Exchange Diary by Yeon-Kyoung Lim

Exchange Diary, Single channel video, 11′ 27, 2018

Yeon-Kyoung Lim’s video work, Exchange Diary, draws from youth culture and the practice of writing in a diary shared between close friends. The practice emerged primarily in Japan and Korea in the 1990s. The culture draws from the desire toward intimacy, raising the question of same-sex attraction/affection and plural modes of gender and sexuality.

This work is a mockumentary exploring the concept of an exchange diary of the twenty-first century, where the artist and her technical  companions have (re)collected images, texts, or other data formats from their journeys. The work attends to a way of reconfiguring the memory in collaboration with her artificial companions. Through an exploration of discursive moments in relation to transatlantic undersea cables, this mockumentary also introduces (a)parallel narratives about how tele-technologies have stored and abandoned personal and social memory.

Yeon-Kyoung Lim is an artist and PhD researcher, working on the loosely/tightly-coupled relationship between humans and technical things. Her research lies at the intersection of critical media theories, visual studies, and gender studies. It aims at understanding how humans sense technical things as their intimate companions, with a focus on media arts and technology/technologies.