TELL US ABOUT WHAT YOU WORKED ON IN THE CULTUREHUB RESIDENCY. WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE CULTUREHUB LA STUDIO?
During my residency, I developed an essay and performance venue in webXR. I wanted to create a new type of engagement with “the metaverse,” both as an idea and a 3D space. With both the writing and world-making, I played with an assemblage of real and imaginary places, objects, and symbols across posthuman theory, the internet, and folklore. It was a thought experiment guided by a live performance online. The narrator was a spiteful spirit housed in a small, sea shrine in Korea. I depersonalized myself through this character because the event felt indulgent, gratuitous, but I felt stubborn in what I wanted to say. I was fascinated by the interior and exterior dimensions of masking, as an act, and the mask, as an object. In ritual, masks are forms of protection, but what is it that happens within the performative space? When thinking about becoming an avatar, I think first back to archetypes of personhood– the virtualities of identity– bringing us to gender, ethnicity, culture. How would a masked performance unfold in a hypothetical “global village?” That is the story I want to tell.
Read the full interview here: https://www.culturehub.org/read/somus-mask
ANDREA KIM 김신영 