Duc Thuan: The Box and its freedom

works; the reader can feel the edges of the box swell with accumulated meaning; the reader feels the slippage hidden in Thuan's mechanical semiosis.

Thuan is a clever conceptualist as well. Regard the first frame in the recent if(Monologue) { ... }(2000-2002): titled "Extremes," it's a meditation on black and birth, rendered in dark letters on an obsidian background. The user has to select the text with the mouse in order to read it (a kind of designer's interactivity that speaks of the meaning hiding in the smoothest and least troubled of surfaces); the text itself consists of dictionary definitions of black and birth. What's notable here is the design: not only has Thuan achieved a suggestion of covert signification by using dark text on a dark background, but he has achieved, from a design and conceptual perspective, a play on opposition, on dualities: the definitions are headed by screaming captions that declare this; for birth, "birth/death," for black "black/white." Other frames in the work show further Thuan's concern with ASCII-art and concrete poetics; the "Hyperflower" frame in the piece is to me the most beautiful, offering a spinning tao symbol in the middle of a pink flower pulsing with text. It's an inventive treatment, and well worth following the link.

Duc Thuan's work is a prime example of what's possible when good design meets a good poetic head.

 

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