Transfer + Resistor
Poetic Devices / Device Poetics
Yunchul Kim
The Conditions of Amplification
The title Transfer + Resistor unfolds transistor into two terms: transfer and resistance. What the word joins, the device enacts. Enacting both, it amplifies a signal by regulating the flow of current—setting thresholds through which a signal may be admitted, shaped, or cut off. This engineering logic becomes a potent metaphor for artistic praxis. Art translates thought and sensation into a medium, while the material conditions of that medium simultaneously delay, deform, and modulate the transfer. Resistance, then, is not simply an obstruction: it is the generative condition through which transmission becomes perceptible, intensified, and transformed into an event.
This exhibition does not treat the device as a mere technological tool. We redefine the device as a junction where energy acquires form and thought turns into matter. Here, transfer is never seamless: it is a translation marked by leakage, deviation, and metamorphosis. Resistance is not an obstruction but a generative condition—one that allows form to emerge. We track moments of poetic amplification: the threshold at which a signal becomes sensation and sensation consolidates into structure, at the intersection of transfer and resistance.
The exhibition holds two questions together: How does an artist use a device poetically, and how does a device enter a poetic regime of its own? Rather than reducing art to an instrument, the exhibition becomes a site where instruments can be seen coming into being as art—where devices are no longer simply human means, but systems through whose operations a poetics can emerge.
Boundary Conditions
We view boundaries—between sophisticated technology and raw materiality, art and engineering, machine and body, visible form and invisible circuits—not as fixed divisions, but as boundary conditions that shape how transformation can occur. They regulate transfer, generate resistance, and establish thresholds for amplification.
Expanded Devices: Robotics, sensors, and data circuits are not the only devices at stake. The layers of a painting, the tension of sculptural joints, and the rhythm of a performance's breath can also be understood as device-events where transfer and resistance intersect. Within this exhibition, media can be approached as "transistor-like events": fields of transformation in which translation and friction occur simultaneously.
Operation of Boundaries: Art often intensifies at the boundary—when matter exceeds control, when protocols waver, when sensation collides with data. It is in these moments of contact and drift that amplification occurs.
Afterimage and Residue: These events are fleeting yet intense, sometimes persisting as afterimages, residues, or traces. The exhibition treats such remains not as mere outcomes, but as conditions that reconfigure the next transfer.
Poetic Devices
"Poetic Devices" names the practice of mediation through which an artist's intent and sensibility traverse a medium and open onto another perceptual or material register. The device exceeds its functional role to become a mediator that organizes how meaning takes material form.
Transduction of States: The friction between brush and canvas, the propagation and resonance of sound, the replication of images, and the visualization of data are not mere movements. They are forms of transduction in which energy, information, gesture, or sensation is converted across material states and perceptual registers.
Poetic Subversion of Tools: The artist subverts a device's default protocol. By bending machines designed for efficiency, the artist reroutes the tool toward sensory leaps and existential inquiry. The device becomes a catalyst for poetic deviation.
Expansion of Transfer: Transfer is not confined to technological media. Poetic devices traverse media, translating images, memories, gestures, and rhythms into spatiotemporal forms. Across these media, transfer is reorganized through distinct "material times"—layering, blurring, overpainting, pressing, absorption.
Device Poetics
"Device Poetics" attends to forms of expression that arise from the conditions of devices and matter—noise, heat, error, fatigue, flaws, nonlinearity—and that do not fully submit to human control. Here, resistance is not hostility but a mode through which matter and devices disclose their tendencies through their own material, mechanical, and computational conditions.
Self-Exposure of Matter: Matter is not a passive surface awaiting inscription. Structural color shifts emerging within a hydrogel, micro-oscillations and resonances within a machine, the slow warping of metal under fatigue, pigment dispersing unbidden through a solvent, sensor drift, algorithmic branching—these are not merely failures relative to an intended operation but events in which matter and devices disclose their dispositions.
The Poetics of Non-Intent: When a device reaches a poetic state through its own inherent conditions—through its own resistance and thresholds—we witness the expressive capacity of the medium itself, a capacity not fully reducible to artistic intention alone. This is a poetics emerging from material conditions, occurring before it is fully translated into human language.
Redefining Amplification: Amplification is not merely "making it louder." It is the process by which minute differences—error, noise, friction—grow into form. This exhibition traces, through the operation of the works, where such amplification begins and which thresholds it crosses.
Amplified Traces
The curatorial team Vestige acts as a conductor connecting artists from Korea and Croatia. Where artistic transfer meets a medium's resistance, the exhibition becomes a site in which technology and art escape the simple relation of means and ends, transforming one another within a single circuit. What this circuit will amplify cannot be fully predicted—and that uncertainty is the condition the exhibition seeks to preserve.