I was adopted into my family from Korea on April 16, 1985, at 3 1/2 months. On May 8, 2011, I was notified by Holt International that my birth family is looking for me. The site ambksy.com begins to chronicle my journey toward reunion and reconciliation as a Korean adoptee. Currently consisting of ongoing writings, the intention is for the project to grow organically into something addressing the greater themes of transracial adoption and the emotions of being found across multiple media.

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Preview images from upcoming web graphic novel.

LUCID is an ongoing experiment in everyday “science fiction”. Utilizing common portable and makeshift technology, LUCID attempts to capture scattered momentary emotions and intimate textures through a collection of 30-second microscopic videos. 

Gathered through the artist’s OCD tendencies to maintain and arrange, the project presents synthesized vignettes of captured traffic, skin, fabric, and those elements often missed in transit. Both carnal and ethereal, the resultant specimens breathe new life from their isolation.

Specimens captured with an LG camera phone and makeshift lens from discarded CD-ROM parts

February/March is a sample from the two-month period and the first installment of LUCID.

ecphrasis.tumblr.com

Ecphrasis (or, more commonly, ekphrasis) is, in its most basic idea, the reaction of one work of art to another in an attempt to describe the original’s essence and relate it to an audience. A poet describes a painting, a photographer captures the light on a statue, a filmmaker weaves visuals inspired by a piece of music. The two works are relational, in that the latter seeks to illuminate the meaning of the former, and create an immediacy of interpretation.

Our work on this site begins with this basic idea. Yet, where a work of ecphrastic art traditionally forms a dialogue with the original only in what it casts backwards through interpretation or inspiration, we are creating, notionally, the reaction while the original is still in an embryonic state. The ecphrastic relationship is not only between the pieces themselves, but between us as artists. Neither piece is complete until a synthesis with the other is achieved.

The method is to work in the creative moment–a spur, a reaction, the forming of a dialectic between the written and the visual, the competing halves of the brain, and the presentation of those moments to an audience. As we move forward, a complimenting series of plays will emerge that explore this relationship.

Also, we hope that they look pretty cool.

Images: Amanda Barrett
Words: John McDonald

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(00:34:59), full projection

Repeat is a single-channel video projection and audio mix that accompanied Meg Hebert Dance’s performance of the same name on November 30-December 1, 2007 at Triskelion Arts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

(00:03:01), performance excerpts

The Project

Good Riddance is an experimental web archive dedicated to the documented destruction of sacred personal objects. Its facilitator views the web as a space of transcendence where information sheds its physical shell to rejoin the ether of non-space. The project calls into question value systems while providing a free-form skeleton through which participants can apply their own personal histories.

Beginning with 16 participants in February 2007, Good Riddance is an ongoing project. To participate, contact Amanda Barrett at amanda.m.barrett[at]gmail.com.

→ Participate

(1 min) x 20

Ebb & Flow is an alternative travelogue compiled during my summer in the United Kingdom, 2005. The single-channel video is programmed to randomize both video and audio sequences, replicating the nonlinear nature of the experience and, moreover, the intimate practice of remembering. The project initiated with the idealized imaginings of a tourist–a desire to escape the present and lose oneself in preordained history. The resultant series captured no such heroic sentiments. What I found was an active backdrop, an obsession with extras, and no subject that did not blend seamlessly in both sight and sound into the landscape. July was plagued with an undercurrent of events and a political climate that left the populace voyeurs in their own dreams. What remains is an endless search and the overcast subconscious of the city, with the roads spidering out to all unknown destinations.

The audio consists of the repetitive sounds and indistinct background drone underlying all parts of the city and sea. Contrary to static trinket and souvenirs, the series speaks in nondescript moments, shadows, and rhythms–void of faces and wrought with anonymity. It is marked by its own impermanence.

I replay these memories with the _________ of a _________ with a _________.
I [wish to say I] was never in London.
I feel as though I was never there.