Jihoon Kim
Chung Ang University, Film Studies, Faculty Member
- Digital Theory and Culture, Film Theory, Media Theory, Embodiment, Avant-Garde Cinema, Film, Moving images, and 26 moreVideo Installation, Special Effects, Medium specificity, Phenomenology of Temporality, Intermediality, Artists Film and Video, Affect (Cultural Theory), Screen Theory, Mobile and Location-Based Media, East Asian Cinema, Transnational Cinema, N. Katherine Hayles, Film Studies, Contemporary Art, Photography Theory, Philosophy of Film, Digital Arts, Film Aesthetics, Film & Digital Video, Jacques Rancière, Expanded Cinema, Deleuze & Cinema, Artist Film and Video, Still and Moving Images, Video Art, and Film and Video Artedit
- Jihoon Kim is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Chung-ang University. He is the author of Activism and Post-ac... moreJihoon Kim is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Chung-ang University. He is the author of Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981-2022 (Oxford University Press, 2024), Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018/2016). His essays on film theory, experimental film and video, art of the moving image, cinema and contemporary art, digital cinema, and experimental documentary have appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and the anthologies Global Art Cinema: New Histories and Theories (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), among others. Currently he is working on two book projects, Crisis Media: Expanding Media in the Precarious Twenty-First Century, and The Mathemagical Media: On Generative AI, respectively.edit
- Richard Allenedit
Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981--2022 is a new book about nonfiction filmmaking in the private and independent sectors of South Korean cinema and media from the early 1980s to the present day. Drawing on the... more
Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981--2022 is a new book about nonfiction filmmaking in the private and independent sectors of South Korean cinema and media from the early 1980s to the present day. Drawing on the methodologies of documentary studies, experimental film and video, digital cinema, local discourses on independent documentary, and the literature on the social changes of South Korea, author Jihoon Kim historicizes the formation and development of Korean independent documentary in close dialogue with South Korea's social movements. From the 1980s mass anti-dictatorship movement to twenty-first-century labor issues, feminism, LGBT rights, environmental justice, and key events such as the Sewol Ferry disaster and the Candlelight Protests, Kim offers a comprehensive history of Korean social change documentaries in terms of their activist tradition.
At the same time, Kim also maps out the formal and aesthetic divergences of twenty-first-century Korean documentary cinema beyond the activist tradition, while also demonstrating how they have inherited and dynamically renewed the tradition's engagement with contested reality and history. Making the tripartite connections between the socio-political history of South Korea, documentary's aesthetics and politics, and the shifting institutional and technological evolution of documentary production and distribution, the book argues that what is unique about this forty-year history of South Korean documentary cinema is the intensive and compressed coevolution of its two interlocked tendencies: activism and post-activism.
At the same time, Kim also maps out the formal and aesthetic divergences of twenty-first-century Korean documentary cinema beyond the activist tradition, while also demonstrating how they have inherited and dynamically renewed the tradition's engagement with contested reality and history. Making the tripartite connections between the socio-political history of South Korea, documentary's aesthetics and politics, and the shifting institutional and technological evolution of documentary production and distribution, the book argues that what is unique about this forty-year history of South Korean documentary cinema is the intensive and compressed coevolution of its two interlocked tendencies: activism and post-activism.
Research Interests: Documentary (Film Studies), Korean Studies, Digital Cinema, East Asian Cinema, Alternative Media, and 8 moreKorean cinema, South Korean Cinema, Documentary Film, Documentary Filmmaking, Radical Media, Contemporary Korean Society and Culture, Documentary, Experimental Documentary, Visual Anthropology, and Minjung movement in South Korea
Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and... more
Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals.
Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary,' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary,' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research Interests: Animated Documentary, Documentary (Film Studies), Digital Cinema, Documentary Cinema, Media Activism, and 15 moreVideo Installation, Documentary Film, Theory of Documentary, Documentary Filmmaking, Online Video, Documentary, Data Visualization, Virtual Reality, Interactive Documentary, Post-Cinema, New Media and Political Activism, Drones, Media and Social Movements, Forensic Architecture, and COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations... more
Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.
Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.
Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.
