The cathode ray tube, now an outmoded technology, occupied a strange space in the history of visual production. Displaying an endless flow of cultural images, they served as endpoints for commercial broadcasts. For viewers, they were portals into other worlds and other times, both real and imagined.

When networked with closed-circuit security cameras, these screens take on an entirely different aesthetic, which may be considered an aesthetic of impending disaster. Natural human vision is replaced by the ever-watching gaze of the surveillance camera, fixed upon a doorway, a stairwell, or the aisles of a grocery store. The architecture doesn’t change, and people enter and exit the frame inconsequentially, except in rare moments of violence, theft, disaster, or beauty – moments that may never come. Periodically, the system’s memory is erased to make room for new recordings.

However, with its gaze fixed on the same scene for years or even decades, a different kind of memory is written upon the television screen. The phosphors are permanently burned-in with the image of the spaces observed, while people disappear or become ghosts. The old television becomes a repository of memory, even when unplugged or forgotten in a dark corner of Sewoon Sangga, itself an architectural repository of cultural memory etched across downtown Seoul.