Digital Heritage Exhibit: Awareness of the Mechanism

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Hwang Jini’s “Green Hills and Blue Stream”

Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas”

Yi Sang’s “Poem No. 4”

About the Exhibit

The exhibit “Technologies of Memory and Loss—An Armful of Azaleas” reproduces versions of the canonical Korean poem using data object of three dimensions to investigate the institutional systems of cultural memory we call literature. It consists of three models that project classic Korean poems onto three dimensional models Unicode values that were extracted from the poem were used to form models that get their identity by by re-articulating the computer code used to display in three dimensions on a computer screens. The models were usually printed using 3D printers and placed on display, for this version of the project, Augmented Reality technologies are used to display the models virtually. #

List Selected Works by Wayne de Fremery (USA/KOR)

“Hwang Jini’s “Green Hills and Blue Stream”
“Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas”
"Yi Sang’s “Poem No. 4"

Artist's Biography

Wayne de Fremery is an associate professor at Sogang University in Seoul, in the School of Media, Arts, and Science. His research concerns bibliography and the socialisation of 20th-century Korean literary texts. Wayne holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Whitman College, a master’s degree in Korean Studies from Seoul National University, and a doctorate in East Asian Languages and Civilisations from Harvard University. Books and journals designed by Wayne have appeared with the Harvard Korea Institute, the University of Washington Press, and his own award-winning press Tamal Vista Publications. He holds three patents for inventions that creatively document and preserve culture and, in 2017, became a member of the Korean Agency for Technical Standards – the first non-Korean citizen to represent South Korea on an ISO committee.

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Hwang Jini’s “Green Hills and Blue Stream”

This work describes the Unicode code points used to represent an eighteenth-century manuscript version of a sijo (song lyric/ poem) by Hwang Jini, a sixteenth century gisaeng (female entertainer) from Korea’s Joseon dynasty. The eighteenth-century manuscript is the earliest extant version of Hwang’s sijo. Unicode is a widely used encoding standard that facilitates the creation and distribution of digital text. The Unicode standard does this by assigning numbers, so-called code points, to elements used in the world’s writing systems. The roughly 65,000 code points of what is called the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode standard were mapped to the surface of a sphere. To describe the weave of the network they create when facilitating a digital transcription of Hwang’s sijo, connections were drawn between the Unicode code points on the sphere needed to recreate Hwangs sijo as a digital text.

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Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas”

This work describes the Unicode values used to represent the title poem of Azaleas, a book by the Korean poet Kim Sowol. The book was initially printed in late 1925. Kim Sowol’s poetry is often described as “romantic” and “traditional.” Unicode is a widely used encoding standard that facilitates the creation and distribution of digital text. The Unicode standard does this by assigning numbers, so-called code points, to elements used in the world’s writing systems. The roughly 65,000 code points of what is called the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode standard were mapped to the surface of a sphere. To describe the weave of the network they create when facilitating a digital transcription of Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas,” connections were drawn between the Unicode code points on the sphere needed to recreate Kim’s poem as a digital text.

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View the Manuscript

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Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas”

This work describes the Unicode values used to represent the title poem of Azaleas, a book by the Korean poet Kim Sowol. The book was initially printed in late 1925. Unicode is a widely used encoding standard that facilitates the creation and distribution of digital text. The Unicode standard does this by assigning numbers, so-called code points, to elements used in the world’s writing systems. To describe the ordered relationships they create when facilitating a digital transcription of Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas,” connections were drawn between sequentially located code points used to recreate Kim’s poem as a digital text. The result is a shape that looks like a tree. Every code point utilized to create a digital transcription of Kim Sowŏl’s poem can be used to generate a tree-like shape. Here the code point associated with the syllable ka (가) was used. Ka is the most frequently appearing character in Kim Sowol’s poem. Code points representing characters that precede ka are drawn as “roots.” Code points representing characters that follow ka in Kim Sowol’s poem are drawn as “branches.”

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Yi Sang’s “Poem No.4”

This work describes the Unicode values used to represent “Poem No. 4” by the Korean poet Yi Sang. “Poem No. 4” was printed initially in mid-1934 as part of a poetic series called “Crow’s Eye View.” Yi Sang’s poetry is often described as “modernist” and “avant-garde.” Unicode is a widely used encoding standard that facilitates the creation and distribution of digital text. The Unicode standard does this by assigning numbers, so-called code points, to elements used in the world’s writing systems. To describe the ordered relationships they create when facilitating a digital transcription of Yi Sang’s printed poem, connections were drawn between sequentially located Unicode code points used to recreate Yi’s poem as a digital text. The result is a shape that looks like a tree. Every code point utilized to create a digital transcription of Yi’s poem can be used to generate a tree-like shape. For example, a “tree” can be drawn where all the Unicode code points representing characters that precede 0 are drawn as “roots” and all the code points representing characters that appear following 0 in Yi Sang’s poem are drawn as “branches.” Here each code point used to create Yi’s poem as a digital text generates a tree. The result is something that looks like a forest. To create what looks like the landscape from which the forest grows, the roughly 65,000 code points of what is called the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode Standard were mapped to a plane in three-dimensional space. Locations on the plane associated with code points used to create Yi Sang’s poem as a digital text were made to rise along the z-dimension of the three-dimensional space according to how frequently they were needed to create a digital transcription of Yi’s poem. Because numerals are so frequently repeated in Yi Sang’s poem, one region of the plane rises high above the others.

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