January 19, 2003, Potsdam Square, Berlin. The Sony Center is glowing in the midday light, the air is cool. In the Film Museum, where an internet-TV studio has been set up on the fourth floor, the US artist Sean Snyder is standing at a video mixing desk. In front of him are tapes from North Korea, which he looks through, winds to the place he wants and then plays. At first, one can see blurred video pictures of a US tourist in the North Korean capital, then long sequences from the DPRK1 documentary film »Changes in Pyongyang Forever in My Memory«, in which rich red, bright yellow, deep blue and shimmering green enliven spacious backdrops: radiant flower beds in front of imposing socialist buildings, happy groups of people going for a walk in the inner city, etc.. Pictures that show the North Korean capital as a gleaming metropolis. Of course, these are official pictures from North Korea that were taken at the start of the 1990s and, curiously enough, already seem anachronistic. Images that stand in precarious contrast to the pictures of North Korea that are at present circulating all over the world via the channels of mass media: while the communist nation is revealing itself as an aggressive nuclear power, the »North Korea Special« on Remote-TV shows Kim Jong-Il’s kingdom as a desirable place to be.

Ambivalent signs in ambivalent times. For, in January 2003, it is not only North Korea that is seen as a place of terror. There are numerous locations in the world that are being treated as »hot spots«. First of all, there is Iraq, which is about to face an invasion by the United States of America. In addition, there are less »famous« countries in which wars have been smouldering for several years, and less »popular« places against which terrorist attacks have been directed, as well as peripheral regions in which the war on terror is being waged with an enormous deployment of troops. Places that are distributed all over the globe and whose increasing relevance does not so much impose a caesura on the economy of attention, as represent the symptoms of a new image of the world. An image of the world that has put aside rough divisions and fallen apart into countless zones where a state of emergency has been declared.3 Visual depictions of this situation make geopolitical units seem like fluid masses of mercury that have been arbitrarily assembled on the digital drawing board, or like rotating continents sliding into one another, involved in a tectonic spectacle of shifts and fusions, such as one perhaps sees on weather maps.5 In brief: an image of the world circulating in the cycle of mass media, one that suggests a new beginning: on a global scale and at the speed of light – in keeping with this, it is said that George W. Bush has accelerated the course of history many times over with his aggressive foreign policies.6

This dynamic image of the world is constituted via a system-immanent exterior: static building blocks in the geopolitical sandpit that seem to oppose the omnipresent changes. A good example of this is North Korea, which has carefully cultivated the myth of isolation. Nothing leaks out, not even the size of clothing worn by its leader, Kim Jong-Il, as could be read in a press release from the World Economic Forum.7 Even those who have fought their way to North Korea cannot penetrate this impermeable info-barrier. In a recent account of a trip there, for instance, one could read how the attentive presence of the hosts and the choreography of the visitors’ programme took on the aspect of a kind of straitjacket for the senses: »In front of the lobby wait not only the Mercedes limousines with a pre-defined route, but also the friendly officials who prefer to see their guests in the hotel or in the car. Pyongyang seen through a curtain.«8 But the myth of the closed nation is maintained just as effectively by the West.

As Sean Snyder observes, this characteristic is exploited by global players for the creation of their brand identity: »As the 2002 World Championship drew closer, the >Financial Times« carried advertisements from a charity campaign that, with slogans like >Let the North Korean children play soccer as well!<, promised 200,000 soccer balls. This offer was sponsored by a group of multinational companies.«9 While the multis polish up their image by means of such actions, this sometimes colonially coded image of the deprived child is used to mysticize North Korea as an eccentric place. For example, in his recent book on North Korea10, Pierre Rigoulot, who is considered one of the leading European experts on the Far East, brings the orientalistic term »stone-age communism« to bear, while his accounts of a »monster« that even tolerates cannibalism reinforce the image of North Korea as a place that is not of this world and not of our time.

In Snyder’s work , this picture of North Korea is gradually dusted off. As in the info-intervention on Remote TV described at the start of this article, it appears as extremely accessible, beyond the circulating stereotypes. As a post-touristic destination, it can be reached at any time without having to leave one’s home: »Television, Videos, CD-ROM, the Internet and virtual reality allow people to ›gaze‹ on [such] tourist sites.«11 So this is a »journey in one’s head« that is not intended solely to help prepare for a real, physical encounter with the actual place12, but is the real purpose of the endeavour.

As well as the official representations of the country and the images that have been put into circulation by mass media to keep alive the myth of isolation, Snyder has discovered other sources of information to let him start out on his trip: accounts of journeys, amateur videos and web sites about the country in English. Documents that allow direct views behind the curtain. In addition, the artist collected satellite images, which enabled him to reconnoitre the country from this seemingly omnipotent point of view. He worked in this way for a long time, even doing research in South Korea as well as the United States. Finally, he met a professor of Korean Studies at the Humboldt University who drew his attention to an exhibition that two radio enthusiasts had organized in the Düsseldorf library about »Korean Culture and Books« (1997). This exhibition had even received some notice from the official North Korean press. Snyder notes: »We arranged a meeting with one of the organizers in Neukölln. At the door I met a very friendly, calm former bus driver with the BVG [Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe = Berlin transport authority], about 42 years old. His appartment looked like that of a North Korean. Portraits of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung hung above the television set. He had already been visiting North Korea twice a year for 15 years, and claimed to have the largest archive of books, CDs and videos outside of North Korea.«13

The material accumulated in the course of Synder’s research was finally subjected to a structural analysis: he looked for patterns, common typological characteristics and semiotic relationships. Then he organized and arranged it. This gave rise to several montages, which Snyder has presented in very different contexts and which stand out primarily for the way they show connections between seemingly disparate points: a technique that could also be called »jump cut« and creates an effect that Jan Verwoert describes as follows: »In many of his photo series, publications and installations, Sean Synder assembles pictures of different urban landscapes. By connecting up distant places, he creates topologies that are characterized by surprising continuities.«14 One of the most amazing continuities is certainly the connection between Pyongyang and Bucharest, which Synder’s work suggests by pointing out architectonic relationships. The buildings in both cities seem to possess the same hereditary structure: pompous architecture built in the socialist style without regard to the human scale and social needs. And didn’t the Romanian dictator Ceausescu talk enthusiastically somewhere about his visit to Pyongyang and identify North Korean urban development as a model for the reconstruction of Bucharest in the 1980s? But Snyder’s artistic theory does not need confirmation from a historian. The déja-vu experience, this confusing moment of mixing up the two cities, has its effect even without mentioning any sources: the myth of an isolationist North Korea, which is based not least on its imagined or ascribed uniqueness, crumbles.

The fact that Snyder’s Pyongyang/Bucharest construction is indeed based on a cultural transfer is at most a footnote in this context, like the fact that North Korea – as opposed to the widely held assumption that it is the least globalized country in the world – is perhaps even the one most strongly connected to its surroundings, because it, more than any other country in the world, relies on the support of other countries and aid organizations and has known for a long time how to play a prominent role on the global black market – channels that are not mentioned in the myth of the closed society. These facts are at the most footnotes for Snyder’s artistic theory of »embedded Pyongyang« because his North Korea project is not to be understood via a factual relationship, but via a structural relationship to the global semiotic sphere: while the myth of isolation fades in people’s heads – in other words, not only the place where the prejudices have their abode, but also where the journey takes place -, the conception of the world also undergoes an adjustment. The dynamic chaos of permanent change is suddenly given a structure. There are patterns and thus also a certain order.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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