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Once, while I was looking outside the bus window driving along the unpaved road, I held my body straight, locking my gaze on the distant scenery after experiencing an unexpectedly powerful jolt. Staring at something nearby is impossible amidst all the uneven, restless vibrations, which will only make the pupil forget to blink and beat instead, as if it were a heart. As the act of seeing fell under threat, I tied my wandering gaze to a rope and threw it into the distance and placed my gaze there. Thus, this delay of seeing, a deferred gaze, escapes from the trembling body and creates an illusion that it is still looking at something, captured by some dot, like a rock, far away. The uncontrollable body is relieved by the gaze, "performing" the act of seeing, and becomes a body obeying to unknown nausea and distortion.

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Vibration – although obscure of its location, whether it landed on the eyes or ears, or it is self-generated from the body – is manifested. This same vibration is what we initially confront in Jangwoo YOU’s Detectable, Undistinguishable. Vague but intense, this vibration interferes with one’s body to the level that it invokes the body up onto a bus moving along an unpaved road. The Protocol of Concentration(2020) is an installation consisting of five videos; the huge screens are forming a vague route, transmitting videos that appear to have recorded the bodies of the performers shot with a fixed camera. In this open space, empty as a theater stage, the screens transmitting those amateurish videos seem somewhat powerful; the videos of gestures and movements, made by one or four bodies, are as faint as silence, recorded by a fixed camera. Only that the screens are vibrating too intensely: there is a gigantic vibration between me and that object. We will be forced to look for a faraway place where we can take the heartbeat-like gaze—never detecting the unknown vibration and the ample gestures of the characters on the screens.

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YOU directed four performers to perform their interpretations of the case recordings about the state of negligence. While investigating the connotations of "concentration" — the forced compulsion and approval of it — inherent in the societal order, the artist focused on the state of "negligence" as a deviation from such acts. Although concentration and negligence seem to have a distinct division like the black and white Go stones, to think about their inexorable interference and the paradoxical similarities between those two are inevitable. Focusing on the overlapping and interferences between these two, YOU explores the paradoxical states of concentration and negligence in the observer’s perspective — which a series of cameras have attempted to explore — what the subject of "perception" repeatedly experiences. In that sense, Protocol of Concentration literally makes one think of the systematic regulation which activates concentration: it invokes the twist between "the protocol of concentration (for the state of negligence)" or "the protocol of concentration (that creates such negligence)."

Five videos are in one location with slight variation in their sizes and directions: one video presenting four performers at one site acting distraction, and four videos presenting four performers acting the state of negligence, respectively. For that reason, the five videos are allocated in a certain route while visualizing chaos of disturbing someone else’s concentration, interfering with each other endlessly. One can guess what the performers are doing. For instance, the screen of the performer that greets the audience the moment one enters the site is displaying anxiety and tension. The performer’s action which begins with a deep breath, seems to seek an escape from that state of negligence by concentrating on the shaking and moving one’s own body and gaze. The performer is expanding his body into this extreme state of negligence, clearing his throat, stretching his body, moving his pupil to other place, in order to find one moment that he can focus all these acts in one juncture. Moreover, the performer practices some short lines such as “did you see that?”, “I must do it”, or “I have no idea” in the middle of the video, and he also thoroughly shakes his bodies, almost as if he were delusional enough to attempt to deconstruct the body, for merely a few seconds of maximum concentration during the performance.

In one other video among a set of videos categorized under The Protocol of Concentration, a performer in a school uniform is acting the state of negligence seriously using a few objects. The small bodily movements of the performer, who has failed to concentrate on studying and is wandering around the open books, depicts a somewhat pathological state. Her bodily movements go like this: she bites her fingernails while creating a rhythmical sound, shakes her legs while spinning a pen with her fingers, underlining on a book leading to obsessive hatching, clicking a pen not to use it but to be immersed in the act of clicking itself - and creating a compulsive clicking noise in the air. By repeating such acts of negligence, the performer displays a pathological immersion in something at the transient moment.

At this moment, YOU engages the chain reaction between the state of concentration and negligence, mediated by a set of performances on negligence, all the way into the exhibition experience. This is similar to the attitude he took in Belief and Reality(2019): this allows one to guess each different act — namely a societal act–a performer’s act–an observing(camera) or spectating(watching) — along with the chain reaction. Concerning the exhibition’s topic, it’s similar to that of the 2019 show Do not pay Attention — where the artist took a complex approach towards the societal context surrounding “concentration” enforced by society, and the viewers, either focused on the exhibition or distracted from the exhibition experience. Thus, the artist appears to be questioning the ‘perception’ inherent between the “you and I”. The artist questions the boundaries of perceptive experience in the (forever) relative position between the “you” and the “I”, and by doing so, he is (recklessly) attempting to relocate it. As the performers who perform/must perform as instructed by the artist, the artist performs plausibly the role of a creator-director who controls and mediates all the circumstances. Here, he accompanies a series of technical editing processes such as video editing and sound tuning, thereby allowing the audience to imagine his invisible position where he controls or fine-tunes this process of perception. [Will noticing it, as a consequence, manifest itself as a negligent attitude towards this exhibition?]

