Disruptive Use
Balloon & Needle and ReFunct Media
I. Cracked Media
In Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, Caleb Kelly defines “cracked media” as “the tools of media playback expanded beyond their original function as a simple playback device for prerecorded sound or image.”¹ The “crack” occasions a practice that avoids both conventional and intended methods of using media technologies. Cracked media — for instance, turntables and CD players from past decades — refers to technology that has undergone some kind of transformation of utlity (often by way of other technologies). The practice of cracking entails hacking, modification, destruction, reconfiguration, or re-contextualization. The “found” media device or object—often obsolete, outdated, or not properly functioning (if at all)—is commonly embraced. Kelly identifies the transformation and utilization of everyday technologies (old and new) as related to this tactical approach, and to this end he discusses cracked media within the context of the tactical navigation of the quotidian as outlined by Michel De Certeau.² An explicitly aesthetic incorporation of the “crack” into tactical artmaking reformulates the conditions of artistic practice by making an investment in the contingent materialities of both human and non-human agencies. This entails a deliberate, and often disruptive, use of materials—in this case, media technologies.
II. Balloon & Needle
Where the experimental musicians of Tokyo’s Onkyô scene have typically performed using professional music equipment marketed toward and used within rock and electronic dance music circles, the members of Balloon & Needle, a music collective and record label formed in 2000 and based in Seoul, South Korea, have drawn upon the consumer electronics boom that came in the late 20th century. Its core membership employs a cracked instrumentation that in liner notes reads like a veritable inventory list of a 1990s Radio Shack (see Figure 1 below): hacked CD players, mobile phones, and radios (Choi Joonyong); turntables played “acoustically”, i.e., often without a cartridge (Hong Chulki); disassembled computer hard drives (Jin Sangtae); and an assemblage of dismantled clocks, contact microphones, tiny speakers, motors, cymbals, and a snare drum, triggered by an old Swiss typewriter (Ryu Hankil).
In contrast to a digital culture that celebrates the most recent advances in technology, Balloon & Needle, through its meticulous, near-forensic embrace of sonic detail exposed through the crack, harnesses and embraces the inherent instability and utterly erratic nature of technologies repurposed as experimental music instruments. Due to the unpredictability of its cracked instrumentation, the music of the collective involves considerable contrast: no dynamic level is eschewed, and periods of densely accumulated noise are juxtaposed against periods of prolonged, non-sounding activity. The musicians act in accordance with their materials, and they remain entirely open to whatever sound world emanates from this situation. Over extended durations, the musicians set up and initiate processes that begin, continue for some time, diverge, converge, reconfigure, and often end abruptly; throughout, they maintain an ostensibly austere appreciation of space similar to the discipline displayed at Off Site in Tokyo. Like Onkyô, the sound world of Balloon & Needle is inextricably tied to place—in this case, Dotolim, an intimate office space that serves as its primary DIY performance venue and only accommodates an audience no larger than 20.³
III. ReFunct Media
The ReFunct Media (2010–Present) project by multimedia artist Benjamin Gaulon has developed along lines of inquiry related to the work of to Balloon & Needle. Emerging from his own electronic waste and hacklab workshops focused on multidisciplinary creative making practices, including sessions in physical computing, hardware hacking, and circuit bending, ReFunct Media is comprised of a series of installations — identified as versions that are created collaboratively with a group of interdisciplinary artists — that repurposes and augments obsolete technologies such as video cameras, consumer audio electronics, video game systems, computers, and display monitors. Each device is “hacked, misused, and combined into a large and complex chain of elements” within which it maintains a functional role.⁴ Presented as an installation, each device functions in response to another, producing or modifying the signal that propels the next device in a chain of causality. Each version of ReFunct Media constitutes a model for the creative possibilities of technologies that, in an age of planned obsolescence, are deemed outdated and often forgotten, and yet persist as undead in both their aesthetic potential and relationship to current and future ecological crises.
IV. Zombie Media
Creative methdologies centered on repurposing discarded and ostensibly obsolete consumer-oriented electronics acknowledge undead media as a nonetheless integrated part of our experience of the world. Drawing upon the contemporary terms of media archaeology, Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka define such undead media as “zombie media”—that is, media that are “not only out of use, but resurrected to new uses, contexts, and adaptations.”⁵ A concept that abjures both the normative timelines of media technological progress and the finitude of anthropocentric thought, zombie media—as substrate for an artistic practice—entails both an experimental reconfiguration of media — via hacking, circuit bending, augmentation, or unintended use — and a re-imagination of the potential functionality of media technologies through its confrontation with aesthetic, ecological, economic, and political concerns.
Independently, Balloon & Needle and Benjamin Gaulon engage with tactical approaches to (re-)using undead media technologies. This shared interest entails an experimental utilization of technology that originates in thinking from or acting in accordance with a given object or device — that is, cracking media implies disruptive use: the suspension of decisions governed by the intended or prescribed utility of a given technological object or material. Such disruptive, aesthetic practices confront anthropocentrism and speak directly to the constitution of human subjectivity in everyday life, acknowledging a geological time that precedes and continues beyond human time. More than sensorially-interesting audiovisual artifacts, these projects of repurposing zombie media investigate the material conditions of aesthetic experience: from the geological to the sociotechnical. They do not encourage the opposition of the human and non-human, but reclaim the former as entangled and implicated within a non-human outside.
This text was originally written in 2014. I would like to thank Mark B. N. Hansen, Ron Kuivila, and Ashley Scarlett for their input.
- Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 4.
- Ibid., 42.
- Dotolim was established in 2006 in by Jin Sangtae, and since 2008 it has served as the home of Dotolim Concert Series.
- Benjamin Gaulon, “ReFunct Media v1.0,” Recyclism.
- Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” Leonardo 45, no. 5, 2012, 429.
