Camille Norment, Min Oh: Untuned Time

What is noise? In music, noise is sound that is not attuned, dissonance lying outside of harmony; on screens, it is a material trace that resists clear representation. Latching onto signals from outside the order, noise is an intervention and a resistance that seeks to return meaning to mere clamor. Untuned Time presents the work of Min Oh and Camille Norment, who read noise as a critical threshold from which new states emerge, a field where the potential oscillates within instability.

Today, algorithmic feeds and recommendation systems constantly return us to what we already know, trapping us in cycles of predictable pleasure, while the material vibrations of reality disappear behind the smooth surface of the screen. In an era overflowing with noise, what we are truly losing may be the very capacity to sense noise in its true meaning. Through the practices of these two artists, the exhibition reconsiders noise not as something to be erased but as a condition of generation.

For the first time, Min Oh brings together her Simultaneity series, developed over years of research and production through the ARKO Partners Support in Multidisciplinary Art. Beginning from the idea that more information is entangled within disorder, the work constructs dense masses of information in which heterogeneous entities—image and performance, music and choreography, machine and body—are layered without hierarchy. Making her Korean debut, Camille Norment extends her Plexus series with a new site-specific installation produced in Seoul. In Plexus (rhizome) Seoul, which grows like a network of roots and nerves, Norment takes the inherent frequencies of the space—sounds regarded as "untuned" within conventional musical systems—as the foundational tones of her composition, opening a field of resonance where voices buried in silence return through their reverberation.

Both artists treat noise, this unstable wave, as a collaborator and symbiont. Norment writes that when noise becomes a collaborator in composition, "the traditional musical authority and hierarchy of composer, performer, and listener tilts toward the horizontal." Oh, in turn, seeks textures in which no element is subordinate to another: "Indeterminacy and structure do not negate one another; they complement each other. Each maintains its own autonomy in a state of superposition." Both artists permit states of tilting, and the interference of new frequencies that arises when waves of differing frequencies overlap in dissonance. This is the opening of a possibility through which a third vibration can intervene.

In a world where algorithms have begun to make our everyday decisions and even to think on our behalf, the way both artists relate to noise is through improvisation. Improvisation is not the absence of a plan; it arises from listening to the voice the work itself carries. The artists attune themselves through the senses to listeners beyond their control, to uncertain conditions, to the territory of the undetermined—and through the exhibition we step into the interstices of time and space that their responses give shape to.

Untuned Time is not the loss of stability but a time not yet decided, not the failure of smooth accordance but the condition from which new relationships emerge. "When Oh shouts "OK" on a film set without knowing the future, when the vibrations Norment delivers to the audience can no longer be distinguished from one's own body or the structure itself, time wavers. This exhibition seeks to remain within that state: where the unpredictable and at times unsettling resonate together unresolved, where what has not yet arrived continues to vibrate.