Representations/Machines/Objects as the World: Recent movements in Korean Contemporary Art

Representations/Machines/Objects as the World: 

 

    Recent movements in Korean Contemporary Art^[각주:1]

 

By Jeong Gang-san  

 

(1) The Speed of “Flatness” and Digitariat “in-Itself”^[각주:2]

(...) In what follows, I will discuss the selected works by Korean artists of the recent decade. Let us begin by presenting two concepts that were frequently summoned in the Korean contemporary art scene from the mid-to-late 2010s: “layer” and “flatness.” Here, the implication of layer distances itself from the definition which generally refers to a certain thickness or of a folded state over another.  Rather, the layer in this context indicates a concept frequently employed to describe the works of selected Korean artists, which explore how the digital media and imaging software influence the viewer’s visual and cognitive senses and as a result, the ways in which it alters classification between reality and the ‘experienced world’.  Akin example to this can be the pop-up windows on a computer interface that are overlaid on top of another. In other words, it is a layer devoid of real-world properties like texture or volume, and, for this reason, is able to produce smooth and ethereal images, as well as realistic images with an aid of technical elements; a concept closely linked with the functional characteristic of the Photoshop.  

   Keeping this in mind, let us now take a close look at Home (2017), a media work by Kim Heecheon.  Home has indeed often been discussed in terms of its “layers.” The narrative plot of the work takes the city of Seoul as a backdrop, a Japanese speaking narrator pursues the trail of a character named Erica, a young female detective from Japanese anime. Meanwhile, Erica, is searching for her grandfather who has gone missing. Seoul is rendered in an anime style seen from Erica’s point of view, whereas the narrator’s search unfolds in Seoul as seen through the eye of a camera. The two cityscapes form two overlapping layers, which at times intersect and at other times abruptly separate from one another, until finally, they bleed into each other. Thus, while the viewer follows the narrator around the city, the narrator pursues the trail of Erica, who in her turn pursues the trail of her grandfather. But in the end, they never succeed in locating their respective objects of search. What happened to Erica’s grandfather? Was she able to get any closer to the truth of her grandfather’s disappearance? Where does the narrator’s “pilgrimage” end? Did the viewers see it from the narrator’s or Erica’s point of view? All these questions are left unanswered or, at least, are not answered clearly until the closing scene. In the world of Home, presented as a composition of multiple layers of realities, the viewer has been warned from the outset that there can be no single coherent reality. The narrative frame makes it very clear from the beginning that these separate worlds cannot converge into a single one. Further, Home thus could be read as a representation of a system of floating signifiers in which the signifiers can never firmly land on a signified since the referential relationship between them has broken down.   

   In this sense, Home is reminiscent of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, famously considered a prototype of postmodern novel. The ways in which New York City is portrayed overlaps with Kim’s depiction of Seoul; both cities are represented as a space where all meaning is lost and the sense of reality suspended. Further, like the private investigator in Auster’s novel series, Kim’s characters are engaged in a desperate search for one another.  As the search continues, the real and the fictional world become entangled together and the perplexing imageries begin to appear, as the discrepancy widens between the representation and the object of representation. Not only the characters in the story but the viewers lose their ways within the narrative as well.  The roles played by the “detective” in Auster’s and Kim’s works are also quite similar, as they attempt to assemble some sense of meaning in chaos in order to grasp a “whole” picture, but they fail in the end, only to face the abyss of nothingness awaiting them. 

   In Home, Erica ends up taking her own life; an event that can be interpreted as a gesture that admits that the subject (detective) to comprehend any meaning has become impossible.  In a world where there is nothing to investigate, there is no place for a detective.       Considering that Kim’s and Auster’s invented world bears similarities, which may seem surprising at first, but is separated by three decades of a spatiotemporal gap and two very different geographical spaces.  But in today’s global value chain, the spaces of New York and Seoul are integrated into homogeneity which far exceeds physical distance and any cultural differences, in addition to having both cities to be fundamentally shaped by postmodernity and under its long lasting manifestation since the 60s-70s.^[각주:3] At first glance, Kim's work seems to start with statements on digital communication media and representational devices, and ends within the same arena of focus; however, it is a direct meditation of the condition and the ‘time-space compression’ as the Marxist scholar and economic geographer David Harvey pointed out earlier.^[각주:4]  What stands out here is a certain sense of compressed time and space. In a world that is compressed in several layers, the time and space in which it is located cannot be known; and, the very viewpoint of the subject and the ground on which he/she stands begin to drift. This is precisely where a signifier in his work corresponds with the transition into an autonomous sign system that leads into an infinite expansion of surfaces. In this sense, the “layer” is not being a layer in as digital representational sense.^[각주:5]  His layers are the layers of compressed “surface” of reality, which can never become a reality in its entirety, no matter how many layers are superimposed. 

