Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Shawn Vieron

Masterpupil(s)

How did burnout become so widespread—if not imperative, among myself and many others? The distinction between being driven and overdriven becomes difficult to determine when control over one’s own agency is no longer certain.My thesis project "Masterpupil(s)" orchestrates a sound-based installation that situates the condition of burnout alongside contrasting modes of exhaustion. Six car speakers extracted from a Porsche Macan are suspended in a self-facing configuration, linked by cables transmitting low-frequency vibrations between 20–40 Hz. Playing off a looping CD track, the speakers sustain continuous cone excursion, emulating the strain of a misfiring car in motion that never quite resolves.For Korean-German theorist Byung-Chul Han, burnout manifests as an isolating, repetitive form of fatigue produced through excess performance and achievement-based imperatives. In contrast, Peter Handke articulates a form of tiredness that suspends the demand to act, enabling a relation to the world grounded in trust. Under these two modes, the complexity of responding to personal burnout leaves one without a clear stance; exhaustion becomes the medium through which everything is felt. What once appeared as an exception begins to define the structure of the everyday. Burnout no longer interrupts experience, but becomes the condition through which it is organized. The question is no longer how to overcome burnout, but what it reveals about the terms under which contemporary life is sustained.Audio engineer: Devin Defreyne

“Absent matters tempt my concealed desire to run out of madness. Sometimes in the name of curiosity; sometimes in the name of revolution; some other times in the name of revenge. When searching for the opacities of absence takes up the majority of how one constructs their day, the surroundings start to perceive it as a danger of an endless abyss due to the “enough” amount of evidence that proves the lack of evidence. I wonder if my scope of life evidence becomes wide and universal that has always been pressured to embrace moments possibly between contingent traumas and serendipities, can my actions of inferences become any closer to prophesying, in which absence no longer matters? Confusion begins. Written by: Ivetta Sunyoung KangFull text available in the icon above.”