netfilmmakers' blog

crack, fissure, pore, scratch on the surface.
We believed we could see something inside (including ourselves) through them.

Such a belief would collapse automatically
when they exceeded the surface
(I’ve searched for that mode of exceeding)

Surface, composed wholly of pores,
is not distinguisable from pore itself

They are
sometimes closed-circuit of vision,
sometimes chemiclly decayed retina
sometimes clumsy equivalence between inside and outside
or me and you.

It is that moment that the pore shimmers in itself.

A fact that the power is not an object to appropriate or possess any more,
and that the power interiorize itself and performs itself,
these things are not interesting anymore, at least after Foucault.

The interesting thing is that, the pinhole - which is indispensable for surveillance - is interiorized as well, and that
it comes to erase the boundaries between inside and outside, and that object comes to peep at me when I
peep at it, and that intersubjectivity is vanishing at such a midpoint, and that pinhole after all becomea a
vanishing point of subjectivity.

For example pornography, when I am peeping at them, the bodies are peeping at me (porno as social safety valve?).

In a word, pinhole is not my shield anymore. It is blackhole that sucks up me or absorbs me.

DIGRESSION/DEGRESSION was resulted from the search for that pinholes right on the filmstrip, which turned out
to be purple spots from diret decay of the emulsion.

PARTY POLITICS STRIKES BACK  is another search, sociological one for such pinholes. This time holes are not of
material, but of law (what we call them emergency or state of exception). Social blackhole in which subject
and object of surveillance vanished into the one and the same point of infinity, and which therefore is the worst
enemy against the law.

KIM GOK exhibits “Digression/Degression ” ( 3:14 min., 2008) Directors Cut for Netfilmmakers 19.edition: “Surveillance. A double-edged sword: comfortable security and confined society.”
See the work on Netfilmmakers here: DIGRESSION/DEGRESSION

Kim Gok
Kim Gok started filmmaking in 2001 from his first film, paper-cut animation. Until now, he just finished his 13th film (including 4 feature films) among which <Anti-Dialectic>(2002) was invited to Venice Film Festival, <Capitalist Manifesto>(2003) to Busan Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival, <Geo-Lobotomy> to Vancouver Film Festival, <Exhausted> and <Suicidal Variations> to Rotterdam Film Festival. The whole works of his was focused on how to get away with overeating and stomach ache even when eating metaphysics with one mouth, eating politics with other mouth at the same time. However, what interests him surreptitiously is a strange and raw image that could be hardly accepted by normal film festival, that is to say, material-thinking on the filmstrip itself, which we regard as “experimental” too easily, such as nitrate thinking on the surface tension between emulsion and base in <Digression/Degression>. He’s also inspired by some noise musicians, like Hong Chulki and Choi JoonYong, the members of the noise band, “Astronoise”, who have been collaborating with Kim Gok for many films in his filmography.