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This is a written adaptation of the opening talk I gave last year at Campette 2025, titled "Spirits in the Digital Machine". Last year I talked about the healing power of the rave. There is something about collective music making that is healing. This year, I want to dig deeper into why we need healing at all. I’m not an expert on this concept, but something I understand to be true about…
Little Hyun couldn’t speak. Little Hyun’s voice was too small. Or maybe too big, too scary for everyone around him and for the world, so it was knocked out of him. Little Hyun committed the sin of being a boy with a too small and too big and too scary sissy voice. Who is speaking for him now? Who speaks for the little faggy boys with voices knocked out of them with a slap and a fist with the force…
The reduction in my anxiety and PTSD symptoms that is coming from taking my SSRI is coming along with a sadness for my younger self that never got to experience this. It's a feeling of loss for a me that never got to be. So much of me that I thought was just my own personality was actually anxiety or trauma responses to my harsh conditions. They were just survival mechanisms. They were…
These are some of the thoughts I had while preparing to release Inheritance EP earlier this year. "I wanted to make this EP because I wanted to execute the seemingly simple assignment of making traditional Korean music my way. But in the process of doing so, I realized that it was also a task to hear the sounds of adventure, beach, ocean, river, cabin, sauna, highway, redwoods. This is actually…
As I've come to get to know my "inner child" over the past several years I have begun to experience a kind of rage at my mother for her inability to care for me properly. It's not like I will ever express this to my parents, I think. I don't intend to any time soon, at least. The adult version of me extends understanding to them. The adult version of me resigns to thinking: it is what it is. It's…
It feels like I am stuck in a perpetual limbo ever since covid. We are trapped in stasis and the end of the end of history. At the end of the end of history lies the beginning of a new history. The condition of the later millennial is that of broken optimism. Or perhaps more aptly, it's a sobering up from a narcissistic, saccharine naivete. A generation that comes of age in a post-soviet…
I am experiencing the world as a menagerie, or a soup. It’s a stew, like the kind that has radishes, potatoes, and carrots, a Korean one, with big chunks, with a strong and rich paste flavoring the savory broth that permeates into every bit and gets better with time to sit over the fire or in the fridge to be eaten the next day, as all of the components meld. As the water-based saltiness of the…
I think that the central drama of an artist's life is of how they will reconcile making art with making a living. We are gullible enough to disembody the actual works from the artist because our limited viewpoint, hindsight, excludes the complexity of the artist-in-situ who cried and moaned at the actual pain of living through these times the works were made. I wonder this for myself. Will I ever…
The primacy of algorithm injustice has become increasingly evident to me over the past three years. The advent of new, twisted technologies of war, unleashed on the Palestinians in Gaza, has been but the most visible zenith of what is an entire iceberg of psychological and spiritual torture inflicted upon us by Big Tech and a government that allies with it. I see a way for me to exist in relation…