Research Interests: Media Studies, Cinema (Celluloid and Digital), Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Film Theory, and 37 moreInstallation Art, Contemporary Art, Intermediality, Hybridity, Digital Cinema, Video Art, Hybridization, Film, Moving images, Film and Video Art, Video Installation, Experimental Film, Film and Media Studies, Still and Moving Images, Postmedia, Digital Editing, Hybrid Media, Film and Photography, Found Footage, Photography and Film, Artists Film and Video, Medium specificity, Structural-Materialist Film, Experimental Film and Video, David Claerbout, Bill Viola, Hito Steyerl, Candice Breitz, Cinema and video, Harun Farocki, Douglas Gordon, Essay Film, Appropriation Art, Sam Taylor Wood, Post Medium Condition, Video Essay, Ken Jacobs, and Moving Image Art
This paper examines the Netflix original serial Squid Game in light of the interdisciplinary framework of critical digital media studies and platform studies. It identifies the show's several key elements applied to the operation and... more
This paper examines the Netflix original serial Squid Game in light of the interdisciplinary framework of critical digital media studies and platform studies. It identifies the show's several key elements applied to the operation and management of the bloodthirsty games that it depicts, particularly the "Red Light, Green Light" game, in terms of what Shoshana Zuboff terms "surveillance capitalism," the parasitic and self-referential capitalist system based on the apparatuses aimed to mine and commodify privatized data. Unveiling how these survival plays disguised as Korean traditional games give expression to how computers and artificial intelligences see and know, I also expand my textual operation of the elements into an underlying factor of the show's global impact, namely, Netflix's platformized spectatorship composed of its personalized recommendations based on its algorithmic data mining, its hyperspecific genre categories that influence the viewers' selection of what they see, its enticing of binge-watching, and its technopsychic construction of voyeurism based on the viewers' screen intimacy.
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This paper discusses Korean artist Nam Hwayeon’s corpus of works based on her artistic research into Choi Seung-hee’s choreography since 2012, focusing on her four-channel video installation Dancer from the Peninsula (2019) and a... more
This paper discusses Korean artist Nam Hwayeon’s corpus of works based on
her artistic research into Choi Seung-hee’s choreography since 2012,
focusing on her four-channel video installation Dancer from the Peninsula
(2019) and a collection of archival, essayistic, and documentation videos
included in her solo exhibition Mind Stream (2020). In so doing, it argues
that Nam’s approach to Choi’s idea and practice of choreography since her
return in 1941 after performances in Europe and North America labels them
as “inter-Asian Dance,” an unfinished project aimed to reinvent East Asian
dance through the multilayered negotiation and amalgamation of its
different regional (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) traditions. Nam’s
intermedial exploration into the heterogeneous body of Choi’s writings,
dance films, and documentation photos, then, is her method of revealing
and reactivating the geopolitical and epistemological, and aesthetic
contradictions of Choi’s method.
her artistic research into Choi Seung-hee’s choreography since 2012,
focusing on her four-channel video installation Dancer from the Peninsula
(2019) and a collection of archival, essayistic, and documentation videos
included in her solo exhibition Mind Stream (2020). In so doing, it argues
that Nam’s approach to Choi’s idea and practice of choreography since her
return in 1941 after performances in Europe and North America labels them
as “inter-Asian Dance,” an unfinished project aimed to reinvent East Asian
dance through the multilayered negotiation and amalgamation of its
different regional (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) traditions. Nam’s
intermedial exploration into the heterogeneous body of Choi’s writings,
dance films, and documentation photos, then, is her method of revealing
and reactivating the geopolitical and epistemological, and aesthetic
contradictions of Choi’s method.
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This paper maps out several contemporary Chinese artists whose work of the moving image, be it installation, on mobile phones, on the app or website, is read as responding to the situation where various screens and their corresponding... more
This paper maps out several contemporary Chinese artists whose work
of the moving image, be it installation, on mobile phones, on the app
or website, is read as responding to the situation where various screens
and their corresponding images or information are connected so deeply
as to blur their previously established ontological and cultural boundaries.
To this end, I expand Francesco Casetti’s idea of ‘hypertopia’, a new
spatial structure in which cinema is unhinged from its traditional place
and relocated into other places and platforms, through Hito Steyerl’s
assertion on the migration of images and data, into, across, and off
screens in the postinternet condition under which the world is perceived
as the sum of the images and data themselves. If Casetti’s hypertopia
points to cinema’s centrifugal relocation to other spaces than the
movie theater, it can be argued that Steyerl’s insight into the postinternet
condition concerns the centripetal folding of images and screens,
including the cinematic, into a screen, so that it is seen as accommodating
them in its inside. Developing this theoretical speculation, I
characterize as ‘internal hypertopia’ an aesthetic trope of moving image
pieces by such artists as aaajiao (aka Xu Wenkai) and Miao Ying.
of the moving image, be it installation, on mobile phones, on the app
or website, is read as responding to the situation where various screens
and their corresponding images or information are connected so deeply
as to blur their previously established ontological and cultural boundaries.
