Phantom Menace2.5

Yeon Sung has investigated fine particulate matter (PM2.5) during her residency at Nieuwe Vide. These are chemical particles in the air that are invisible to the human eye, but are the soils, gases and liquids that pollute the air and that we breathe in on a daily basis. With her project Sung has put this matter in the local context of Haarlem by collecting data with the help of sensors and computer technology in collaboration with ITENG. With this data collection, she attempts to materialize the real-time PM2.5 data in Haarlem into site-specific scientific artworks in the form of an observatory and an airflow.

Phantom Menace2.5 is the second work in Sung’s long-term research/production project The Matter Trilogy in which she explores the critical materiality of three selected matters. The project attempts to demonstrate how to unravel the past of the matter through current socio-economic situations.

About Yeon Sung and ITENG
Yeon Sung (성정연) is an artist-researcher and a graphic designer based in both the Netherlands and South Korea. As a transboundary practitioner having an unconventional educational background in a tech university and an art school, she is revealing humiliating ideologies geared in “non-human materials,” through research-driven interdisciplinary artworks. Her works have been presented internationally at art-technology exhibitions, film festivals, and a post-colonial studies conference in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and South Korea.

ITENG is a Rotterdam (NL) based collective focused on iterative engineering. It currently consists of the two founding members Ioannis Papamanoglou & Ruben Baldewsing. Their academic backgrounds in Computer Science and Industrial Design Engineering provide a strong foundation for the wide range of technologies and design processes they apply in their work. ITENG’s core approach leverages the commonality of reoccurring functional modules in the design of embedded devices to achieve quick iteration cycles and a competitive time to market.

Read more about the research project  ‘All that you touch, you change’.