Yunsun Shim × Hyeonah Choi
Whale Rock Project, PLATFORM L, 2021
Work Area: Exhibition Poster, Handout, SNS
Client: Yunseon Sim
Poster︎︎︎
594 × 841mm
“If you wish to understand the Universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.“ (Nicola Teslar, 1856-1943)
Humanity is moving toward an era of energy conversion and new space exploration centered on electric vehicles, passing through the past civilization era supported by fossil fuels. Nikola Tesla, an American electrical engineer and inventor, has focused on energy, frequency, and vibration as the most important factors to understand the world's principles. The history of science and technology has made a significant leap forward through the invention of electrical and communication technologies to overcome spatial and physical constraints by geopolitical locations.
Through the development of advanced science and technology, humanity is now expanding its dreams and goals beyond the realm of Earth to the unknown world, and since the Apollo Project in the 1960s, Mars exploration has recently begun in earnest through SpaceX and others, setting a goal of sending people to Mars in 2024. Space exploration has great significance not only in terms of these scientific and technological advances, but also in terms of expanding the horizon of human consciousness. Just as humans have projected and imagined familiar images to humans on clouds, stars, and moons in the past, space exploration technology is making rapid progress around Mars, and humans still project certain images on unknown objects found in space, imagining, and making them exist on a cognitive level.
The project name, Whale Rock, was taken by NASA's image probe Curiosity in 2014, and is an important clue to speculating that water may have existed on Mars in the past. It has ripples and sand dunes formed by the flow of water to lakes believed to have existed on ancient Mars, intersecting by geological phenomena, and rising into the sky as a whole. It is very interesting that human imagination reminded whales of stones discovered in the search for the first clue of life, water, on Mars.
Whales in the sea and stones on Mars. The sea and the universe are unknown areas of the two extremes in terms of physical and cognitive terms as much as their vast distance, but the existential gap is narrowed through a kind of metaphor called "whale." And coincidentally, these metaphors begin with images of stones transmitted over 400 MHz of radio waves between Earth and Mars. Furthermore, the communication of whales below the Earth, human communication, and communication with space are connected in a similar way by non-material-based media.
Advanced technology and human imagination open up the possibility of telepresence beyond the physical realm at a new level, and this project aims to explore the possibility of non-material-based new media and new ways of understanding the world with these keywords, 'whale, space, and wave'.
Text by Yunsun Shim, Hyeonah Choi