To this end, I expand Francesco Casetti’s idea of ‘hypertopia’, a new
spatial structure in which cinema is unhinged from its traditional place
and relocated into other places and platforms, through Hito Steyerl’s
assertion on the migration of images and data, into, across, and off
screens in the postinternet condition under which the world is perceived
as the sum of the images and data themselves. If Casetti’s hypertopia
points to cinema’s centrifugal relocation to other spaces than the
movie theater, it can be argued that Steyerl’s insight into the postinternet
condition concerns the centripetal folding of images and screens,
including the cinematic, into a screen, so that it is seen as accommodating
them in its inside. Developing this theoretical speculation, I
characterize as ‘internal hypertopia’ an aesthetic trope of moving image
pieces by such artists as aaajiao (aka Xu Wenkai) and Miao Ying.
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This article discusses the applications of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and digital non-linear editing to three documentaries from the 2010s on social events that profoundly impacted contemporary South Korean society, including... more
This article discusses the applications of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and digital non-linear editing to three documentaries from the 2010s on social events that profoundly impacted contemporary South Korean society, including including the Yongsan Massacre of 2009 (Two Doors [Tu kaeŭi mun, Kim Il-ran and Hong Ji-yoo, 2012]) and the Sewol Ferry disaster of 2014 (Intention [Kŭnal, pada, Kim Ji-yeong, 2018] and Ghost Ship [Yuryŏngsŏn, Kim Ji-yeong, 2020]). It argues for two significant contributions of the films to Korean nonfiction filmmaking and its commitment to the Korean society’s contested reality and politics. First, the films attest to the formal and aesthetic expansion of documentary practice in the twenty-first century—and, by extension, to its production of reality and truth—in ways that are irreducible to the verité mode of the 1980s and 90s. And second, more than asserting the disavowal of the objective truth, the digital images and techniques employed in the films are used to scientifically investigate and reconstruct the events beyond the camera’s record for the sake of unveiling their truths. In order to demonstrate these two points, I examine the uses of digital imagery and technique in the three films in light of how they mobilize what Mark J. P. Wolf has called the “subjunctive mode,” a subgenre of the documentary “concerned with what could be, would be, or might have been.”
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This article discusses several documentary films since the 2010s that portray the place and landscape related to Korea’s social reality or a personal or collective memory of its past, classifying their common trope as the ‘audiovisual... more
This article discusses several documentary films since the 2010s that portray the place and landscape related to Korea’s social reality or a personal or collective memory of its past, classifying their common trope as the ‘audiovisual turn.’ The trope refers to the uses of the poetic and aesthetic techniques to highlight the visual and auditory qualities of the images that mediate the landscape or place. This article argues that the films’ experiments with these techniques mark formal and epistemological breaks with the expository and participatory modes of the traditional Korean activist documentary, as they create an array of Deleuzian time-images in which a social place or natural landscape is reconfigured as the cinematic space liberated from a linear time and layered with the imbrication of the present and the past. The images, however, are read as updating the activist documentary’s commitment to politics and history, as they renew the viewer’s sensory and affective awareness of the place and landscape and thereby render them to be ruins.
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Based on a nuanced understanding of immersion and sense of presence (SoP) as two key aesthetic effects that the application of virtual reality (VR) to cinema is believed to innovate, this paper develops the concept of synthetic vision as... more
Based on a nuanced understanding of immersion and sense of presence (SoP) as two key aesthetic effects that the application of virtual reality (VR) to cinema is believed to innovate, this paper develops the concept of synthetic vision as fundamental to understanding the visual experience of VR media, particularly VR documentaries. The concept contends that viewers' experience in VR is based on two visions that seemingly contradict each other: first, a disembodied vision that transports them to a simulated world, and second, an embodied vision guaranteed by the freedom to control kinesthetic movement and direction of gaze. This serves to advance the idea that immersion and SoP are not unified but rather multifaceted concepts premised on a nuanced understanding of the varying relationships between the technological system of VR, its media content, and its user. For the concept of synthetic vision points to the paradoxical coexistence of viewers' presence in the virtual world and their structural absence from the world that lays the groundwork for their immersive experience. By classifying three generic categories of contemporary VR documentaries (humanitarian and journalism documentaries, documentaries about nature, travel, and museum visits, and documentaries based on the reenactment of conscious or mnemonic realities), and by examining the aesthetic and ethical underpinnings VR brings to each of them, I argue that it hinges upon what kind of cinematic conventions and genres are remediated to determine the effective synthesis of the two visions. The varying effects of synthetic vision in the three subgenres of VR documentary stress that immersion and SoP have different political and ethical consequences of media witnessing. In the conclusion, I recapitulate multiple implications that the concept
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* For the essay's originally published online version, please visit https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/1060/ Addressing the uses of data visualizations, vlogs, and drone imagery to document and investigate the uncertain... more
* For the essay's originally published online version, please visit https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/1060/
Addressing the uses of data visualizations, vlogs, and drone imagery to document and investigate the uncertain realities of the COVID-19 emergency, this paper contextualize them in terms of ‘expanded documentary,’ an array of non-standardized nonfiction artifacts and practices enabled by the new digital media and platforms of the 21st century.
