MUKBANG

Boiled eggs, omelette, fried egg, quail egg, ostrich egg, scrambled egg, egg whites;

Susanna Flock incorporates the theme of isolation
in her two-channel video installation Mukbang (2021).
Mukbang is a Korean neologism carried over into English,
a combination of the words for eating and broadcast.
Mukbang refers to a live streaming or video genre, which
has been transmitted for about a decade on Afreeca.tv,
the South Korean equivalent of the live streaming service
Twitch, and YouTube. Mukbangers film themselves while
eating and either answer questions from the viewers, talk
about their lives, or record munching noises ASMR style
with high-calibre microphones. The great interest in these
videos and their ongoing success have repeatedly been explained
as an effect of social isolation, which becomes all
the more painfully evident when eating alone.4 In Susanna
Flock’s Mukbang an anonymised performer speaks “trivial
Internet jabber” (Susanna Flock), underpinned with poetic
nutrition and digestion metaphors – from newsfeed to
video resolution that’s hard to digest. Parallel, she eats all
kinds of different egg dishes while speaking alone in front
of the camera to a fictional audience; she is part of a
community and isolated at the same time.