JooYoun Paek

Zipper Orchestra

When artist JooYoun Paek first moved to New York in the fall of 2005, it rained constantly. On the city’s crowded sidewalks, Paek remembers, it was almost impossible to move around without being jostled by pedestrians brandishing their umbrellas.

So Paek jerryrigged a conventional umbrella with a set of pulleys and steel strings. With a slight pull on the handle, Paek’s contraption—the Polite Umbrella—droops slightly, avoiding its neighbors.

Polite Umbrella

Like a funhouse technician, Paek splices new technologies into everyday objects and movements: zippers play music, umbrellas shy away from each other, dresses inflate with the wearer’s steps. In the process, Paek invents new ways for people to interact with things they take for granted and with each other. This belies her education: Paek’s sculpture studies at Seoul National University emphasized traditional practices with wood, stone, and metal, but the Seoul native transferred that material fluency into startling, playful mutations of common objects, like headphones fused together to allow shared listening and glasses frames that can be worn by two people facing each other.

Portrait by Dorothy Hong

An intense interest in how art can foster social interaction eventually led Paek to NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she studied “physical computing”—the same technology which makes touch screens possible—and new musical interfaces. For her piece Fold Loud, a part of the MOMA’s exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind,” Paek stitched conductive thread into origami paper; folding the paper plays recorded musical tones. For Paek, Fold Loud not only marries new technologies and ancient practices but illustrates their conceptual connections. “Origami is like a piece of software,” she says. “It’s flexible. It doesn’t solidify into one single shape or visual. People can come in and make something and then it can go back to nothing again.”

For her interactive installation Zipper Orchestra (2006), Paek shot video “interviews” of people playing with the zippers on their clothes, discovering each person’s idiosyncratic rhythms. Paek linked projections of these videos to a canvas mixing board tricked out with zippers and conductive thread, which can carry electric signals into fabric. Viewers “conduct” the piece by moving a zipper, activating their digital counterparts on screen. “My work never starts from technology,” Paek says. “If I find something I want to amplify, I use technology to fulfill that. But it starts from observation of everyday life.”