1 Crossing over the Boundaries : Beyond the Screen Hyun Jean Lee and Ali Mazalek I. Introduction I drew over one thousand apples on paper or canvas during my teenage years. At that time, as a student in the visual art department in middle and high school, I studied a realistic ways of painting. Always I dared to make an apple on canvas look vividly real like a Rembrandt apple. However, the more I struggled with apples, the more I realized there was a gap between the real apple and the painted apple on canvas. It was the gap between reality and illusion, and between the apple and myself. Through dedicated practice I could delude myself into creating more a realistic apple on canvas, but the apple on canvas still remains as an illusion. The fact that the real apple cannot be replaced with the apple on canvas ultimately reminded me of the existential difference between reality and the representation of it. This difference prevented me from reaching the real apple. Thus, for me, the process of painting a realistic image allowed me to shed the psychological distance between the object and me, and at the same time understand the physical distinction between the object and myself. Seduced again and again by the illusion of a real apple, I verified that I could only desire the real one. The apple on canvas was the representation of my perception of an apple. The canvas was a beginning and end of the communication between the world and myself. Struggling with this translation, the existence of the white canvas positioned between the object (apples) and myself became more significant to me. The existence of the canvas was separating me from the apple, but at the same time, it made me desire it. The canvas bridges these two separate worlds. The subject matter of my work has evolved from the apple itself, to the process of representing it, and again to the canvas representing the apple on it. Subsequently, I used a video camera in lieu of paintbrushes. The video camera can capture the world as it is in faster and easier ways. Using the element of time as another expressive component in my work enables me to approach the real world, which is always changing, more intimately. Although the medium has been changed from painting to video, my perception and representations of the world have remained. The world is still captured onto a two-dimensional screen. It was a just switch of the canvas, from a painting canvas to a video screen. II. Screen as a boundary object 1. Screen: Its Physical Condition One of the main physical characteristics of a screen is its two-dimensionality. Throughout the history of painting, painters have devised many solutions for creating the illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat field. Renaissance paintings were developed through one-point perspective and Cubists’ painting composed multi-perspective images, or collages employing the real object on fabricated space. This two- dimensional space has driven painters to strive to represent what they see in the three-dimensional world, but at the same time, this dimensional limitation has also encouraged artistic imagination. The rectangular shape of the surrounding frame is another distinctive characteristic of screens, be it a physical frame or a white margin like in old-fashioned pictures. Therefore, painting becomes displaceable and freely exchangeable, that is commodifiable (Morse 1989, 154). Although time has passed and technology has developed, the screen form still remains the same. The moving image screen is also enclosed by an encasement (a brown tube) or a monitor frame. From painting to cinema, the visual culture of the modern period is characterized by an intriguing phenomenon, the existence of another virtual space, another three- dimensional world enclosed by a frame and situated inside our normal space (Manovich 2002, 95).) 2. Screen: The Boundary of Space and Time Literally the word ‘screen’ means ‘filters out’ or ‘cuts out’ things. Because of the frame around the screen, certain objects represented may be cropped. The frame also divides the space into illusionary space and physical space. Outside of the frame is the physical space. The physical boundary provides a certain visual focus, dividing the content inside the screen from the white wall outside it. Thus, the frame leads