Using experimental cinematography and the performed gestures of family, friends, and community members, Jin-me Yoon’s lens-based practice works to reveal the social, environmental, and geopolitical entanglement of our connected planet. As the Crane Flies Bunker (Sonic Transformations) is the latest in Yoon’s series of “sonic transformation” works that investigate the power of sound to reconnect repressed pasts with damaged presents to propose different futures.

As the Crane Flies Bunker (Sonic Transformations) was filmed upon a decades-old military training and exercise ground, in an area close to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides the Korean peninsula into its two ideologically opposed regions. Yoon’s installation features footage filmed with a thermal camera, commonly used by hunters as well as South Korean military surveillance and border security. She explores the visceral potency of sound, particularly its ability to affectively alter space and experience, referencing both the Buddhist tradition of sonic meditation as well as the “sonic warfare” that the two Korean states accuse the other of propagandistically inflicting upon each other (such as noise bombardment from the North, K-Pop from the South). As the Crane Flies Bunker (Sonic Transformations) also considers the unique potential of the DMZ’s charged landscape: this zone is also the most biodiverse in the region. The rich array of animal and plant life that thrives here serves as a reminder that human-made borders often created by war and militarism are both provisional and permeable, and that a different kind of biophilic future is possible.