Simultaneity, Lecture

single channel image, stereo audio
45 min 49 sec

The work takes the form of a lecture on SIMULTANEITY, articulated through spoken reflection, references, and the presentation of Min Oh’s own works. By sharing her laptop desktop, Oh operates files of various formats and navigates information in real time, DJing fragments of media — images and sounds, speech and text, previews of related works, and YouTube, Instagram, and Google search results — for forty-five minutes.

SIMULTANEITY is an inquiry into complexity within collectivity: a state in which heterogeneous entities remain superposed yet autonomous. It resists reduction into a single linear trajectory while propagating multiplicity and non-hierarchy. Rather than forming a Wagnerian totality, SIMULTANEITY articulates complexity without synthesis, allowing each entity to persist without subsumption.

In contemporary conditions, already fragmented elements are endlessly reproduced into similar forms, generating proximity as we move through hyper-saturated information by pressing remote-control buttons, clicking hyperlinks, or swiping through images. Yet proximity must neither collapse into unity nor be governed through distinction, a logic historically entangled with exclusionary and authoritarian structures. In this sense, SIMULTANEITY resists reductive unification without reverting to differentiation as exclusion. It foregrounds coexistence, where heterogeneous materials, temporalities, and agents remain distinct yet interdependent.

Inspired by twentieth-century notions of “sound mass,” SIMULTANEITY reflects on how the erosion of line-based musical texture anticipated the weakening of categorical separations across disciplines. Drawing on Claude Shannon’s proposition that “there is more information in disorder,” the lecture proposes an orchestration of overlapping heterogeneous genres, processes, and roles, cultivating complexity through deliberate disruption and confusion as an aesthetic strategy.