   Analyzing the concept of 'flatness' will reveal this point more poignantly. Broadly, flatness tends to be assumed, rather narrowly, in terms of technology and media, such as ‘the imagery of a subject’ who perceives the world through (flat) digital screens such as smartphones and PCs. However, behind this understanding lies a premise that the disappearance of underlying hermeneutic dimensions and the “flatness”, indicates the quality of the new imaginary space created by new transportation and communications technology in order to gain the increased circulation of the capital. Furthermore, this term refers to the phenomenon of the ‘extinction of space’ caused by time (which also means the extinction of time itself). “Flatness” is, in short, another way of saying the compression of time and space. It is an allegory that marks the loss of reality as the world that is comprehensible to us, not a loss of reality in a sense that contrasts with the virtual. Importantly, the driving force of flatness is nothing but the accelerated turn-around time of product production, along with the accelerated financial and globalization from image productions, services to consumer goods, financial market, and experience economy. The background to this sense of compression can be summarized as follows: 

“Accelerating the turnover time in products entails paralleled acceleration in exchange with consumption.  Improved systems of communications and information flow, coupled with the rationalization in techniques of distribution (packaging, inventory management, containerization, market feedback), makes it possible to circulate commodities through the market system with greater speed. Electronic banking and plastic money were some of the innovations that improved the speed of the inverse flow of money. Financial services and markets (aided by computerized trading) likewise sped up. As the saying goes, ‘twenty-four hours a very long time’ in global stock markets.”^[각주:6]

   Meanwhile, as was correctly pointed out by an art critic Ahn Jin-guk, technology is not just flat.^[각주:7] What lies beneath the superficial flatness of digital technology and media is not only image editing technologies, transmission devices or virtual reality, but the complex practices and structures related to financial market as well as computer engineering.^[각주:8]  Digitalization and complex mathematical formulas are the keys to the financialization of society and advances in these fields have occurred hand-in-hand with financial innovation.  It is not an accident that over the past 20 - 30 years, there was a parallel growth in the United States finance, insurance, digital software and computer system design. Together, they have replaced manufacturing as the key driver of growth in the US economy, creating enough new jobs to compensate for the losses in manufacturing jobs. The baffling speed at which digital devices circulate information and images thanks to the latest computer programming technology, is the exact mirror image of the speed at which the financial system, closely involved in production at every stage, circulates currency.^[각주:9] Qualities that make the cycle of digital media production ultimately return to its point of origin, such as liquidity, non-permanence, non-repeatability, temporariness and instantaneousness, are unthinkable without the remarkable acceleration in the turnover of capital, brought about by financial globalization. The inconceivable speed at which images, news and other information are updated are also a mirror image of the speed of changes in real life. Employees are laid off almost as fast as they are hired, people frequently change jobs and file bankruptcy, while companies routinely engage in M&A, while the neighborhoods are transformed through mass gentrification. In conclusion, the acceleration of the speed of production, mediated by the financialization of the world economy, is the very condition and context of “flatness.” 

   In the work of media artist Kang Jungsuck’s GAME I: Speedrun Any % PB (2016), such flatness does not manifest itself as images of flatness, but rather as symptoms. This work is a collage of video clips from first-person shooter games that are streamed through a private live streaming platform like, ‘afreecaTV’, and various other game clips the artist has recorded from lesser known sources. The narrator initially shares his “user experiences” of several games with the viewers. But he quickly changes the tone, speaking directly to the viewers as a private broadcaster addressing his audience. What appears here is the constant flow of feedback between it and its anonymous viewers. The instant feedback between the ‘viewers/audience’ and ‘games/video art’ resembles the dynamics and instantaneous process of stock and foreign exchange rate charts that are updated every Nano-second, and how transactional data are transmitted across the world in real time for instant electronic payment, which are then fed back to the market. In other words, revealing this immediacy of interaction is what the work heavily aim for. Moreover, the ‘speed run’ chosen by Kang which takes place in a game, hints at the fact that one of the most salient aspects of our experiences today is the speed at which any and all things circulate through a system.^[각주:10]

