Title: Machine Suite (2025)    

Media: Single-channel stereo sound, 35mm reversal film

‘Machine Suite’ is an installation devised during a period of visiting Seoul. The work emerged not from a planned investigation or a research study, but from a bodily pull. Jon would immerse himself by foot, walking the city limits, only to repeatedly find himself gravitating to the industrial districts - its wear, its work and residual purpose. It’s these areas that resonate with Jon’s practice, where memory clings not to narrative but to gestures and atmosphere. 

Chungmuro’s rich industrial heritage (both its printing district and being cited as the birthplace of Korean cinema) was the starting point for ‘Machine Suite’. The work is not a documentation of the area, but a distillation of it, abstracted into original sound recordings and re-imagined found objects. This re-assembling creates a constellation of disembodied labour and temporal slippages that oscillate between the archival and the speculative. 

Memory is at play, but it’s not concrete, not quite. Its labour rendered spectral - repeated, looped and flattened. It attempts to process the area like a projector might process light and sound and what remains is a suite of mechanical sensations. A rhythm of images and atmospheres of sound that pulse through analogue-machines. It’s this kinship of print and cinema that ‘Machine Suite’ converges on.