Addressing the uses of data visualizations, vlogs, and drone imagery to document and investigate the uncertain realities of the COVID-19 emergency, this paper contextualize them in terms of ‘expanded documentary,’ an array of non-standardized nonfiction artifacts and practices enabled by the new digital media and platforms of the 21st century.
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This article presents a critical overview on how the formal and aesthetic variations of the Korean documentary cinema in the twenty-first century have differed from and simultaneously renewed the activist, cinéma-vérité tradition of... more
This article presents a critical overview on how the formal and aesthetic variations of the Korean documentary cinema in the twenty-first century have differed from and simultaneously renewed the activist, cinéma-vérité tradition of Korean independent documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s. These variations encompass personal documentaries and essay films, experimental documentaries on landscapes, documentaries extensively using archival materials, digitally enabled documentaries, and intersections of documentary and contemporary art. Mapping these variations onto five categories, I use the term “post-verité” to theorize these new constellations of aesthetics and politics. By departing from the epistemological and aesthetic assumptions of its predecessor, the Korean documentary in the twenty-first century has formed the most vibrant screenscape for cinematic experimentations. At the same time, I argue that these experimentations have also updated the activist tradition’s political and ethical commitment to history and politics by reinventing the ways of engaging with the traumas of modernization and the new problems of neoliberalized contemporary Korea.
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Bridging between documentary cinema and media installations that focus on portraying the traumatized memories of the marginalized subjects who experienced national or postcolonial violence, Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon is... more
Bridging between documentary cinema and media installations that focus on portraying the traumatized memories of the marginalized subjects who experienced national or postcolonial violence, Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon is acclaimed both locally and internationally. Investigating his feature-length films Jeju Prayer (2012) and Factory Complex (2014), as well as his latest multi-screen installation pieces Reincarnation (2015) and Things That Do Us Part (2017), I argue two aesthetic forms variously employed in his work – landscape imagery and reenactment – serve as rich supplements to audiovisual testimonies to overcome the impasse of documenting the traumatic memories and experiences of subjects affected by violence. While Im renders the seemingly indifferent present landscape as the ruin haunted by the remainders of pain, loss, and death, he also employs various forms of reenactment to reconstruct affectively and fantasmatically the painful experiences of the subjects. I argue his careful orchestration of testimonies, landscapes, and reenactments makes his documentary works significant to “decolonizing trauma theory” in that it leads to a larger narrative of trauma and violence that both respects the specificity of traumatized individuals and creates their commonalty across different times and geopolitical contexts, one that I call the translocal or trans-historical narrative.
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This paper examines the ways in which several Korean documentary films in the 2010s use archival footage of the distant or recent histories of Korea. It argues that the films testify to what I call the ‘post-vérité’ turn of recent Korean... more
This paper examines the ways in which several Korean documentary films in the 2010s use archival footage of the distant or recent histories of Korea. It argues that the films testify to what I call the ‘post-vérité’ turn of recent Korean documentaries: an array of experimentations with the forms and aesthetics of documentary, which are distinguished from the vérité style—an activist tradition of Korean independent documentary—but also inherit and renew its commitment to politics and history. As a subcategory of the ‘post-vérité’ turn, I characterize the recent Korean documentary’s increasing uses of found footage as the ‘archival turn’ and argue for its two implications. First, this term suggests that the extensive uses of found footage allow filmmakers to develop other modes of documentary filmmaking—compilation documentary, essay film, and metahistorical documentary—besides the participatory mode distinguished by the supremacy of the camera’s immediate, on-the-spot witnessing of reality. Second, this term indicates that Walter Benjamin’s idea of historiography is shared by the filmmakers, as their appropriation, reassessment, and manipulation of found footage are motivated by the desire to endow it with a new historical perspective in relation to their engagement with the politics of the present.
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Can digital platforms such as the database and the virtual museum offer new possibilities of the archive? What concept of the archive can be pursued by contemporary practices that are appropriate and explore the digital forms in order to... more
Can digital platforms such as the database and the virtual museum offer new possibilities of the archive? What concept of the archive can be pursued by contemporary practices that are appropriate and explore the digital forms in order to engage with the radical transformation of the experience and memory of older arts and media? This article seeks to address these questions by investigating Ouvroir (2008), a Second Life virtual museum created by Chris Marker. The author argues that Marker's model of the virtual museum allows for the dialectic of the archive as marked by both new possibilities for documentation and memory and its inherent room for loss, fragmentation, and disorientation. This dialectical concept of the archive challenges not simply the traditional concept of the archive that presumes the totality of preservation and the systematic classification of information but also the utopian account of the virtual museum or archive, according to which its simulation, free accessibility, and universal connectivity contribute to overcome the physical museum or archive.