Here the characters race toward their destination in the shortest amount of time, at the expense of narratives to experience. The ‘speed run’ is therefore, devoid of any narrative and is composed of a naked plot in which a character rushes toward an arbitrary goal.  In such a format, what matters is the “present” in which the character keeps on running, and as a result, what we witness is a floating senses of “celebration” and of meaninglessness. It is here that Kang’s work paradoxically rejoins what Gilles Deleuze calls “intensity” (intensité), that shows a plain of as a field without any priori meaning and value. For Kang, the divide between the subject and the object, or between the representation and the referent, appears to have long been eliminated by the games and its technology. There is a striking absence of any attempt to form understanding about the world, with only a sense of the present speed; the intensity filling this void.   

   The only theory that can be afforded to a ‘flat being’ is presentism. It is impossible for him to distinguish between the front and the back of the present time, and his spatial movement is not counted as anything more than a certain intensity of speed.  Given this vision, it is interesting to consider how he identifies himself as a “dongsedae”^[각주:11] artist. Here “dongsedae” indicates the “contemporary generation,” intended as a pun on “dongsidae” (contemporary). As pointed out by the sociologist and art critic Seo Dong-jin, the contemporary is a discursive temporality in which there is no other sense of time except the present.^[각주:12] Contemporary is a time that floats in uncertainty without history or foundations; it is a temporality in which both the past and the future have vanished.  In such a sense of time, there is no collective identity that is shared by individual subjects other than the similarity of their phenomenological experiences. In this condition, “generation” would be indeed the only conceivable type of shared identity.  However, such an identity is fictional and does not possess any real substance or space of its own.  

   These aspects offer essential clues to the layer at which his work is located, which arise from a perceptible world that is “supersqueezed.”^[각주:13] The flatness of this world surpasses that of Murakami Takashi’s world of “Superflat”, in which he leveled the high and low cultures by erasing the hierarchies, a term describing the contemporary culture’s depth-lessness. However, Kang’s statement that the world manifests itself as effects of images mediated by games and digital devices, offers no new insight. Since we already know that the reality is organized like a text in the mirror-age system of signs, and reiterates only what is possible and thinkable within the system of signs. Kang has also stressed in various interviews and online posts, the importance of “strategy.”^[각주:14] Although by ‘strategy,’ it may seem like a commentary he is extending from his game participation into aesthetic practices, but in a world where politics is bereft of ideology, this void is filled by game theory-based political engineering. His strategy is possibly adopted by an artist in the late capitalist society for whom life is a continuous series of risky choices he is forced to make for a survival, to minimize opportunity costs and effectively manage his life.^[각주:15]

It is in this vein that Kang’s video art may be said to portray the digitariat as overpowered by augmented virtual images and the bewildering speed of change in the real world. However, the digital world is not just a closed space. As a Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once said, quoting the American author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff, “The digital network that regulates the functioning of our societies as well as their control mechanisms is the ultimate figure of the technical grid that sustains power today and the key tool of “surveillance capitalism”, which appropriates the surplus value people generate through their free activities.^[각주:16]  In a contemporary world, information is power; by supplying personal information to digital intermediaries, we transfer some of our power and this transfer must take place on a contractual basis. In reality, however, our information is routinely stolen from us, unbeknownst to us. At the same time, the digital network is also a communal space it not only controls the movement of all goods but is also a fundamental condition of life, as it mediates and organizes all our actions, experiences and emotions. The digital network is an open space which can be a place of class struggle as well as a space of intervention. However, Kang’s digital space appears to be mostly a self-serving space, and his avatar, absorbed in the thrill of speed, unfortunately seems completely oblivious of its human and social potential.^[각주:17]

 

