“The House of Sorrow – House” sets up a game map as a space for recording thoughts, experiences a space formed with thoughts using a unique sense of storytelling that video game possess as a medium, and reconsiders a sense, that holds substantiality, and reason itself.
There is a story of Buddha where he achieves enlightenment, and recites a poem, which goes as follows: “Builder of this House of Sorrow, you shall build your rafters no more…” Artist Jisun KIM was pondering about the House of Sorrow, as she traveled around places like Peruvian Amazon, Colombia, Myanmar, and India, conducting a study about houses as both tangible and intangible spaces for containing thoughts, just like mandalas that are intricately drawn only to be erased afterwards. Meanwhile, she discovers a game map constructed in the online world by a character named ‘Min’ (which is her creation, in fact.) While playing this game, she experiences Min’s pile of thoughts that repeat the process of being created and destroyed as enormous sorrow. In the game, Min dug a cave, created a gallery of reasoning, and strolled around the digital desert as he carved his memories on the sand-sized dots. And he played the game he’d created, experiencing and reexperiencing his own memories. Which thoughts and memories did he hope to record as he created such a space? Jisun Kim traced Min’s thoughts in the game, as the first outside player ever to visit Min’s ‘house’ constructed with the game, a space formed with thoughts. She completed Min’s game by adding her own thoughts, which then she distributes as a game titled “The House of Sorrow – House”.
Unlike the performance version,“The House of Sorrow – House” is a video project of gameplay for this game.
Jisun KIM majored in Time Art, and has been presenting various projects based on her interests in social systems, cultures, and no man’s land (multi-layered spaces created between laws, norms, borders of physical lands, marginalized spaces in existing and online worlds).
Since her performance of crossing over borders with a torn-out passport in earlier days, Kim founded a guerilla media group ‘Pan-Asia International Conference’ in 2011, and disturbed political messages through media by visiting election campaign sites wearing a T-shirt saying ‘헐(What the…)’.
In the earlier version of Climax of the Next Scene, Kim traced the changes of sensations through which we perceive the world by juxtaposing online games and travel experiences in the real world from a perspective of armchair anthropology. And she created a developed version of Climax of the Next Scene, seeking after the exit of this system to imagine the world beyond. Extending this trajectory, Deep Present placed ‘outsourcing’ as the key engine of our system and saw Artificial Intelligence as its ultimate product. This replica of our intelligence was presented as a mirror to spark fundamental, yet pressing questions about ourselves and the present society.
