Bokyung Jeong

Concept

The municipality of Vareš, and specifically the mountain village of Mijakovići, stands as an intricate socio-political and geological archive where the human, the non-human, and the technological are irrevocably tangled. The landscape carries heavy historical accumulations: from the medieval royal seat of Bobovac to the industrial infrastructure of the Yugoslav era, the trauma of the 1990s war, and the ongoing administrative “transition.” Today, this layered ground faces a critical contemporary crisis — the corporate extraction of silver, lead, and zinc, unfolding directly within the watershed that feeds tens of thousands of downstream households.

These aggressive corporate mining operations rely heavily on rigid, top-down computational models — silicon hardware that quantifies, digitizes, and violently extracts material value from the earth at lightning speed. My project, I Rock Hard with Otherness, fundamentally questions this destructive, extractivist logic. I ask: how can sound art offer an alternative, slower mode of inquiry that refuses to take from the land, but instead listens to what is already leaking from it?

To counter the cold binary of silicon-based calculation, this project introduces an artistic framework of “Fluid Coding” and “Sensory Translation” inspired by the obsolete, historical research field of fluidics (fluid logic) from the 1950s. Fluidics conceptualized computational hardware not as dry silicon chips, but as intricate, physical cavities where curved morphologies guided the slower, analogue movements of fluid jets. Reimagining this forgotten technology, I position the Vareš watershed itself as a grand, natural computational hardware. Water is an active agent — a liquid machine that flows over, absorbs, and holds the complex historical and post-industrial realities of the ground.

This project fundamentally avoids the trap of voyeuristic sympathy or defining local history through pre-existing labels of tragedy. Instead, my concept centers on an artistic ethics of pure observation: to simply face, carefully look at, and acoustically interface with the complex, entangled textures of a community where capitalism, war, and migration overlap.