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Let’s come back at the beginning of the exhibition and talk about what we have left out. Trembling body, the experience of perceiving the body performing negligence, in fact, intersects with the perceiving the screen which vibrates by itself. The vibration of the screen, which should be stable to hold the gaze, bluntly maximizes the “negligence” of the screen itself, thanks to the severe video editing effect that is overlapped. For instance, if we take our memory back to the scene where the performer begun with a deep breath within a second changed into undertaking extreme negligence, in hopes for a transient moment of maximum concentration; then take a closer look at the vibration of the screen that has mediated the shaking body, or, the exceptional interruption.

Creating vibration with the motor, attached from behind, the vertically standing screen is locked in a state of continuous shake. The durée of gestures of distraction is in fact an act endlessly aiming for concentration, waiting for a moment of concentration; in other words, paradoxically already speaking of a “certain concentration”: it is obvious that the performer’s body performing that is of course focusing in (the acting of) the state of negligence. Moreover, what it’s saying here is that the screen supporter in which the acting is displayed self-generates the vibration in accordance with the action. And the vibration of the screen leads to the dispersion of the perception and simultaneously, assists the immersion into that action, indulged in distraction. Simply put, as in a VR or 4D theater experience. Like the reflexive action — trying to fix one’s gaze due to uncontrollable nausea, the shaking screen blocking the gaze from focusing, instead creates a slight optical illusion or disturbance and overturn the gaze, turning over the gaze back to myself(the viewer) in the relationship between the screen and I, as well as the corresponding overturn of the gaze. In other words, the hitting spot of the gaze that would lock the screen’s tremble is the “I”. Thus, I must be the paradoxical agent who should overcome the strict moment of concentration in a negligent state in order to experience negligence.

Another important issue here is in video editing. I have emphasized earlier that concerning the videos on these screens, we can take a guess about the third person’s perspective of the fixed camera as “an amateurish video”. In fact, this feels a bit insistent (on the surface). Not only the vibrating screen already creates a spectacular experience that would fall the viewer into a state of the distraction of disturbance, but also the flashiness of the video is not just created by the motors but also because of the video editing – the abrupt movements and instant cuts enhance the disturbance and distractedness of the gaze. That said, the reason why I mentioned the amateurishness is that the artist’s attitude towards video editing is raw rather than skilled. I have no doubt that the cameras were still standing. Multiple cameras shot each performers’ actions in respective perspectives. YOU took these videos and edited them into recreated videos, each of them running for about five minutes; I think this is where YOU has shown the abrupt changes of the viewpoint that he experienced while shooting – immersed in following the performers’ paradoxical performance – and applied them in the editing. For instance, YOU has expressed the performers changing the direction of their bodies, roughly with a shift of the screen and an instant piece-down – this roughness is not just an effect of the editing but it comes simultaneously from the vibration of the screen – or has explicitly expressed through editing techniques such as close-ups or movements. It is paradoxical, but the viewer’s body and gaze confronted with the screen are secretly under threat to stay fixed.

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Then what about the sound? Let’s think about the sound which fills the air like vibration. In YOU’s The Protocol of Concentration – where the performers’ movements performing the state of negligence, the movement of the edited videos, and the shaking screens all closely intersects – sound has prominent importance. His amplification of the sounds that “negligence” has made, ended up not only discovering a pathological sound effect but also amplifying the range of vibration that could be physically detected through the intersection of the sound’s physicality and the rough texture of video editing. Thus, the impulsive clicking of the pen is the result of the bodily movement the performer has made while performing the state of negligence, the amplification of that sound has created physical vibration, and that amplified sound provided the screen, which should be fixed, the power to vibrate by itself. As the audience perceives a series of chain reactions, in the overly shaking state constructed by the state of negligence, they are tested the phenomenological capability of the simple gaze escaping from a simple gaze that it is interfering with. Of course, most of them would give up on seeing, captivated by the confusion of the gaze.

   In that sense, Bleeding, Muscle Aches, and Gnashing of Teeth(2020) show the same connotation from the same context as The Protocol of Concentration. Derived from the artist’s experience during one of the training drills, Preliminary Rifle Instruction, the work focuses on the process of the training, testing the soldiers’ concentration ability by putting a Go stone on top of a gun muzzle and make sure they don’t drop it, in order to train a specific shooting posture. Perceiving this training drill especially as a training in which he was forced to concentrate, not to enhance his focusing ability but to avoid the punishment resulting from failure of dropping the stone, he is investigating the pathological anxiety, forcing people to concentrate. In the video where it is almost stationary as a still screen, a white Go stone is continually trembling, and the daunting sound of the respiration intersecting with the screen is intensifying the trembling of the screen. Thus, the body of the viewer that must endure the uneasy shake, persevere with, and watch still, operates as a dialectic body that detects phenomenon at the border of concentration and negligence — beyond the dynamics of the gaze and perception happening between the trembling body and the shaking screen.