Aesthetics Of Exclusion

Beach Umbrella

“Should I classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?”

Beach Umbrella is a short film in which a computer categorizes the city of Seoul using Street View archives of companies like Google, Kakao (Daum) and Naver. It questions how technology can be used to examine urban changes such as gentrification. By witnessing the birth, life and death of objects, aesthetics and urban phenomena through extensive visual archives, technology becomes like a fortune teller: reading, analyzing and predicting the future of the city. It shows the past, present and future of one of the objects often used by small businesses and street vendors: the beach umbrella.

Credits

Directed by Mark Jan van Tellingen and Sjoerd ter Borg
Text adaptation based on:

The System of Objects (Le Système des objets) by Jean Baudrillard (1968)
English translation by James Benedict
Korean translation by Youngdal Bae

&

The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (La société de consommation) by Jean Baudrillard (1970)
English translation by Sage Publications
Korean translation by Sang-Ryul Lee

Narration by #I5IMQ4O
www.voicebunny.com

Computer vision programming by Jorrit Schaap
Open source code used from Anaconda, Darkflow and Processing

Sound design by Mark IJzerman

Research and translation by Suhun Lee, Hee-Eun Kim and Yoon Cho Ahn

With thanks to Ji Yoon Chung, Minsun Kim, Soh Yeong Roh, HyeIn Jeon, Hanmin Na, Hyemin Son, Younwon Sohn, Aletheia Shin, Binna Choi, Kyulim Kim, Minkyung Choi, Jan Misker, Florian Weigl and Sjaron Minailo

This film is supported by the Summer Sessions program of V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) and Art Center Nabi (Seoul, Korea); and the Creative Industries Fund Netherlands

‘Beach Umbrella’ is part of the design research project ‘Aesthetics of Exclusion’ by
Thomas Smits, dr. Melvin Wevers, Mark Jan van Tellingen and Sjoerd ter Borg

Gallery