Q1. Hello. Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Hello, I’m Sung Rok Choi. Currently, I work primarily with animation and video. My research focuses on how we, as human beings, perceive a world that is becoming increasingly digitized through the tool of new media, and how we ourselves are recognized as entities within that process. I am particularly interested in the changing relationship between machines and humans.


Q2. You studied fine art, but your practice extends across animation and digital video. What led you toward this direction?

Originally, I had planned to major in sculpture. However, while preparing for entrance exams, I gradually lost interest in sculpture and became more interested in painting instead. But as I studied painting, I think I became overwhelmed by the weight of its long history, which eventually distanced me from school life itself. After completing military service and before returning to university, I began assisting with documentary filming, and that was when I first encountered moving images.

Around the same time, I became interested in stage design, so I followed a stage designer around, learning and experimenting with design work. When I eventually returned to school, painting no longer interested me at all. I think that was why I continued making semi-flat works. During that period, I became increasingly interested in science through drawings and installation works based on science-fiction narratives.

I was fascinated by how scientists develop, execute, and structure theories through research processes, and I began connecting those processes to artistic creation itself. I constantly thought about how process and result could be transformed into visual elements capable of constructing narratives within exhibition spaces.

Today, Arduino is widely known and commonly used, but at that time it had not yet really entered Korea. As someone trained in fine art, handling machines such as motor-control systems was extremely difficult for me. In order to overcome those limitations, I even attended private technical academies. It was there that I met a friend majoring in mechanical engineering, and together we built my first robot.

Although I was making artworks, the process itself often felt more like research. There were constant cycles of attempting, breaking, discarding, and trying again. Animation was similar. I had never formally studied animation, nor was I using traditional animation techniques. Because I was continually drawn toward unfamiliar fields, my practice may appear to move in many different directions.


Q3. Through your engagement with various fields, it seems you have developed a very distinct artistic direction of your own. The works presented in your 2015 solo exhibition all utilized drones. Was there a particular reason or moment that led you to become interested in drones?

As suggested by the title of the exhibition, 《The Height of Phantom》, the work concerns the existence of invisible beings. I became interested in the problem of perspective that emerged with the invention of linear perspective, as well as the new forms of vision produced through airplanes, hot-air balloons, and satellites.

I was also drawn to the surveillant gaze generated by CCTV systems, and more recently to the purposeless, almost zombie-like gaze produced by civilian drones. The project began from the idea that unseen entities may be watching us.

I first began this work while I was in the United States, around the time drones were initially becoming publicly available. As digital machines continued to develop, I became increasingly interested in how humans understand the world through intellectual tools and technologies. This led me to investigate the social, political, and ethical issues surrounding drones as unmanned flying surveillance devices.

During my research, I realized that the developmental history of drones closely resembled the trajectory through which computers were first invented for military purposes and later commercialized for civilian use.

For example, I noticed that DJI—a major drone manufacturer controlling over sixty percent of the global market—was imitating Apple’s design strategies almost exactly, from packaging and marketing to website structure. People were beginning to purchase drones in the same way they bought iPhones.

Eventually, I acquired a drone produced by DJI myself. Flying it and recording photographs and videos, I found the images, landscapes, and worlds revealed through the machine to feel both fresh and surreal, which naturally led me into making work with it. My interest in drones also led me to join hobbyist communities. Much like cameras or RC devices in the past, drones were often framed as hobbies associated with middle-aged men.

Looking at the purposeless, almost zombie-like photographs and videos uploaded within those communities made me think deeply about what it actually means to capture images through drones. In my works, my intention was not to emphasize the recognizable features of the machine itself, but rather to use the machine on another level entirely. I spent a great deal of time thinking about the intrinsic properties carried by these technologies.

Q4. Recently, drones have become widely used not only in entertainment programs and documentaries, but also by independent creators. Although drones emerged relatively recently, many people now feel familiar with the perspective they produce. Your recent works also engage with landscapes seen through drones—that is, the drone’s gaze itself. What kind of gaze are you attempting to express through drones?

I wanted to create images in which “an unmanned aerial object is observing an entity with intention.” The title of my work I Will Drone You actually comes from a phrase used by a Republican politician in the United States. Instead of saying “I will kill you,” he said, “I will drone you.” Recently, there has been a strong tendency toward the militarization of drones in the United States.