(2) The Points of Divergence  

   On the other hand, the multimedia artist Ham Yang-ah’s Undefined Panorama 2.0(2019) reveals a kind of contemporary cultural landscape, comprised of images collected on the web and figures shot against a green screen,  The characters in the work perform a sequential act in micromovements of the development process, which ultimately brought about today’s economic system. Skyscrapers are erected to form a financial district and the automated modes of production emerges, while human beings appear between the systems wandering aimlessly. The viewer can assume that the scene is depicted as an allegory of a “system”. What is interesting in Undefined Panorama 2.0 is not so much the relationship between the characters, but the aspects of the accidental composition, which was not under her control.   In short, it can be said that Ham’s work embodies a shift in the methodology of collage work.  Where the Undefined Panorama 2.0 differs from a collage work, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956) by Richard Hamilton, is that it does not methodically follow the rules of perspective to ensure visual balance, or arrange element in such a way as to achieve compositional unity. Furthermore, the scattered elements are not necessarily integrated into the whole to create a sculptural from, as shown in the works of Shin Hak-chul's Modern History of Korea: Suspended Castle (1983). In Ham’s work, the incongruent elements are scattered around randomly, completely deviated from a single point of view, as they are projected in different perspectives. In other words, rather than aiming to generate a single image, the work foregrounds the ‘divergence of perspective’ as its motif. And this complete division and disintegration from a single perspective makes itself a basis for the condition in which materialization of currency and signs can take place in depth. 

   The materialization of “parts” is not a phenomenon just found in Ham’s work as it can be observed in contemporary paintings as well. For example, the loss of a single coherent perspective has become a main motif of Kim Dong-jin’s experiments in 2016; the objects in his paintings are seen from diverse perspectives, while the other works of his illustrate only one object. The beheaded body in his Meaning Is Lost (2016) stands on the foreground, appearing as though completely separated from the background and having no significant relationship with the rest of the painting. In Passive Destruction (2018), human figures, trash and animals are heaped together.  Each of these figures and objects are seen from a different perspective and is completely separated from one another, even though they are placed together to share the same space. The landscape is packed with objects seen from multiple-point perspectives, each with a different vanishing point that ultimately fails to form a cohesive unity. The effects of such an unstable composition without the gaze of a single coherent subject is ominous.  In Kim’s paintings, beings are revealed as fragmented and partial and existing in a non-interconnected worlds.  Therefore, his work not only materializes the vision of today which does not understand how a subject can relate to the whole, but also articulates the state of cognitive hysteria the subject is under.^[각주:18]

 

(3) Materialized Machines  

   From the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and Keynesianism to financial globalization and the materialization of signs which led a dizzying sense of acceleration, “Flatness” is an allegory of time and space compression. In this world where all things change and fluctuate at a vertiginous speed, the compression of time and space entails the loss of bases for any critical analysis and the sense of depth, erasing also the distinction between the subject and the object. The boundary between the real world and images also collapses, with the two increasingly resembling each other. The same thing happens to the boundary between humans and machines. Machines become more like humans as machines are increasingly being materialized. Machines are now autonomous agents capable of explaining human life and are considered organic-like beings or even elevated to the status of humans. The popular discourse around “posthumanism” is a refined expression of this phenomenon. It is also no coincidence that discussions on posthuman subject have been most active in the first world. This phenomenon presuppose the production process sufficiently mechanized for machines to be considered an existential part of humans, and to seem quasi-autonomous.  Modernism, for instance, emerged in an era where there was still a clear divide between humans and machines, as well as a clear difference in their status (the distinction between signs and their referent was similarly clear then). Therefore, in this era, machines were eminently controllable tools as well as promises of comfort and convenience. Today, however, machines are enigmatic “beings” like the humanoid performing a bizarre dance in Ji Hye Yeom’s Future Fever (2018).^[각주:19]

