Life had become untenable. Everything that seemed concrete fell away to the wayside until the only thing that existed was the in-between places. People had been talking about it for years- the inevitable collapse. Nothing spectacular happened- or all the spectacular things happened all at once. Whichever you are to believe, the strangeness of the world became self-evident again.

These days in the mornings I go to old spots on the island that house the shrines of old gods. I carry with me a camera, though it doesn't look quite like a camera. It's a bit shoddy and could be mistaken as a cobbled together piece of trash. But this is my main navigating principle. Made from old aluminium cans and light tight old boxes. A small dark room inside it contains a spool of film made from reused stock, gelatin, and reclaimed silver. A chopstick acts as the mechanism, rotating the inner spools and advancing the position of the latent image. An old Cass beer can is fashioned into a sliding shutter with a hole and sandwiched just below is a series of small pinholes right on the threshold between dark and light.

In my village, Hawon, there’s a shrine that I stumbled upon on a walk to the bus stop. It was tucked away right on the side of the road, hidden in plain sight. There’s a perimeter of trees that line and protect it with stones buttressing the living guardians. It’s wild and overgrown with moldy food offerings so old that you’d be hard pressed to know what it had once been. A teacher who carries on the knowledge of shrines across the island told me once to not go to the shrines without any purpose. You have to have a reason to be there, it isn’t some tourist site. But here I am all the same taking these images. What’s my purpose here? It’s hard to say, or rather it's hard to put into words. Maybe it’s something like “I want to believe, I want to see what cannot be seen, I want to serve as a witness to spirits and beings who wish to be witnessed”. My secret hope is that there might be tucked away in one of the frames a strange light shining in an austere way. A curve of a wave of light casting a shadow that shouldn’t be there- but perhaps always has been there. Whatever it might be, all I can do is just show up.

There's a rhythm to filming this way. Like walking, like praying- I think it's quite a liturgical process. There are no gauges, no numbers, no indicators of what is a correct exposure. Everything is in flux and you can't predict anything- but you fall into a steady pulse that guides you. When I approach the shrine, I give a prayer clasping my hands and bowing three times. I often am not sure what I will hope to film or if I will film at all, but I pray. When that inexplicable feeling comes I trust it and start my movement. Wind the film, pull the shutter, wind, pull.

Then there’s the silence. Things are quieter than they ever were. Life is tucked away just a tad, preparing for something. There are fewer birdsong than they used to be, fewer insect noises. In the shrines, all the more so- like there’s a sudden shift in the world. It's so subtle that I didn’t recognize it at first. 

All that remained stained beyond its essence was the drum that rolled onward towards the distant moors past times beyond its origin. We had come a long way tied beyond what could be foretold or what remained. All we had were these syntax clues that pointed towards signs of life. Sparks or rather glimmers of the sacred heart-center.

Flashes of light illuminating the corridors and expanded recesses long forgotten. Illuminated super organisms align us to the core. Aligned upon its axis- a star map, an inner map. Whether in or out, like the flux used in glass making, the essential element of heating objects beyond its origin and into something unknown. Something unrecognizable to its origin and altogether new. Spiritual matter is no different than low grains of sand transformed and transfigured by light.

I started hunting for mushrooms these days. I have my spots, I'll tell you if you're curious. On the sites of old Japanese military constructions, during the war. It never reached our island- instead the faint traces of walls, ditches, and moors, and caves remain. Potential energy loaded like a spring of a bolex- slowly fizzling outward.

There are cave systems hacked into the volcanic mountains, and if you look closely upon the ground- mushrooms. Do those stone walls talk? I know some can speak. I've met some beings there too. But they seemed to be from the other side. The beings are often faint traces. Little dokkeabi, little fairies, fae, daemon. Beings in between incarnation. Yet we are the machines to incarnate. These machines are here to give them form. These words to move hazy leaves across the forest floor, to make reality from illusion.

Walking on foot had become a preoccupation of mine. Days at a time with a distant goal and a small pack filled with my patch work camera. During one of these journeys I ventured across some mountains as it was slowly turning to dusk. Evening light and the decay of the day made the shadows of the pine trees elongated and otherworldly. There with many kilometers still to go to find a place to rest for the night I felt the presence of something. The small chatter of the forest became still and it felt as if I had crossed an unmarked threshold. It was too dark to film anything with the low sensitive film stock that I had brought with me,  but I started my practice of winding my camera and pulling the aluminum tab. Though light might not enter, perhaps something else would. Little grains of noise, soft and harsh, and reminders of the imperceptible reality. Like the visions one sees before falling asleep, under the darkness of one’s eyelid.

My father was a pizza delivery driver for Papa Johns. My earliest memory. Something I bragged to all of my classmates in school. He was also a school bus driver for a time, as well as a used car salesman. But he was a pastor and a man of God from the reformist Calvinist tradition by way of Korea to Argentina. I remember his sermons when I was very young, just old enough to start to imprint memories. His demeanor was fierce and filled with conviction. He talked about faith not as a theoretical concept but as real as the most mundane. 

