Lauren Lee
The Book of Na by Na Mira, Wendy’s Subway, 240 pages, $28
Amid the current resurgence of analog media—I’m thinking about our born-again love for the record player, and a more recent revival of CDs and cassette tapes—I am proud to be a digital native. The internet, in many ways, provided me with a space to create an identity for myself beyond the physical and conventional bounds of space and time. A few weeks ago, in an attempt to look back on some of my embarrassing internet forays, I was met instead with screen after screen of dead links, my former self lost in the junkyard of dead cyberspace. Even the digital (old) is being quickly outpaced by the digital (new)—remember the death of Adobe Flash Player and the thousands of error links that were born in its place?
The term “glitch” can be traced back to radio talkers around the 1940s who used the word to describe on-air mistakes in their speech. From radio, the “glitch” traveled to television in the mid-1900s, where the word then took on a more technical connotation, to refer to errors resulting from frequency interferences. In 1962, the astronaut John Glenn used it to describe changes in voltage often seen in circuits from the small ones used in washing machines to the technology aboard Project Mercury, his mission to orbit the Earth for the first time. As internet developments accelerate, the term glitch has become synonymous with error, fault, or something otherwise bad. My roommate takes her laptop to the Apple Store to fix a glitch—the pixels on her screen are split in half, the right side flashing black infinitely.
Glitch comes from the Yiddish glitschen, to slip, to slide. What meaning has been lost as the concept has evolved? What do we gain in looking back?
In Na Mira’s latest piece, The Book of Na, the glitch takes on a body in the form of physical pages of the book. Based in Los Angeles—on Tongva, Gabrielino, Kizh, and Chumash lands—Na Mira has created work that spans multiple mediums, both in the United States and South Korea and in their “in between.” Much of her recent work weaves together several thematic and material threads: the work of fellow Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, in particular her unfinished 16mm film White Dust from Mongolia, the use of glitch as an art and communication medium, Korean shamanism, and the physical setting of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
Na Mira’s The Book of Na serves as a form of documentation of her art and practice: it is as much of a book as it is an art object. The book itself is divided into six sections, “Speaker Is a Microphone,” “밤시각 Night Vision,” “Measuring with a bent ruler,” “The Book of Fixed Stars. Cryotype,” “Passage, Paysages, Passengers,” and “TIMESTAMPS, 3000BC–2-22/06/05.” The first five sections correspond to a title of one of Na Mira’s art pieces, displayed in galleries across the United States as well as internationally from 2018 onwars, and follow a series of prose-like poetry interspersed with images either from her work or pictures from her personal life that correspond to the words on the page. The final section is a collection of written fragments from her practice of automatic writing, a practice that she describes as working like a contrapuntal stream of subconsciousness.
As a form of documentation, each section represents a different facet of Na Mira’s practice, from musings, images, and journal entries to historical recollections of Korean folklore. In both the aesthetic quality of the book—its use of scattered artist sketches, screengrabs, and other blown up images in between its written components—and content, a few themes stitch The Book of Na whole. Most significant perhaps are the 20th century avant-garde artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and tigers.
A recurring theme throughout the book and Na Mira’s work, the image of the tiger is both historically important to a Korean history shifted by Japanese imperialism, as well as Na Mira’s personal practice. In 2018, while traveling and shooting footage in South Korea for her video work 밤시각 Night Vision, the infrared camera that she used glitched, sending previously shot scenes gliding across the screen capturing live video. She guided the glitch to the DMZ to finish shooting her work, where it splayed a picture of a tiger prowling across the militarized border space. This tiger—commonly associated as an embodied god in Korean shamanic traditions— brings Na Mira and her work to a place otherwise inaccessible. When I asked Na Mira, how do you use the glitch?, she replied that she was only its steward.
In her 2020 book Glitch Feminism, New York City-based curator Legacy Russell proposes a radical overturning of how we think about concepts of error more generally. What if we thought of the glitch—previously, an overabundance of frequency, electricity—as an overabundance of potential? In glitching out of the bound of what is possible or “correct,” can we exist in a space that is boundless, that can allow us to step across borders of space and time? Na Mira’s glitch suggests, yes.
Her glitch has since populated several other video works and installations such as Tesseract (test), in which she recreates the proposed last scene for Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 16mm film White Dust from Mongolia. Following the narrative of a young amnesiac on a quest to retrieve her past memories, many have interpreted the film as a metaphor for the kind of diasporic amnesia that Cha felt towards her homeland of Korea when she immigrated to the United States as a child in 1962. Unfortunately, due to her early death in 1982, the film was left unfinished, consisting only of around 30 minutes of location footage shot in Korea. Like the glitch of the tiger, Na Mira accesses the inaccessible, does the unimaginable, using her infrared camera to finally “complete” the film. Elsewhere, Na Mira has written that while working in Cha’s archives and creating the final film she discovered “the violence of being outside this world, the ecstasy of making another.”
The medium of the glitch finds its productive potential in the material production of The Book of Na as well. It is a swath of glossy red, the title and Na Mira’s name impressed into the cover so that the bold letter can only be read by their shadowed indentation. Before even opening the book, you can see that the red ink that floods the background of the pages is not consistent, a thinly veiled indication of the printing process. Most important, a few key pages in the book’s last section are printed in “reverse,” on the left side of the page in what looks from afar like white ink. Upon closer inspection, the words are etched into the page instead, as though a layer of the red page has been lifted to reveal a hidden message beneath. Some pages are a more saturated red than others, rendering the text unreadable. When I first saw how the ink laid across the words, sometimes giving way the hint of a letter at most, I was annoyed at this seeming glitch in production (I wanted to read what Na Mira had to say!). Perhaps now I know I was approaching the text all wrong, assuming that I was meant to or would ever be capable of reading it in its entirety. The power of the glitch, after all, is to obscure the perception of its audience to rewrite the intentions of its user. Across its print run, maybe one day I’ll pick up another version of The Book of Na in another bookstore and be able to finally read the missing print. Maybe, I never will.