Dr. Byeongwon Ha. Juried Artist
Constellations
WebXR on the Styly platform
Artist Statement
Make America Great Again and Again (MAGAA) appropriates the exclusive political slogan “Make America Great Again” to create an inclusive phenomenon through participatory/interactive storytelling art. MAGAA invites visitors beyond the U.S. border to an exhibition space, transforming it into a public sphere where they can manipulate or maintain a large American flag displayed on a white wall, accompanied by the Star-Spangled Banner song. Following the exhibition outside of the United States, the project will return to the United States to showcase external voices and then travel to other countries. Upon its return to the United States, the project will incorporate a broader range of voices from its previous journeys. MAGAA is an ever-evolving open work, as it circulates at different exhibition events. Rather than providing a definitive answer to the questionable slogan “Make American Great Again,” this project provides a public platform for participants to dis-cuss diverse perspectives on the concept of “make America great again.” This process naturally visualizes a temporal collage, transitioning from the American flag image to a multi-screen representation created by participants via YouTube.
Styly link: Make America Great Again and Again
About the artists
Byeongwon Ha is an assistant professor in Media Arts at the University of South Carolina, specializing in new media art. He has exhibited interactive installations in multiple countries, including Singapore, South Korea, Colombia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. In 2018, he completed an artist-in-residence program in Gwangju, South Korea, where he show-cased his participatory video project, Ordinary People. In 2019, Dr. Ha authored articles in Leonardo Music Journal and coauthored one in Leonardo. Dr. Ha is a frequent participant in international conferences and festivals, such as the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS2023), the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016), SIGGRAPH Asia 2012, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023), and ARTECH 2019 and 2021.
Credits: Byeongwon Ha