Let me tell you one thing, one very important thing, about Bananamilk: It's full of sugar! 34 grams in the Promised Land brand, and that's based on one bottle having four servings (and for whom is one bottle of this rich and creamy elixir four servings?)! Needless to say, it's not a beverage that will help me stay the svelte and suave dandy I am now. Indeed, I would be much better off if I stuck to the virtual Bananamilk--the interactive art site by Sangburn Kim at http://www.bananamilk.com/ .
It's full of sugar too, but this is sugar of a different sort: pure Pop bubblegum sweetness. Sugar for the eyes, ears and mind (I'm not sure if there's a corresponding decay here, comparable to the damage sugar does to teeth, and, in viewing Bananamilk I'm inclined not to care, so slick and effortless these ten Flash and Quick Time pieces are). Sangburn Kim studied at Iowa State, and if work of this caliber is what Iowa State's Intermedia students produce, I may have to move there.
Despite the slickness, the sugaryness of the pieces, Bananamilk is actually a commentary on the current political heats. Kim engages the user with charged imagery (the piece This Is Roast Beef is a prime example of the visual exposition Kim seems most adept at: images of a knife slicing through a hunk of roast, interspersed with a deep red feel, the silhouette of a portly white man gesticulating in a loop--that red is reminiscent of all the old cold war dichtomies, the red of soviet communism, the red of maoism, the red in the American flag)(And Untitled, with its video of the two towers, each tower on rollover outlining itself in white on the blue blue city, on click looping the plane coming closer, closer--it's the most desperate of Kim's pieces here, because the interactivity is limited to looping the planes flying in, the only variation being which tower the plane flies into) and loops that imagery in meaningful ways. Wall Cam, too, demonstrates the arcitecture of Kim's work: a menu of three white buttons on a scene of what I do believe to be the Wailing Wall. Each button initiates a loop that zooms in on a political figure through the
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