The Art of Sleep
The Art of Sleep has been commissioned by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES for Tate Online, to coincide with the opening of the Frieze Art Fair in London. Employing their usual mix of animated black and white typography, jazzy music and humour, the work explores the international contemporary art market from the artists’ perspective.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a collaboration between Young-Hae Chang, a Korean woman, and Marc Voge, an American man, who live and work in Seoul, have produced some 35 works, all in more-or-less the same vein: text–usually black, sometimes red or blue–flashes on screen, synched to the rhythm of a jazz soundtrack. The technology is Flash, a tool for, among other things, creating and delivering images and animations via the web. Using some fancy math (known as vectors), Flash enables artists and designers to pack a lot of graphic punch into tiny packages that can be delivered quickly over slow Internet connections. Although Flash can be used to do some very complex things (see, for example, the work of Joshua Davis), Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries barely scratch the surface of the application’s capabilities. Instead of exploiting Flash extensively, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries delve intensively into a small set of the applicationÌs features. Much as Barnett Newman explored the virtually limitless formal and expressive possibilities of vertical stripes of color on canvas, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries play with the narrative possibilities of animated text accompanied by instrumental music.
