Electric Gugak

La MaMa and CultureHub presented Electric Gugak livestreaming on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv onFriday 5 November 2021 at 6 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 8 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 9 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 10 a.m. KST (Seoul, UTC +9).

Electric Gugak is a multi-locational live concert which features performances from Seoul, New York City, and Los Angeles, where networked CultureHub studios are located. The performances combine traditional Korean music with new media practices, highlighting new expressions of Korean composition.

A small audience will be welcomed into the CultureHub New York studio to watch Jin Hi Kim’s performance live and to watch live feeds of the performances in Korea and Washington. All audience members joining us in person must be fully vaccinated and wear a mask. Purchase a ticket to reserve your spot.

Electric Gugak is presented within La MaMa and CultureHub’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling Program. Electric Gugak is presented as a part of The Korea Project 2021: Agora which is funded by Korea Foundation. Electric Gugak is powered by LiveLab, a browser-based media-router for collaborative performance developed by CultureHub.

CultureHub New York
Jin Hi Kim

Electric komungo virtuoso and Guggenheim Composer Fellow Jin Hi Kim creates a ritual for COVID-19 live at CultureHub in New York in memory of 616,000 deaths in the USA and 4.2 million deaths worldwide during the pandemic. The work, inspired by Korean Shamanistic ssitkimkut ritual, purifies the deceased spirit as she performs on the world’s only electric komungo. The performance articulates the enormous tragedy, grieving, praying, and finally purification as a protest against the anti-Asian bias that resulted from COVID. A ritual for COVID-19 was developed within La MaMa and CultureHub’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling Program.

CultureHub Korea
Dae Hong Kim

Paleum (팔음, 八音) is a term in Korean traditional music that refers to the eight material types or sounds used to make traditional Korean instruments: metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, soil, leather, and wood. The haegeum, a traditional Korean instrument, incorporates all of these materials and produces many sounds. This performance intends to show that we can reproduce sounds with modern materials through our newly developed “electronic haegeum” along with A.I. and augmented reality audio-visuals.

CultureHub Los Angeles
Eyvind Kang & Jessika Kenney

Echolocations plays with sensory substitution through a poetic lens of sound and image. The echolocation practiced here leads to a kind of no-place where thieves of perception reflect our attempts to love and be loved, as described by Priest Yongjae in his famously inscrutable 8th century poem as translated by Peter H Lee.

Terpsichore Choral Dance is an ensounding of images, intensities and temporal dynamics described in the eighth section of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictee. We chose ten sentences. In our arrangement, each descriptive fragment is accompanied by other nearby fragments which indicate sonic and visual transformations. Thus Cha’s words are drawn on for their strong images but also for method and technique.

Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney will perform live from Laboratory Residency Spokane.