   Artist and choreographer Geum Hyung Jeong’s work stems from such a posthuman context.  Her performances called the ‘puppet play’^[각주:20] are often evocative of sexual act in which machines are heavily anthropomorphized.  Her works are not so much operated as they are ‘touched.’; this is the case with the performance with a vacuum cleaner in Vacuum Cleaner (2007), and fitness machines like treadmill and belt massager in Fitness Guide (2011), as well as the performance with a heart-rate monitor and a mannequin in CPR Practice (2016).       Jeong’s machines are the concretizations of an anti-essentialist view of the “theory of the body” and a decentralized subjectivity. At the same time, her works are also a striking reminder of the increasing human reliance on machines and technology. Just as the media theorist and philosopher Marshall Mcluhan thought, machines were becoming physical extensions of our bodily parts. However, machines increasingly resemble humans not so much because this is the natural course of technological evolution, but because of the mode of production that the society demands it.  After all, the autonomy of machines is a result achieved through meticulous human planning and engineering efforts, the same way as the learning ability of artificial intelligence is entirely dependent on human-engineered software based on complex digital algorithms.  The autonomy of machines are a necessary part of automation, driven by the goal of generating higher profits over a short term by reducing the share of variable capital, which is, simply put, wages, and thereby optimizing capital. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of humans becoming more like machines through the use of prosthetics or machines is likely to be limited or occur in a socio-economic class-dependent manner. For example, a temp worker who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis disease would not be able to afford the equipment Stephen Hawking used. But, for both of them, the change in the mode of production is real and a practical impact on their lives. Once one looks at technology beyond its phenomenological condition, one realizes soon enough that machines becoming part of humans or alternate forms of humans is a mere impression, and that the boundary between the two are, in reality, clearly maintained. When we say that the boundary is blurred in between, we are, in fact, talking about the effect of the social (or historical) reality. This effect is indeed alarming and we will not be able to just merrily dance with a machine. 

   Similar to Jeong’s works, artist Ayoung Kim’s unconsciousness is portrayed in her works as an aesthetic response to the current overflow of the ‘internet-of-things’ - technological objects carrying out performative actions via a network of internet - which is embedded in the ‘first world experience’ through the advanced industrial technologies.  Her Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017) depicts a world in which all inorganic objects are acting as autonomous instrumental agents.  Here, a sculpture of a database is treated as a ‘being.’ The database is personified and is given a prominent role in the narrative as an ‘agent of action.’  Porosity Valley, Portable Holes unfold in an animistic landscape in which the distinction between the subject and the object has been completely erased.  Such a view reminds one of Bruno Latour and his Ontological Dissolution, in which he sees the division between the subject and the object as something entirely illusory and stresses the urgency of abandoning human-centered thinking.  For Kim, what we perceive as an object is not an object, but a ‘thing.’  The fact that Porosity Valley, Portable Holes is a narrative about the immigration of a ‘subject of data’ named Petra across different times and spaces confirms this view.  The problem, however, is that the distinction between the subject and the object is not just an abstract construct which only resides inside human brains.  This division is the internalization or reflection of divides that actually exist in the real world, such as that between humans and nature, between individuals and society, between citizens and the State or between labor and capital.  It is not something that can be simply abolished through a thought conceptual process. As made evident by Chinese surveillance monitors with built-in face scanners or the avid collection of data by Google and Facebook, even a single piece of data, merely worth one kilobyte, is already mediated by our society and far surpasses its material cause. We call these things that are mediated by social reality “objects.”  

In this sense, a thing that perfectly resides outside of  the subject-object dialectic simply does not exist. It would be obscene to suggest, for instance, that the napalm bombs dropped in Gaza Strip should be looked at in the thingness or agency of objects. To put it differently, if the ‘thing-narrator’ in Kim’s work were replaced by a military drone, it would be difficult to sustain its proposition. Porosity Valley, Portable Holes holds together only on condition that the viewer somehow accepts to forget the fact that objects don’t move by themselves, and both of their arrangement and operation are determined by human agents and the relationships that organize and control human societies.^[각주:21]       Even though it is agreeable to perceive Kim’s work as an attempt to bring attention to the extreme objectification of human beings, the proposition that things are their own instrumental agents seems to be lacking in its conviction.  Rather, society operates in ways to make things appear as such.  Meanwhile, there is a parallel between the way in which non-human objects, including technology, are materialized and become regarded as subjects or have a subjecthood transferred to them, the way materialized signs are equated with an autonomous, self-enclosed universe or given the place/status of reality. In other words, the subjectification of objects as a phenomenon of materialization of social relationships follows a similar logical trajectory as the system of signs. 