I staged scenes in which drones circle above people lying—or already dead—on the ground, almost like crows hovering over corpses. In the case of I Will Drone You, I approached the scene from the perspective of becoming a target. Through editing, I intentionally made the body appear either as though it were reacting after being shot or as though the movement itself might simply be an editing error.

A Man with a Flying Camera borrows its title from The Man with a Movie Camera, the film created by the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. I was influenced by the way Vertov conceived of the camera as a mechanical eye and by how he represented images of the world, the city, and people as seen through the gaze of machinery.

In my own work, I wanted to capture a way of seeing the world through what could be considered the most contemporary camera technology today: the drone. The human figure in the work becomes almost an object moving through the frame, like a character progressing through predetermined stages within a video game.

At the same time, I wanted to create the sensation that the images were not being seen by a drone at all, but rather by some fixed existence observing from elsewhere. Initially, I experimented in various ways simply to understand the inherent properties of drones. But drones turned out to be far more stable, precise, and easy to control than I had expected.

They create a sensation similar to viewing live satellite imagery—as though looking at a still image suspended in time. It also resembles the feeling of a virtual computer observing within a computer simulation. I wanted to create images that did not appear to have been filmed by drones, and to convey the sensation of another kind of machinic entity doing the seeing.

Scroll Down Journey, for example, originated from the act of constantly checking our own position through navigation systems and digital maps.


Q5. In both A Man with a Flying Camera and I Will Drone You, the frame does not move according to the movement of the subject within the image. This fixed viewpoint appears to be a distinctive characteristic of the works. What is the significance of this fixed perspective?

I wanted to differentiate my work from the kinds of drone footage that audiences are already familiar with, and I think that impulse also emerged from my experiences with games and virtual spaces. I have always been deeply interested in the kinds of environments constructed within games, so that was probably the biggest influence.

There was also an intention to conceal the fact that what was seeing was a fixed camera or a machine. At the same time, I wanted to treat the image as flatly as possible. Because of this, even though the works are filmed in real spaces, they end up conveying images of spaces that feel somehow unfamiliar or alien.

Q6. In these works, realistic drone footage is combined with painterly expression, so the fact that the images were captured by drones is not immediately foregrounded. In fact, this seems to create another layer of illusion, almost as though the scenes are unreal. What significance does this indirectly represented reality hold for you?

At first, I did not intentionally aim for that effect. Structurally, drones can only fly for about twenty minutes, and once they rise above roughly one hundred meters, people appear merely as pixels. So in order to make human movement minimally visible, filming had to occur at altitudes between sixty and seventy meters.

When I first experimented with this, the resulting imagery felt unexpectedly flat, almost as if human beings had been mechanically placed onto a surface. From there, I wanted to expand the idea further, so I began filming in different locations.

I was inspired by the way simulations and 3D games allow viewpoints to move freely and fluidly, and I staged the work so that it would resemble the experience of passing through stages within a game environment.


Q7. Continuing with your recent works, Scroll Down Journey seems particularly complex in the way it transforms satellite imagery and drone footage into a two-dimensionalized, continuous virtual map. Could you explain your working process?

Initially, I collected satellite images and drone photographs, cut them into fragments, and stitched them together piece by piece. Through digital painting processes in Photoshop, I created eight digital images, each measuring 2200 × 16000 pixels. Then, using After Effects, I constructed sequences in which these eight digital images moved sequentially.

Other moving elements were separately animated and later composited into the work. The automobile itself remains stationary while the background moves around it. At the end of the work, the landscapes the automobile has passed through are revealed to be a single flat layer, which then falls away into another layer before the sequence loops and repeats.

The image-objects appearing in the work are primarily drawn from landscapes of Seoul, and fundamentally reveal the structural organization of the city itself. The bridges over the Han River, Olympic-daero, golf courses on the outskirts of Seoul, sinkholes, and passing ships—including imagery referencing the Sewol ferry disaster—are embedded throughout the work.

These devices function in such a way that those who recognize them can identify their references, while others may simply perceive them as fabricated images. Another important aspect of this work is that every image shares a single unified perspective. I wanted to construct what could be described as an absolute viewpoint.

