Gnome

Directed by 99betaHUD(한지형 ,기예림)
Sound by 김도언



Screened at:

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2024 Frame by Frame, Screening and Artist Talk, Mother Offline, Seoul
2024 Pirate Bay DIY Film Fest, Worm, Rotterdam
2023 Duo Exhibition <Gnome>, Alterside, Seoul

Original Soundtrack

Text:

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'Gnome' is an audiovisual essay that imagines alternative lives in self-sufficient communities through the voice of an extinct dwarf earth spirit. The two-channel video shows the world from the gnome's first-person perspective and, from a third-person view, depicts him alone, rambling madly. Originally conceived as an installation, fake artifacts, including ceramic helmets, giant stone shoes, and portraits of gnome ancestors, were arranged alongside the video. This collision between screen-mediated images and tangible materiality further emphasizes the current absence of the speaker, who exists as both an imaginary creature and a potential being.

The narrative within the work unfolds an esoteric tale about seclusion, trust, labor, and the conditions for forming kinship. Floating among post-internet aesthetics and flat, oversaturated lo-fi images, the archetypes we project onto gnomes, comical yet secretive earth spirits, simultaneously elderly and childishly mischievous, sinister, diverge and shift forms, refusing to coalesce into a single identity.

Two artists layer multiple digital paintings to construct a three-dimensional stage-like composition, while also tracking through the primeval forests of Yakushima, Japan, to discover natural objects: driftwood, stones, and trees, which are scanned using photogrammetry methods, then transformed to massive scales and extended into virtual spaces where one can explore these inanimate objects.

Through 3D simulation, the artist maximizes dynamic camera movements and depth of field effects to demonstrate the sense of distance between objects. Within this technical process of representation, the artist's own experiences with digital media and the physical world transform into memories that might belong to the mythical being of the gnome—a collective subject as a species.

Exhibition view

List of Works