As I grew apart from my father’s faith and began to see the world as I saw it, I realized how rooted my life was in his. Whether I recognized this or not, it seemed that my practice of filmmaking was one in the same as his as a pastor. I had grown apart initially because I could not reconcile all the pain and suffering in this world with an omnipotent god. But the more I tried to film that which could not be filmed, it seemed that God didn’t exist in the frames themselves- but in the mind that sees the frame and makes them move and dance. 

As our materials became scarce, I started to use the same frame over and over again before I fixed them- multiple layers on top of one another. It was a practical decision and one that initially made it very hard to discern what was upon the images. Yet, I could train my eye to view each layer at a time. One film became ten films. A family portrait became an intergenerational print passed down time and yet never developed as doing so heralded the end of its line.

What faith we have. This small plate of undeveloped silver housed in slowly decaying gelatin holds the same remains of light that reflected our ancestors. Stored in potential chemical reactions. A machine that makes gods.

"Let there be light"- how else might light be stored? Light's reflections enter our eyes. But they are recorded through neural pathways downwards of the visual cortex and end up where? Where might our images and light begin?

Images are inert fossils of light on sediment layers of silver. Photochemical smog floats above cities- a long exposure of the cities movements. Images made up of air particles, water, industrial waste, that floats up upon a cities head. Hit by packets of light and heralded and made grey, like a ceramic glaze upon a kiln.

We produce images everyday- the dead skin on our bodies, our every exhale, our waste. 

Moving images are an illusion- yet a very real illusion that creates anew something. Mind processing moving images. Mind takes in information through crude instruments like our eyes and reads them as we see the world. But what do we lose when we do this? What other visions do we lose? Images that might be able to see ghosts or things not upon this plane.

Can we remake the eye, primitively? Strip it down bare? Just a hole that flips the image. The hanged man seeing beyond the curtain of his visual cortex. The pinhole is the eye of the hanged man.

A mudang transmutes pain through song, dance, and myth. The gut transmutes through audiovisual language, through presence. To witness pains and horrors, shoulder their weight and transmute them. Gods and gods exist whether remembered or not. Gods do not depend on the memories of others, they are self arising principles, self fulfilling. Just as our own mind, consciousness arises without precedent, such a mind continues to exist after death.


You shall not perish, but have eternal life.


The shrine is a hospital, a place of mourning, a place to grieve, a place to give thanks. Cultural institutions that process our lives and bind it together in the thread of the divine. Can cinema do the same? The shrine of cinema is perhaps the dark room where images are made, reflected through the threshold of the pinhole. 

The work is to see the world and its pain, unbidden by the demands of scientific materialist hegemony and synthesize it, not diminish it, to hold the pain of existence and to hold it together. For one another, for our communities.


Gureombi shall not die, cannot


When I was about 12 or 13, I had a dream that I was in a desert being chased by pursuers. There was an old ship moored and half-collapsed in the sand dunes. If I could just reach there I would find salvation.

I often had stretches of time where I was stuck in dreams. There were moments where the dream crossed into waking states and I would sleepwalk in the night and still be in the contents of the dream world. Often when I was sick, these dreams would take a repetitive quality, the same dreams played every time I slept and continued in waking. The contents were in black and white and there was an abyss to either side of me and I stood on a narrow path with no end in sight.

There was often a greek choir to the side of me narrating in song my journey across the endless expanse. When I woke or was stirred into a sleep walk, half dream state, the reality of my house flickered into this state like an intermission of the main show.

I would walk very slowly across the tiles of my home avoiding with dread any mirrors that hung around the place. The premonition, narrated by chorus (or my own psyche), was that if I found myself in the reflection the deadly truth of the matter would be revealed- that it was not me in the mirror, that I could not recognize my existence.

My parents would find me in this trance state, unable to gaze upon the mirror in fear yet feeling the pull towards it—to the loss of existence. Eventually they would shake me awake where I would slowly be awoken back into material consciousness and a slow sheepish slightly shameful confused state would take over me.

That day on the couch where I had taken a nap, I fell into this inbetween state. I must've been making some noises, because my parents came to wake me- but with my eyes fully open I still saw the desert and felt the dread of my pursuers. I remember telling them I had to get to the ship. They were confused. I slowly didn't know myself what I had been talking about, until the constraints of this reality took me back in.

During this time, I had my first inclination of needing to make films. A sudden realization, like a calling from god. 

A friend told me about their practice of speaking in tongues- an act of untranslatable communion with the divine center of things.

Producing undefinable masses of light and shadow, figures obscured and unrecognizable. Yet their spirit made whole in the private mind. The visions perhaps are not to be seen, yet there's a wish to be witnessed and to find form. To bring body and incarnation to the visions- it might look and sound like gibberish. Like noise- but like speaking in tongues, cinema ought to be an act of untranslatable communion. At least the cinema that I wish to bear. 

Confronting the realities and trauma of the world brings us close to the reality that dream, vision, cave, unwitnessed. We are swallowed by the whole, our freedom lost in the body of another. In darkness, in the darkroom within God.

As I hang the film to dry underneath the moonlight, the weight of something fades. Something is appeased or so my conscience informs me. The images are patchy, blurry, approaching abstract. It’s all a bit strange. Forms appear and then don’t. Movement suggests a quality of motion which is denied. Yet something else opens up. Crossing into a threshold the world becomes thin. The veil is torn and we might see clearly once more.