Horizontal Intimacy (2010)

Recorded in the chilly, indeterminate locale of airport terminals around the world, Seoungho Cho's surreptitious footage of travelers biding their time captures the ominous quietude unique to that space. The canned announcements and muttering news reports that usually fill this limbo are gradually supplanted by an Alexander Scriabin piano sonata, lending an introspective and melancholic air to the inorganic shades of blue and grey, and the anonymous silhouettes of bored strangers. A floating set of mysterious glowing red orbs seem to stare back, eerily calling to mind the red eye of HAL the super computer from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Perhaps these "eyes" match the artist's role as an outsider looking coolly upon an unfamiliar world, longing for a communion that wil always be disappointed in such a transient realm.