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Jihoon Kim discusses in his "Postinternet Art of the Moving Image and the Disjunctures of the Global and the Local: Kim Hee-cheon and Other Young East Asian Artists” ways in which moving image works by East Asian artists Chen Chen-yu, Lu... more
Jihoon Kim discusses in his "Postinternet Art of the Moving Image and the Disjunctures of the Global and the Local: Kim Hee-cheon and Other Young East Asian Artists” ways in which moving image works by East Asian artists Chen Chen-yu, Lu Yang, and Kim Hee-cheon engage the postinternet condition, a situation in which the internet and digital technologies are no longer perceived as new but as fundamentally restructuring our subjectivity and world. By opening a platform for intersecting the postinternet condition with a discourse on globalization, which has yet to be fully discussed in the existing Western-centric discourses on postinternet art, a key specificity of the postinternet art of the moving image by contemporary East Asian artists lies in its attempts to create spreadable images of multiple political, aesthetic, and cultural layers. The artists’ rigorous aesthetic juxtapositions of virtual and physical spaces should be seen not simply as indicating the artists’ cosmopolitan postinternet sensibilities but also as expressing their engagement with the contradictory and unstable disjunctures of the global and local in contemporary East Asia.
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Drawing on Stephen Prince's concept of “perceptual realism”' to examine the use of computer-generated images in two megahit Korean blockbuster films of 2014, The Admiral: Roaring Currents and Ode to My Father, this article underlines... more
Drawing on Stephen Prince's concept of “perceptual realism”' to examine the use of computer-generated images in two megahit Korean blockbuster films of 2014, The Admiral: Roaring Currents and Ode to My Father, this article underlines these films' impression of reality as the nexus of the complex intersections between Korea's national history and identity, and the industrial and aesthetic transnationality of Korean popular cinema.
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This article argues that video technology plays a decisive role in Godard’s double movement toward the “cinematic” and the “post-cinematic” as demonstrated in his videographic essay Histoire(s) du Cinéma. It claims that Godard’s... more
This article argues that video technology plays a decisive role in Godard’s double movement toward the “cinematic” and the “post-cinematic” as demonstrated in his videographic essay Histoire(s) du Cinéma. It claims that Godard’s videographic refashioning of cinema in the technical, ontological, and philosophical manners necessarily involves bringing cinema to its limits. As this article will discuss in the ensuing two parts, video’s material and technical elements transform the methods of cinematic montage and the ontological status of the films extracted from disparate sources extensively. As a result, video in Histoire(s) ultimately serves both as a tool for the postcinematic expansion of montage and as a “synthesizer” of discrete images (films, paintings, photographs) and soundtracks whose affiliated media are originally distinct from each other.
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Countering Babette Mangolte’s and D. N. Rodowick’s assertion that it is diffi cult to express duration in digital cinema, this article argues that an array of micro-level manipulations of the lens-based image with digital technology—color... more
Countering Babette Mangolte’s and D. N. Rodowick’s assertion that it is diffi
cult to express duration in digital cinema, this article argues that an array of micro-level manipulations of the lens-based image with digital technology—color correction, digital dissolve, and extreme slow motion, all of which I call “digital micromanipulations”—are capable of deepening the presentation and exploration of cinematic duration and temporality. Drawing on the recent digital films of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, and Thom Andersen, I demonstrate that the directors’ different uses of digital micromanipulations should be viewed as extending their experimental approaches to documentary time and aesthetics in the celluloid-based cinema.
cult to express duration in digital cinema, this article argues that an array of micro-level manipulations of the lens-based image with digital technology—color correction, digital dissolve, and extreme slow motion, all of which I call “digital micromanipulations”—are capable of deepening the presentation and exploration of cinematic duration and temporality. Drawing on the recent digital films of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, and Thom Andersen, I demonstrate that the directors’ different uses of digital micromanipulations should be viewed as extending their experimental approaches to documentary time and aesthetics in the celluloid-based cinema.
