Henry Chung

My work considers the unstable relationship between technology, memory, and identity. Drawing from my background in engineering, I work with both emerging and obsolete technologies—repurposed cameras, embedded devices, outdated computers, synthetic voices, and coded messages—often treating their limitations, artifacts, and histories as material in themselves.

I am interested in things that have outlived their intended purpose: machines, images, languages, memories, and narratives. Obsolescence becomes a point of transition, where something familiar begins to lose its original meaning and acquire another. The technologies in my work carry traces of the time and culture that produced them, while becoming vessels for new and sometimes incongruous histories.

Memory is similarly unstable, reconstructed through fragments, repetition, distortion, and gaps. My work inhabits the space between what is remembered and what can actually be recovered, where personal and collective histories become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

In The “Last Year”, obsolete electronic devices become repositories for fragments of the language surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, transforming headlines and declarations into signals that can be seen or heard without necessarily being understood.

Manchild Noise Box uses generative AI and neural speech synthesis to construct an absurd echo chamber of fictionalized, child-like political rhetoric inspired by Donald Trump. Through repetition, parody, and distortion, language becomes both familiar and strange.

Across my work, technology functions simultaneously as medium, subject, and artifact. I am drawn to the point at which systems designed to preserve, transmit, and organize information instead reveal its instability—when the machine becomes obsolete, the message becomes fragmented, or the memory can no longer be trusted.