   In midst of the current dominance of finance/currency structure and the regime of signs in semiotic system of today, the gap between representation and the referent, object and subject, man, machine, and technology are no longer a disputable issue. What matters is that representations, objects or machines have now taken on an independent life as their own agent,  on a path to become the world itself.  However, the political divide in the day-to-day reality that support the conflict between the subject and the object persist until today, assisting to perpetuate their hegemony in seemingly autonomous condition on the surface level. In this regard, the mode of production is the mediator which leaves imprints on all social practices, as well as the enduring signifier.  It is only by recognizing the role of the mode of production that art can begin to cast light on this imminent world that is now our reality.  

 

 

1. This article is Section 4 of a longer article that originally appeared in the December 2019 issue of Critic-Al, titled “Production Mode as an Enduring Signifier: On the Conditions of Contemporary Art Trends.” In the latter, I argue how the collapse of the Bretton Woods system coincided precisely with the fall of modernism by explaining this phenomenon by the transition of the world monetary system, from a gold standard and fixed exchange rates to a fiat currency and floating exchange rates. Here only the section discussing the works of individual artists is provided due to space constraints. [본문으로]
2. This term coined in Poland has been sometimes used to refer to the elite class of an ‘information society’ that controls the collection of information and data. In this article, however, I propose to use the word ‘digitariat’ to designate the masses (or the collective body) that have become an object of rule and exploitation through the collection of digital data by corporations and the State and have been thus brought into an irremediable state of conflict with them. For detail, see Notes 16 and 17 below. [본문으로]
3. Narrators in Paul Auster’s works, particularly in his “City of Glass” and “The Locked Room,” are devoid of any permanent identity as they perceive themselves as a combination of signs without any reality. They either arbitrarily choose these symbols or are in a state of cognitive panic. Meanwhile, faces from face-swap apps that frequently appear in Kim’s works suggest that what was once ‘irreducible faces’ à la Emanuel Levinas—in other words, faces that contain each individual’s intimate identity and expressions—has now become signs. Like Auster, Kim thus introduces us to a world of floating signs. As a mimesis of a fluid system of floating signs, Auster’s and Kim’s works indirectly but ultimately echo the volatility and fluidity of capital. If what we encounter in Auster’s works is mainly the autonomy and reification of writing and language, it is the reification of images that we witness in Kim’s works. However, langue and images are merely two facets of the same reality. [본문으로]
4. David Harvey, The Way of the World , trans. Choi Byeong-du (Seoul: Changbi, 2016) p. 185. [본문으로]
5. Even if used simply as a figure of speech, this can express a floating state and a state without depth. In this sense, the title “Home” strikes as paradoxical if the word ‘home’ is to be understood to mean a stable place or firm foundations supporting life. This is perhaps because in Kim’s world, the word ‘home’ has long ceased to have its meaning à la Heidegger, as the home of being itself. [본문으로]
6. Harvey. op. cit., p.186. [본문으로]
7. Ahn Jin-guk, "Flattened Contemporary Art Floating in Heterotopia Everywhere: Flat, Digital-Internet, Ubiquity, Evil and Abject Machines, Oppressive Will," MisulSegye, Aug. 2019: 141. Ahn seems to equate the negative aspects of technology, imagined and embodied as an abject machine, with technological abyss/structure. However, the real problem is rather the relative position of technology in a broader socioeconomic context. Technology should be seen from a dialectic point of view by paying attention to how it functions in relation to other causative agents in society and the context in which it arises. In other words, digital devices, the internet and software programs can be just as much tools for revolution as abject machines. [본문으로]
8. As has been pointed out by Harvey, today we “experience a rush of images from different spaces almost simultaneously, collapsing the world’s spaces into a series of images,” which is a phenomenon that is essentially the same as how a supranational corporation “operates plants with simultaneous decision-making with respect to financial markets, input costs, quality control and labour process conditions in more than fifty different locations across the globe”: Harvey, op. cit.: 199. [본문으로]
9. Harvey expresses his view that the global circulation of images is embedded in the same reality as the global system of goods circulation in the following words: “The whole world’s cuisine is now assembled in one place, in almost exactly the same way the world’s geographical complexity is nightly reduced to a series of images on a static television screen”: Ibid.: 211. [본문으로]
