Lee Ji Sun’s art life of research, ‘About the voice-over’ 너의 목소리가 들려

Images by Lee Ji Sun

Over groovy Bass laid low at the bottom, the rhythm of the drum starts softly, and different sounds add one after another to blend all in one harmony. After a while, on all these ‘basis’, the melody appears and crosses through the sounds as it swims in the water. Alone or together with the sounds developing in steps, the melody follows them, outruns and passes ahead, or comes backwards to create a story of its own.

In a dark room, the projector starts to run and a square stage lights on in front of the eyes. Inside the rectangular frame, color dots are tangled in themselves, the movements get wider or smaller, and various visual effects continue tail to tail. Then appears a voice. Without any corresponding mouth, hand gestures or faces to be found in the screen, the voice just continues to spread out, from behind or around, somewhere no one knows.

The creator of the work or the protagonist of the story sometimes puts out his/her own voice independently. The voice follows harmonized elements in the video or installation piece and goes along its solo path of progression. This added voice functions in various ways in films, videos or installation art works. It explains the situation with neutral tones, speeds up the rhythm of the scenes, reveals one’s inmost thoughts, and starts a second story apart from apparent events.

The presence of this voice sender, marked only by the voice and the language, is distinguished from any other characters in the video. The listener may or may not guess the sender’s sex with his/her voice color and tone, and the spoken words may be understood or just be heard as unknown sounds. Visual elements shown at the same time are mixed discretely with this dominant auditory element. Using individual imagination and calling back personal experiences, the spectator sketches the face of the voice and imagines the figure.

The unseen speaker sometimes borrows voice of another to make fictive the existence of the first person subject “I” or to put him/herself in the third position. In audio-visual media such as cinema and video, the voice-over, distinguished from other visible elements, invites the visitors to reflect on the identity and the position of itself.

Thus, the voice-over catches the listeners’ ears and makes their heartbeat to its rhythm. Furthermore, it sounds so secret and close like a private whisper among bounding noises in the crowd. Inside or outside of the frame, conducting the orchestra of different sounds and noises or disordering them like an airplane track in the sky, the voice leaves its narrator and becomes that of the work itself.

 

 

Contributor, Lee Ji Sun

Lee Ji Sun is a young Korean artist, who does activity in Paris, France. CultureM Magazine releases her art works images by drawing, writing, video, photograph in every month. http://leejisun.blogspot.kr/

이지선은 프랑스 파리를 중심으로 유럽에서 활동하는 젊은 한국여성작가이다. 회화, 비디오, 사진, 글 등의 다양한 매체로 작품활동을 하고 있는 그녀의 이야기를 컬쳐엠이 소개한다. http://leejisun.blogspot.kr/