Ep5. Reality Sandwich: ABC Nameless Timeout

Title: Ep5. Reality Sandwich: ABC Nameless Timeout 
Runtime: 15:44
Director: Ho Bin Kim
Starring: Rega Ayundya Putri 


Reality Sandwich is an ongoing, place-responsive, subaltern video series that unfolds through performative encounters with artists across diverse geographies. Inspired by absurdist gestures and relational practices, each episode begins with a single question—“What does a Reality Sandwich mean to you?”—and evolves through unscripted, daylong collaborations with local practitioners. Filmed in cities such as New York, Gwangju, Shanghai, Bacolod, Seoul, Rotterdam, Jogja, Kawasaki, and Riyadh the series resists conventional documentary structure, favoring instead a poetics of slowness, improvisation, and affective entanglement.

In the fifth episode of Reality Sandwich, titled "ABC Nameless Timeout", Ho Bin Kim collaborates with Rega Ayundya Putri, an artist who mainly works with drawing, from Bandung, Indonesia, to delve into the automatic techniques inspired by the Surrealist movement. The episode unfolds in a purely digital realm, with no physical location anchoring the narrative. Instead, the creative process takes place on a MacBook and iPad, merging analog and digital mediums into a seamless exploration of subconscious creativity.

On one half of the screen, Rega performs automatic drawing, allowing her hand to flow intuitively across a digital canvas, free from conscious control. On the other half, Ho Bin experiments with autonomous writing, using the Mac Terminal interface to generate spontaneous and unfiltered text. The juxtaposition of these parallel processes reveals an intimate dialogue between analog instincts and digital immediacy, reimagining Surrealist methodologies for a contemporary context.

The title, an anagram of "automatic ensembles," reflects the fluidity and randomness inherent in their creative acts. Background noise, carefully designed to alternately harmonize and clash with the visuals, underscores the duality of relevance and randomness. Together, the visual and auditory elements form a layered commentary on the nature of automaticity and its resonance in a modern, mediated world.

Through this immersive, screen-based episode, Reality Sandwich pushes the boundaries of location, medium, and collaboration, offering a profound meditation on creativity in the digital age.