10. There is a certain parallel between GAME I: Speedrun Any % PB and Kim Heecheon’s Sleigh Ride Chill (2016), a work focused on the sensation of speed created by the rapid succession of images. [본문으로]
11. “As an artist of the same generation, I support their activities, dynamically moving back and forth between artists and operators and between massive multi–player and single person FPS games.”: Kang Jungsuck, “Instance Dungeons of Seoul”, Vanziha, May 27, 2015, https://c11.kr/bqg4, accessed November 29, 2019. [본문으로]
12. Seo Dong-jin, op. cit., pp.12-13. [본문으로]
13. If “superflat” is a concept that recognizes how products of a consumer society causes all cultural goods to become flat and have the same shallow depth, “supersqueezed” may be understood as the next level reached in this process of flattening, as “superflat” makes further progress. [본문으로]
14. “I like to record my life and the lives of people of my generation. By “generation,” I mean the generation as I experience it in my concrete life, not the generation as “constructed” by society or in theoretical discussions. I like the idea that my story resonates with people of my generation. To more clearly explain myself, I could discuss how my generation is related to other generations. While this can certainly be a strategy, it does not interest me personally”: Chae Yeon, “Kang Jungsuck, a Video Memorandum for the Internet Generation,” Art In Culture, December 8, 2014, www.artinculture.kr/online/2463, accessed December 1, 2019; “As we all know, PACK appeared as a strategy to solve space problems with a minimal budget, an extreme one at that (...) It’s a learning process. We ask ourselves why some sell more than others or what those who sell more have in come. That’s what’s so exciting about the market. We learn from one other and revise our strategies as we gain experience. (...) It’s a balancing act between ethical concerns and efficiency considerations. You walk the fine line between the two. If you don’t have an exit strategy, you could end up like these greedy, unethical corporations.” Kang Jungsuck, Sunwoo Kwon, Kim Yun-ik, Gim Ikhyun, Yu Ji-won, Jeong Hong-sik, “Conversation: GOODS 2nd Anniversary ,” July 17, 2018, https://pia-after.com/?p=609, accessed December 1, 2019. [본문으로]
15. There are, at the same time, moments in Kang’s works where one catches glimpses of some sort of utopic impulses. For example, photos of him as a young child suddenly appear in the middle of a speedrun. These photos, perhaps the closest things to a past he can still refer to and linger in, are traces of a wholesome time, which continuously reappear in his works. [본문으로]
16. Slavoj Zizek, "We are already controlled by the digital giants, but Huawei’s expansion will usher in China-style surveillance," Independent, 14 May 2019, https://c11.kr/bzoj, accessed December 2, 2019. [본문으로]
17. Here it could be useful to evoke some examples of works that portray the digitariat as a digitariat “for-itself.” Killing in Umm al-Hiran (2018) by Forensic Architecture deals with a raid on a Bedouin village by the Israeli police and the conflicts that ensued between the Israeli state and local residents of Umm-Hiran. Using digital reenactment devices and 3D modeling systems, Forensic Architecture documents the reality of this event, which is completely different from what was reported through the official announcement by the Israeli government, in the process, presenting a new model for digital class struggle. Meanwhile, Zach Blas protests against biometrical face recognition through his Face Weaponization Suite (2011-2014). This project creates an anonymous face that is impossible to scan by exploiting weaknesses in face recognition technology, such as the tendency to misidentify people with dark skin or women and using techniques that can counter the recognition technology based on alleged physiological features specific to homosexual men and women. These artists reclaim digital spaces, which are so static as to be called the ‘third nature,’ as political spaces. [본문으로]
18. The analysis of the works of Kim Dong-jin, provided here, is an adaptation of sections of a previously published article of mine: “Is a Catastrophe the Promise of New Possibilities?,” Public Art, April, 2019. [본문으로]
19. The fear of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and automation is a case in point, illustrative of our changed relationship to machines. [본문으로]
20. Ahn Soyeon, "The Uncomfortable Play of Action and Gaze in a One-person Puppet Play: Geum Hyung Jeong "(interview), Webzine AROKO, January 18, 2016, https://c11.kr/bwz5, accessed in December 4. [본문으로]
21. The decision to construct the ‘speed bumper’ Bruno Latour talks about, often positively cited as a place where the leveling of all elements of an action, including materials like asphalt and paint and the will of public officials, occurs, is not taken by things themselves, but in government agencies. [본문으로]