Hangjun Lee (b. 1977)
The Metaphysics of Sound (2007)
2007 / 16mm / color / sound / 2S / 28' 00

Adopting mainly hand contact printing with photographic enlarger, «Metaphysics of sound» started from September of 2006 and completed in July of 2007. With a 35mm soundtrack image, I made a hand-drawn soundtrack on the 16mm film strip. The sounds were made either by directly contact printing the 35mm sound tracks or collaging the scratch images. I found an educational film about insect collecting at Japan in 2005 as the main materials for images work. Using a peculiar attribute of film medium, I began to think fundamentally about seen sound and heard image. According to pattern of sound on the 20% blank of 16mm film strip (normally used as space for optical recording), I edited whole image and made structure of film. Hence the margin is a where image is sound, and vice versa. Later, I studied the sound patterns which varied according to the kinds of images used or the concentration of the image, and made various attempts at rearranging the structure of the sound with the image. The most significant idea of this work was derived from the gap between playback logic and reproduction logic, and the discovery of the collision between the transfer of formats within film media. - Hangjun Lee