vision shapes the definition of being human, and find ways to reframe and retrain the ways we see and understand the face.

I originally wrote this talk four years ago.
It’s about internet culture and archival practices. The thing about talking about the internet, is that things shift very quickly and ideas and events can also quickly become obsolete.
 So the talk I am giving today is a version that partially preserves a snapshot of that talk, where some things stick and other parts are knocked off, a re-roll of the original, titled: “Katamari Damacy: a framework for erasure”

A flip book commisioned by Verso. An exercise in Lossinesss and incompatibility

On Illegibility is a lecture performance on identification politics in the development and use of biometric technology such as facial recognition and fingerprint scanners. The lecture scrutinizes the algorithms that center certain bodies as a standard from which others are mere deviations, and traces how biometrics ultimately shape definitions of what a human being is. This lecture unpacks what it means to be legible in the eyes of the state and society, and looks into strategies built into “illegible” bodies and faces.

A workshop focusing on score-making as a creative method derived from and made for different parts of the body

Poetics and Politics of Erasure is a digital essay on the aesthetics and politics of erasure in audio, visual, and digital cultures. The framework for erasure is drawn from the video game Katamari Damacy and internet aesthetics. It investigates power relations in dominant archival practices, traces how memory storage technology reinforces hierarchical models of knowledge, and poses the generative potential of erasure in alternative models of knowing, doing, and being.

The essay was produced and published on oneacre.online from Dec 2017 to Mar 2018 in collaboration with Victoria Douka-doukapolou, Stef Kors, and Titus Knegtel. Each time viewers visit the site, several words are deleted. This happens until the main text disappears and only the footnotes remain.

A record of silence in a sandpaper lined sleeve

Text lifted from Thomas Edison's failed invention: a 125 foot recording horn turned scrap metal for war effort

Two performers each write lectures on the cocktail party effect as a form of composition through active listening. The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus in and out of one audio source while filtering other surrounding stimuli. 

The lectures are delivered simultaneously so that audiences are put in the position of choosing to listen to both lectures simultaneously, switching between the two, choosing one over the other, passively receiving the lectures as noise, or all of the above.

A solo piano transcription of a guitar being smashed

Come On You Fuckers is a project by artist Rowan Smith and composer Ingrid Lee. An electric guitar is smashed until it no longer produces any sound. The recording of this action is transcribed for solo piano. It has taken multiple forms; a solo piano score, a live performance of this score, and as a 7″ vinyl record/publication designed by David Karwan and Isaac Berenson, including texts written by Rowan Smith, Ingrid Lee, Jen Hutton, Michael Molitch-hou, Linda Stupart, and Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal.
 More information at https://comeonyoufuckers.wordpress.com/about/ 


Multiple similarly tuned snare drums are placed around a space with their snares turned off. A single snare drum in the center is amplified with a contact mic. With its snare on, the drum begins to feedback on itself. One by one, the other drums have their snares switched on so that the resonance of the first drum infects an increasing number of drums, causing them to resonate and rattle in sympathy with the first drum. These sounds build up, interfere with each other, dissipate, and recompose, culminating in a single assemblage of sound and rhythm.