Yeondoo Jung, Blind Perspective, 2014 © Yeondoo Jung

“Virtual reality is the ‘ultimate empathy machine.’ These experiences are more than documentaries.” — Chris Milk
 

Yeondoo Jung’s Blind Perspective(2014) was first presented at his solo exhibition 《Just like the road across the world》 at Art Tower Mito in 2014 and is set against the backdrop of a village in the Mito region left in ruins by a nuclear power plant accident. The artist wandered through the actual village and installed approximately 16 tons of various debris (a shattered bathtub, a stopped clock, and so on) along a roughly 33-meter corridor constructed inside the exhibition space. Viewers walk down this corridor lined with debris while wearing a VR device called the Oculus Rift. In the actual exhibition space, viewers move through the remnants of the ruined village, yet within the VR device they encounter beautiful natural landscapes.
 
This work actively utilizes the virtues inherent in VR. Like magic, it provides viewers with moments that transcend the limits of reality—moments that do not exist and cannot exist. Yet the images offered by virtual reality are not essentially detached from reality or premised on a radical disjunction. They may once have been the appearance of this place and may again become scenes encountered in the future. In other words, while VR reveals an idealized image not found in the already ruined reality, this ideal is ultimately premised upon the real world, thereby functioning as a latent projection of reality itself.

Indeed, Jung filled the VR landscapes with images based on actual scenery he filmed over the course of a week while traveling around Akita Prefecture, approximately 200 kilometers away. Through this, he juxtaposes images of the village in Mito with those of another region, allowing mutually incompatible temporalities—the past and the present, the ruined village and contemporary Akita—to coexist through virtual images.
 
The principal objects appearing in the work also embody the temporality of the damaged village. In particular, the clock in the village hall has stopped at the very moment the tsunami struck, clearly revealing that the installation reconstructs a specific moment in the past of Mito. Within an installation environment halted at a past moment, the viewer dons a virtual reality device and experiences another time.

These devices unsettle the viewer’s present sense of time and space, and through this overlapping of time and space, the artist compels both viewers and residents of Mito to reconstruct the present of the ruined village. Although the current Mito village exists in a state where its past beauty can no longer be found, the beautiful image of the village that survives in someone’s memory confronts reality through Jung’s work—as a magical double reality.

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