To me, Teletubbies rates with the greatest of TV series. More cyphers than fully developed personalities, the four Teletubbies are sort of alien-like teddy bears with antennae protruding from their heads. They are minimalist creations, smiling and waddling, muttering “uh-oh” at everything, and emitting unencumbered happiness in a landscape as minimalist yet inviting as they are.
I occasionally watched the series — designed for young children — as an adult in the 1990s, probably as a form of pop-culture meditation, a blissful experience drained of any complicating thoughts. I also equate them with a pre-9/11 world, since they originated in the late 1990s. (After ceasing production in 2002, Teletubbies has recently resumed.)
If I could think of an ugly opposite in television/video to the Teletubbies, it would be a game like Grand Theft Auto — an excuse to let children and young adults not just vicariously commit violence.
Jisun Kim, the South Korean artist whose very strange and ultimately haunting video installation Climax of the Next Scene will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday at the Contemporary Arts Center, seems to have somewhat of the same feelings about those two.
In her hour-long animated piece, there are two Teletubby-like characters that seem adrift and at loss to understand a society, a culture, with a video game infatuation. One is identified as Jisun, a stand-in for Kim, and she wants to know — by going inside their worlds and interviewing — by what logic and games like Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft work the way they do. What do they mean and what do they say about life? She’s asking about the differences between virtual life and real life, virtual death and real death.
As a visual experience, Climax — with its triptych of screens and layers of interacting virtual worlds — gets very meta. It takes a As an intellectual experience, it can get very melancholy, as when Kim’s Teletubby character recounts a nightmarish vision:
“Imagine an iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible, with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation. Dying in their sleep, they won’t feel the pain of death. Now if you raise a shout to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making these unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you really think you are doing them a good turn?”
As she explained in an email, she used Teletubbies in Climax because they are popular among players of a video game called Garry’s Mod. In that game, they manipulate props or “ragdolls.” “Most game players who play Garry’s Mod in Korea most often use the Teletubbies character,” she wrote. “Since one very famous player used Teletubbies first, many players followed that style, because simply it’s cute.”
A search of internet reference sites revealed Garry’s Mod (and also Minecraft) to be a “sandbox game” because, like a child’s sandbox, play is unencumbered by traditional action-oriented goals. And that’s in a more passive way, that’s also what made Teletubbies such a burst of freedom.
Freedom and liberation are concerns of Kim in Climax, as she expressed in an interview with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image: “I attempted to reveal (in earlier work) the illusion of the current system by penetrating into the cracks that exist inside it. However, it occurred to me that such works might also be acts of providing service to this system, failing to escape from it. Climax is a first step that poses the questions of, ‘Can we imagine the outside of this system?’ ”
Climax ends on a deeply troubling note. Slowly at first, then like lemmings, red Teletubbies fall from the top of a sleek, modernist skyscraper and tumble down. Many will see it as a 9/11 World Trade Center-like image.
“During the production process, I was completely unaware that the scene of Teletubbies leaping from the building could be associated with the twin towers and the incident,” she told the Australian museum. “I was reenacting the suicide shows carried out by players in the games, with no intention of suggesting a specific event.”
Jisun Kim’s CLIMAX OF THE NEXT SCENE screens Thursday and Friday at the Contemporary Arts Center. Kim will talk after the Friday event. More info: contemporaryartscenter.org.
This article appears in Apr 5-12, 2017.