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This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within 'post-cinematic' conditions. Since the mid-1990s, the... more
This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within 'post-cinematic' conditions. Since the mid-1990s, the formal and experiential components of the cinema in the 20th century have increasingly become displaced from the traditional apparatus and site and 'relocated' within new technological and institutional platforms, and museums have become one of those new sites for content consumption. The paper discusses both the limitations and possibilities of the exhibition as it is considered to represent the migration of cinema into the art museum context as one salient phenomenon of post-cinematic conditions. The Kubrick exhibition is explored to uncover the underlying tensions of the 'exhibition of cinema' as a key trend of major international museums, between the movie theater as black box and the art museum's exhibition space as white cube. It considers the difference between these two institutional platforms and their conceptions of objecthood, artifact and the temporal economy of the viewing experience. The author argues that this event succeeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying three constants of cinema: film auteur, cinematic apparatus, and intermediality. The ambivalence demonstrates that while the museum's exhibition of cinema inevitably removes some of its ontological essences, it also preserves and revivifies others.
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This article discusses digital three-dimensional animations by Miao Xiaochun and Lu Yang. The two artists’ works are commonly based on the expressive possibilities of digital software and virtual space, such as non-naturalistic rendering... more
This article discusses digital three-dimensional animations by Miao Xiaochun and Lu Yang. The two artists’ works are commonly based on the expressive possibilities of digital software and virtual space, such as non-naturalistic rendering of objects, vertical and multiple perspectives distinct from the linear perspective of traditional painting and photography, and the virtual camera's freedom of omnidirectional and gravitation-free movements. While this article provides in-depth analyses of the works in terms of how these expressive possibilities allow Miao and Lu to create the spatially and temporally complex worlds in which past, present and future dynamically coexist and interact with one another, I also argue that both artists are different in their technical and conceptual approaches to digital technology and its impact on reality and subjectivity. To demonstrate these differences, I draw on the ideas of ‘digital’ and ‘postdigital’ art: whereas digital art is marked by the ambivalent tendency to exploit the new properties of the digital while also seeking the ways of translating the forms and techniques of traditional arts in the tools and space of the computer, postdigital art means a variety of artistic responses to the situation that the internet and digital technologies are no longer perceived as new but as fundamentally restructuring our subjectivity and world.
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This article examines a series of video works by Okin Collective, a group of three Korean artists (Jin Shiu, Kim Hwayong, and Yi Joungmin) who have over the past few years been productively concerned with an array of political, social,... more
This article examines a series of video works by Okin Collective, a group of three Korean artists (Jin Shiu, Kim Hwayong, and Yi Joungmin) who have over the past few years been productively concerned with an array of political, social, and cultural issues from both local and global perspectives. Such issues include the process of urban redevelopment in Seoul, the global environmental crisis, utopian aspirations in the neoliberal economy, and the Korean authorities' ideological control of citizenship. The collective's imperative to engender sensory and affective engagement with these issues has led them to produce several video works derived from their open-form performances. I argue that the videos can be read as projects that foreground and explore an array of interrelated ideas or issues revolving around collectivity. Taking individuals' performative acts as their nodal point, the videos demonstrate open forms that are produced through and resonate with these individuals' collective participation. Presenting both the catastrophic situation of contemporary society and utopian aspirations, the videos present the “space of the common” that is made by participants' performative practices. These performances produce a common affective understanding of the present and a shared envisioning of the future as the overlapping temporalities of collectivity.
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Research Interests: Cinema (Celluloid and Digital), Intermediality, Digital Cinema, Film & Digital Video, Digital Archives, and 9 moreJean-Luc Godard, Studies in intermediality; contemporary theatre; films about Shakespeare, Chris Marker, Documentary, Experimental Documentary, Visual Anthropology, Hybrid Images, Hito Steyerl, Digital Media and Memory, Harun Farocki, and Essay Film
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Examining what the author calls ‘small-screen panoramas’, a set of software-based digital panorama services that provide the production and navigation of panoramic photographs available for users’ experience on small-screen devices... more
Examining what the author calls ‘small-screen panoramas’, a set of software-based digital panorama services that provide the production and navigation of panoramic photographs available for users’ experience on small-screen devices (laptops, mobile phones, tablet PCs), this article argues that the panoramas’ algorithmic view and movement signal an emerging visual regime that remediates
the scale and mobility of their pre-digital predecessors. Digital compositing technique reinstates the sensory and epistemological conditions of the panoramic, ‘tourist’ gaze of modernity as it combines
discrete pictures of a location into a 360-degree seamless visual field that proffers an immersive form of spectatorship. At the same time, however, the applications undermine the visual field and spectatorship of the traditional panorama as their technological features activate the embodied, material, and contingent aspects of mobile media spectatorship: the portability of laptops and mobile phones and the applications’ algorithmic streamlining of 2D photographs. These examples, the author claims, demonstrate that, despite the applications’ efforts to create seamless virtual 3D images, they lead to the paradoxical coexistence of the animated and the static, of the immersive and the miniaturized, and the embodied and the disembodied.
the scale and mobility of their pre-digital predecessors. Digital compositing technique reinstates the sensory and epistemological conditions of the panoramic, ‘tourist’ gaze of modernity as it combines
discrete pictures of a location into a 360-degree seamless visual field that proffers an immersive form of spectatorship. At the same time, however, the applications undermine the visual field and spectatorship of the traditional panorama as their technological features activate the embodied, material, and contingent aspects of mobile media spectatorship: the portability of laptops and mobile phones and the applications’ algorithmic streamlining of 2D photographs. These examples, the author claims, demonstrate that, despite the applications’ efforts to create seamless virtual 3D images, they lead to the paradoxical coexistence of the animated and the static, of the immersive and the miniaturized, and the embodied and the disembodied.
