Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Reactions to pieces from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Not friendly to epileptics.

That said, all three pieces share a similar structure, i.e. too-fast-to-be-read-comfortably text combined with strobe-y screen flashing and sense-of-urgency-inspiring music. I can get why the poems display at the speed they do, given the music that they try to keep time to and match rhythm with. The problem is that I loathe someone else dictating the speed at which I read. The poems try to convey urgency, force. That's fine. But if I blink, glance away for a split second, pause to light up a cigarette, or whatever, and things have gone three screens away, losing the thread for me...that's just a pain. I don't want to sit through an unpausable video, which is what the poems essentially are, multiple times to feel like I "got" everything that went into it, captured all those little, quickly-vanishing phrases.

"Lotus Blossom" rates special mention for actually playing into the strobe action of the poems, corresponding that annoying quirk of programming with its frequent mentions of flickering lights. The use of subliminal-like phrases scattered throughout what I'd consider the "main" text also adds to the hypnotic quality. All of the pieces almost seem to be aspiring to that hypnosis, especially "Dakota" with its pounding percussion, as if seeking to deliberately induce a trance state. I'd enjoy reading these as traditional text, but I confess doing so would probably lose something that the chosen medium seeks to add. "The Sea," with its stream-of-consciousness wandering, was for me the most enjoyable to read in terms of textual content.

It's possibly a dated view, but I like my text pinned down, like butterflies to a board, so that it can be appreciated. Granted, it may lose the animus when being presented like that, but it does make it more comprehensible. Literature shouldn't be a moving target.

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