Jean Shin's "Pause"

I'm Jean Shin, I'm an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. I'm really interested in working site-specifically because it's a place to start. The Bay Area is a very big tech community. We've all been transformed because of the innovations. But there seems to be a paradox between the notion of making our lives better, but in fact technology is actually making our environment worse. So we wanted to explore that space between those two conversations. You know, our technology is becoming obsolete the minute they are invented and this is just unsustainable. When you see so much of this useless technology, it's distressing, it's haunting. I'm always gravitating towards things that are leftover or discarded, or it's been devalued by people, and that becomes sort of a trigger for me. So part of the project was that we invited the public to donate their old cell phones, cables, hardware devices. There's this invitation and this material exchange with the public at large or a specific community. So when you walk into the exhibition, Pause, you'll encounter these three massive rock formations. And they look like geological, familiar organic forms, but in fact they are made and generated by old cell phones. And they're surrounded by these cables that feel like waves and oceans that seem to echo and ripple into our space. And so the viewer is confronted by this spilling of technology and e-waste as you walk into the gallery. I have these e-bundles which are positioned throughout the edges of this installation, so the visitors are invited to sit, to stay in the gallery, to linger. And for me it's a reset while we're sitting there, to try to unplug and disconnect and relate to real time and space. I was very inspired by wanting to re-create a Chinese scholar's rock. So many of the scholars would go into these meditative retreats and have these scholar rocks. These kind of ideals of retreat happened around a relationship with a rock. Another aspect of the influence of the Asian Art Museum was thinking about the influence of zen gardens, in particular, places where you could have this beautiful vista of rocks: the kind of imagined space that we project onto nature. But it's the sense of longing and being mindful and capturing our attention. So while we have a desire that we often need to retreat to this kind of refuge, our phones are actually not allowing us to do that. In fact, they are incredible distractions to our ability to get anything done. We can't really blame the phone. It's really just the seduction of all the possibilities of the phone. The project allows us to think, "What are the benefits of this amazing tool that is in our hands, but also what has it robbed us of?" How can we reclaim our attention and our focus, and our ability to connect with people in real time and space?