Pleased to share Tromarama’s first solo exhibition in Korea Ping Inside Noisy Giraffe, presented by SONGEUN. The seemingly nonsensical title of the exhibition, Ping Inside Noisy Giraffe, is a recursive acronym for the word “ping”. A “ping” measures message transmission time between computer devices, derived from sonar technology’s pulse-echo process for underwater detection. The title functions as a recursive acronym — a self-referential programming convention exemplified by phrases like “PNG’s Not GIF” (PNG) or “GOD Over Djinn” (GOD). These acronyms typically employ humorous double negatives, or caricatural resemblances to other reference points, to simplify complex computational concepts.

Ping Inside Noisy Giraffe, then, acts as a provocation for the audience to speculate about the idea of a ping, bouncing between two points, in a frequency that reaches upon the infinite — a ping that constantly bounces without end. The questions being considered by the artists are manifold: Can increasingly sophisticated computer programs and artificial intelligence speculate upon more abstract notions of things such as infinity? How does this sentience separate the finite from the infinite? And to what extent are these pings being sent and received in the digital world an inseparable part of daily human existence? What forms of truths, or mistruths, undergird a ping’s underlying structure?

Tromarama continues to find inspiration from the ever-changing relationship, and blurring terms and conditions, between humans and the digital realm. The collection, interpretation, and utilization of personal data—often gathered in a manner devoid of consent—are amassed and processed by corporations through increasingly opaque and indistinguishable algorithms. Ping Inside Noisy Giraffe brings together a compilation of video pieces across the collective’s career, expanded reconsiderations of previous works that contain algorithmically generated connection points, as well as newly commissioned works engaging with some of the far-reaching ramifications of these ever-changing realities. In Ping Inside Noisy Giraffe the artists utilize local Indonesian aphorisms, such as sapi perah (“dairy cow” or “cash cow”) and banting tulang (“to slam one’s bones” or “to toil with great hardship”), as metaphorical and visual frameworks to consider more universal issues.

— Courtesy of SONGEUN.