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Research Interests: Film Studies, Speculative Realism, Ecocriticism, Environmental Sustainability, Art And Ecology, and 12 moreObject Oriented Ontology, Environmental Humanities, Ecomedia Studies, Anthropocene studies, Cinema Studies, Material Ecocriticism, Anthropocene, Art and ecology/ environment, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Ecocinema, Energy Humanities, and Contemporary Art and Ecology
As the first installment of the year-round courses entitled "Crisis Media," this seminar aims to examine the complicated ideas of media in times of various planetary and regional crises encompassing climate change, environmental... more
As the first installment of the year-round courses entitled "Crisis Media," this seminar aims to examine the complicated ideas of media in times of various planetary and regional crises encompassing climate change, environmental transformation, energy and supply chain crisis, extraction and exhaustion, post-truth uncertainty, automation of labor, thought, and sensibility, and civil wars and global protests. We will open up the forum for pondering possible intersections between those political, environmental, social, epistemological, and ontological crises on varying scales and the assumptions of what media are: what roles various facilities, visible/invisible machines, things, and natural components play in creating and propagating these crises?; how do they expand or alter the traditional definitions of media, which encompass their formations, dispositifs, operations, agencies, and the subjects which they construct and which use them?; does a new reconfiguration of media in sync with these crises mark a 'turning point,' an etymological origin of the word 'crisis,' in the historical phases of media as Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan have proposed?; are the media no more than the cause of these crises?; how these crises are mediated?; and how the media are used to control and overcome the crises? By tackling these questions in relation to the multivalent relationships between crisis and media, students will formulate the idea of 'crisis media' in different guises and with various configurations and instances. For this desired effect, the seminar will read and discuss recent scholarly works on the three subtopics, media infrastructures, computational media, and (civil) war and media, all of which are associated with a set of new technological objects or processes and techno-social-cultural assemblages and the crises with which they are concerned or connected.
Research Interests: Social movements and revolution, Ecomedia Studies, Ethnic Conflict and Civil War, War and the Media, Digital Media Studies, and 10 moreArtifical Intelligence, Automation, Infrastructure, Critical Infrastructures, Data Center, Environmental Crisis, Media Infrastructure, Machine Learning Big Data, Crisis Ecologica Global, and Computational Media
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Research Interests: Avant-Garde Cinema, Animated Documentary, Documentary (Film Studies), Documentary Film, Interactive Documentary, and 7 moreNew Documentary Movement, Documentary and ethnographic filmmaker, Ethics and Documentary, Documentary, Experimental Documentary, Visual Anthropology, Documentary, digital media, interactive digital communication, Auto/biography, Documentary, Politics of Representation, and Documentary Practices In the Arts
course syllabus for Avant-garde FIlm, Video, Installation Art (graduate program)
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Research Interests: Game studies, Media Archaeology, Digital Humanities, Film Theory, Digital Media, and 14 moreMobile Media, Documentary (Film Studies), Digital Cinema, Embodiment, Media Arts, Software Studies, Social Media, Interactive and Digital Media, Transmedial Storytelling, Media Convergence, Film Aesthetics, Digital Animation, 3D Cinema, and Mobile and Location-Based Media
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Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group led by architect and theorist Eyal Weizman, has employed architectural techniques and digital technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights... more
Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group led by architect and theorist Eyal
Weizman, has employed architectural techniques and digital technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. This paper examines Forensic Architecture’s video documentations not simply in terms of a recent remarkable case of the ‘documentary turn’ in contemporary art, but also in terms of the practice that has expanded documentary cinema’s political, aesthetic, and technical possibilities. In so doing, it argues that the group’s practice is a hybrid activist documentary practice that creatively combines existing modes of documentary film, and that its documentations based on various digital manipulations aim to construct a countervisuality that copes with the crisis of the evidentiary value of the photographic image that caused the idea of ‘documentary uncertainty’, and with a new governmentality of truth and fact that is increasingly afforded by new digital vision machines.
