Howlround

“Howlround” is British slang for the screeching sound of a feedback loop, where one sound is echoed and amplified through a system until it becomes uncontrollable. This paper takes up the metaphor of resonances and feedback loops to interrogate the interactive systems of Korean artist team Loopntale (Youngju Kim & Hoyoun Cho). Based in Seoul, a megacity that has famously embraced smart city technology, the duo utilizes interactive storytelling and video to engage audiences with non-human urban perspectives, including animals and machines. Resonance occurs when two elements share a frequency, and therefore amplify and strengthen each other based on similarity. This functions as a lovely metaphor for social solidarities and collective action that emphasize agreement, and when applied towards creative practices might be considered under the framework of relational aesthetics. Curator Nicholas Bourriaud coined the term in 1998 to describe artworks that take up social relationality and contexts as a creative material, yet the idea has been famously critiqued by art critic Claire Bishop, who points out that his idea of social relationships is too easy. Antagonism, she argues, is crucial to democratic participation, which requires resonances but also dissonance to properly represent a plurality of viewpoints. For Bishop, merely participating (interacting) in a relational exchange is not enough—the encounter must also the quality of the meaning production that takes place. Therefore, a rich encounter must include both resonance and dissonance. While Loopntale use the medium of video games—a media that is often associated with play and pleasure—their interaction design often relies on challenging mechanics that disrupt the player’s ability to smoothly interact with the artwork. For instance, Code and Cartography (2022) requires players to navigate a series of spaces built around non-human perspectives that disrupt human senses of direction, while Layers of Reality: The Cat (2018/2023) symbiotically links the player character and a companion animal as they strive to evacuate an urban disaster. Other works like Ro (2023) feeds player movements and interactions into an AI story generating system that then populates new narratives that feed back into the system, and Manipulating the World (2020) similarly highlights fragmented narrative and unstable truths by using smartphones to stage local multiplayer interactions. This paper hypothesizes that the artists use glitched and disrupted perspectives to create critical and self-reflexive gameplay dynamics (See: Menkman). These tools highlight both the resonances and dissonances of the topics that they explore, including non-human perspectives in urban environments, and the fragmented ways that human storytelling shapes the world around us. The writing will position their work as an important intervention into the homogenized urban spaces that are created by economically driven development and the technocratic urban technologies of the smart city (See: Lindner), using a methodology of close analysis on a selection of case-studies from the artists body of work, alongside interviews with the Loopntale team to understand their thinking and material practice more deeply.