Bun Shin Sa Ba
“Bun Shin Sa Ba” is an interactive video/sound installation that takes the form of a karaoke performance. The audience is asked to sing along with the melody to the popular song “My Heart Will Go On” with new lyrics generated by predictive auto-text type applications. By singing these words, we fill the public space with sound generated by data collected from private conversations. In the installation, there is a microphone facing a video screen that plays a karaoke-style video. The mic is attached to the sound system, and the audience is encouraged to interact with the piece by singing along with the video.
Predictive text algorithms collect the data from our private conversations and suggest the most commonly used word combinations across a large network of users. Based on my research, the word combinations from these apps often reveal hidden messages of misogyny and racism. All the song lyrics in the piece are culled from algorithmic suggestions in the English and Korean language from a variety of applications. For example, when the Korean word for “wife” was input into a chat app, a suggested word combination generated by the algorithm is “wants to commit suicide.” This sentence has been reappropriated as a song lyric.
