Omyo CHO: Barrel Eyes
An imagined future where you can inject other people’s memories into your own life.
An imagined future where you can inject other people’s memories into your own life.
Omyo CHO, Barrel Eyes, 2022–23, single-channel HD video, 10 min 47 sec. All rights reserved by the artist.
The premise of Barrel Eyes (2022–23) is the technological possibility of transmitting others’ memories into one’s own life, and imagines this from a future point of view where the physical environment and the body accompanying those memories have become separated. In a future where life on earth has become impossible due to climate change beyond a threshold set by the artist, the viewer, starting from the “Memorial Forest,” is presented with memories contained in four plotline that are inserted into the Oculus and can travel to each “moment.” The viewer follows the forest guide (a cat) through the virtual space, groping for memories of various material things. This allows the body to operate with a sense of matter and immateriality, reaching in and out of space and time through the injection of memories alone. The edited environment that plays on the screen simultaneously with the Oculus, through the audience’s active listening to the dialog in the video with a single handset, interprets the body in multiple tenses located from the observer’s point of view.
About the artist
Omyo CHO envisions future phenomena arising from technological advancements by focusing on the medium that can communicate this, including VR and sculpture. Recently, drawing inspiration from the field of “memory transfer research,” she imagines a life in the future where personal memories are valued as data and commodified as consumer objects.