The idea originated from the everyday act of constantly checking one’s position while moving through space using digital map applications. Within a small screen, we become represented as blinking red dots, while the surrounding environment unfolds as a perfectly flattened world organized entirely around the perspective of that red point, replacing the actual physical landscape around us.

Q8. Operation Mole contains a highly layered narrative and appears to expand the conventional structure of animation through its use of multiple channels. How do the panoramic perspective and multi-channel structure operate within the installation space?

This work is an animation installation composed of eight channels in total. It centers on a mole tank capable of traveling underground and the various events unfolding around it. The work deals with the mission of the pilot operating the machine, the purposes behind constructing and traveling with the machine, and the historical events occurring during that period.

I adopted the structure of the panorama because I wanted to contain multiple simultaneous scenes within a single visual field. Historically, panoramic technology itself emerged from attempts to move beyond the conventional limits of the standard screen. In the actual installation, the work consisted of a structure combining three screens, each measuring approximately 1.5 meters wide and 1.7 meters high.

The installation was designed so that viewers would feel surrounded by the screens. Furthermore, depending on the distance from which the audience viewed the work, entirely different details within the image became visible.

For example, within the underground bunker’s torture chamber, the method of water torture changes whenever the flag on the exterior building changes. Elsewhere, soldiers drink alcohol in a tower while cats wander across the ground below. Small situations like these emerge throughout the work. I used the panoramic format in order to show many events occupying the same screen simultaneously and colliding with one another.

In many ways, the work also symbolizes the condition of contemporary viewers, who witness historical and political events unfolding simultaneously, almost as though they were being livestreamed through websites or digital media platforms.

Q9. Since the narrative is based on historical events, what were some of the key incidents that informed the work?

The work combines elements drawn from anti-communist education in Korea during the 1970s, the infiltration tunnel incidents from that period, and the mole tanks that appeared in Japanese science-fiction comics of the same era.

On the surface level of the work, trucks are shown dropping pigs into pits; at the time I was writing the scenario, outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease were particularly severe. I incorporated images of pigs being buried, along with the sound of pigs crying, into the sound composition of the piece.

Q10. During The Stream’s screening program, audiences were able to see Climbing and The Chestnut Walking from your early ‘Microscenic’ series. As I understand it, these works used an advanced microscope called “Camscope” to magnify coins, thumbtacks, and stones into unfamiliar landscapes. It seems that there may be a connection between those works and your recent projects in terms of using advanced technology to generate unfamiliar ways of seeing.

Yes, I think there is definitely a continuity. ‘Microscenic’ was a project I worked on around 2005, nearly ten years earlier, and the goal was to combine immense spaces invisible to the naked eye with objects we usually consider trivial. It was part of a collaboration organized by the Savina Museum of Contemporary Art and KIST, where scientists and artists worked together.

At the time, what interested me most were laboratories and technological apparatuses themselves. For this screening, I brought only two works from the ‘Microscenic’ series. Small objects were filmed through a microscope and transformed into scenes resembling vast landscapes. In Climbing, I magnified a tiny pebble—about the size of a fingernail—that I had picked up on Bukhansan Mountain, turning it into a landscape resembling a rocky mountain range.

I then composited footage of people climbing the actual rock faces of Bukhansan into the scene. In The Chestnut Walking, I enlarged the surface of a chestnut so that it resembled the surface of a planet, creating scenes in which an astronaut appears to float across it.

At that time, I was less interested in telling a specific story than in creating singular scenes—technically fascinating images that could only be seen through such processes. One major influence was the film Innerspace (1987), which depicts characters miniaturized to microscopic scale and entering the human body.

There is definitely a connection to that film. Since this was before the era of digital video, the image quality was poor, and it was also the first work in which I used the editing software After Effects.


Q11. Could you tell us about the future direction of your practice?

I’ve become increasingly interested in the history of media, in how machines evolve, and in how they in turn transform human beings. I am also interested in the ethical issues surrounding drones and broader cultural changes related to technology.

Going forward, I would like to continue working with animation while also experimenting further with audiovisual practices. I’m particularly interested in historical experiments within abstract film and animation that attempted to synchronize image and sound.

References

• [인터뷰] 유령의 시선으로 바라보기: 최성록
  [Interview] Seeing Through the Gaze of a Ghost: Sung Rok Choi