Weizman, has employed architectural techniques and digital technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. This paper examines Forensic Architecture’s video documentations not simply in terms of a recent remarkable case of the ‘documentary turn’ in contemporary art, but also in terms of the practice that has expanded documentary cinema’s political, aesthetic, and technical possibilities. In so doing, it argues that the group’s practice is a hybrid activist documentary practice that creatively combines existing modes of documentary film, and that its documentations based on various digital manipulations aim to construct a countervisuality that copes with the crisis of the evidentiary value of the photographic image that caused the idea of ‘documentary uncertainty’, and with a new governmentality of truth and fact that is increasingly afforded by new digital vision machines.
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This paper investigates a group of films and video installations that collect and reassemble citizens’ videos of their lives or voices posted or live-streamed on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, characterizing them as ‘online... more
This paper investigates a group of films and video installations that collect and reassemble citizens’ videos of their lives or voices posted or live-streamed on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, characterizing them as ‘online ethnographic compilation.’ Encompassing Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament (2009) and its related projects, as well as films by Dominic Gagnon, Ossama Mohammed, and Zhu Shengze, online ethnographic compilation draws viewers’ attention to user-generated videos as a remarkable media of various individuals’ self-expressions and connectivity, and to the political, economic, cultural, and infrastructural dimensions of networked platforms where the videos are circulated. While contextualizing it within the larger tradition of compilation documentary, I argue that online ethnographic compilation produces what I call the ‘archive of the political commons,’ an archive characterized by the collective assemblage of individual user-generated videos that is based on the collection and selection of their aesthetic, affective, and discursive commonality, as it is based on and often critically intervenes in the two ambivalent aspects of participatory culture: first, the practice reveals not simply social media platforms’ emancipatory possibility for users’ interactive, connective, and participatory subjectivity but also the precariousness of both their life and the platforms to which they are invited to connect; and second, given the social promoted by the platforms implicates users’ atomized individuation, the practice reorganizes individual video’s expressions and voices into the sense and memory of collectivity while also preserving their heterogeneity.
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이 논문은 1990년대 이후 지금까지 전지구적으로 활발히 제작 및 전시되어온 다큐멘터리 영상 설치작품을 다큐멘터리의 ‘확장된 디스포지티프(expanded dispositif)’로 개념화하고, 이러한 작품의 미학적, 기술적 전략 및 관람자의 경험을 이주(relocation) 및 재분배(redistribution)이라는 개념을 통해 이론화한다. 토마스 앨새서, 레이몽 벨루, 에이드리언 마틴 등의 디스포지티프 개념을... more
이 논문은 1990년대 이후 지금까지 전지구적으로 활발히 제작 및 전시되어온 다큐멘터리 영상 설치작품을 다큐멘터리의 ‘확장된 디스포지티프(expanded dispositif)’로 개념화하고, 이러한 작품의 미학적, 기술적 전략 및 관람자의 경험을 이주(relocation) 및 재분배(redistribution)이라는 개념을 통해 이론화한다. 토마스 앨새서, 레이몽 벨루, 에이드리언 마틴 등의 디스포지티프 개념을 발전시킨‘확장된 디스포지티프’란 갤러리 영상 설치작품을 구성하는 이질적인 기술적, 미학적 요소들의 배치를 뜻하며, 이러한 배치는 표준적 다큐멘터리 영화와 연결되면서도 이와는 동일하지 않은 다수의 다큐멘터리 무빙 이미지 표현을 낳는다. 프란체스코 카세티가 포스트-시네마 현상을 설명하는 키워드 중 하나로 제시한 ‘이주’는 다큐멘터리 영상 설치작품을 영화의 구성요소가 영화관을 벗어나 갤러리에옮겨진 것으로 간주할 때 적용되는 개념으로, 이러한 작품에서 영화적 경험이 일정 부분 보존되는 동시에 그 장소 또는 인터페이스에 고유한 새로운 경험과 행위들이 부가되는 이중적 작용을 가리킨다 ‘재분배’는 자크 랑시에르가 ‘감각적인것의 분배(distribution of the sensible)’를 확장한 개념으로, 다큐멘터리 영상 설치작품의 물질적, 기술적, 건축적 요소가 기존 극장 기반 다큐멘터리에서 픽션과 사실을 구별하는 체계는 물론 다큐멘터리를 구성하는 형식적, 감각적, 수사적 요소들을 변형하고 재배열한다는 점을 뜻한다. 이 논문은 다큐멘터리 영상 설치작품에서 이주와 재분배의 작용이 적용되는 국면을 다큐멘터리 영화의 주요 양식, 아카이브 자료 및 사운드 같은 구성성분, 이주 및 디아스포라와 같은 주제 등의 사례에서 살펴보고 이를 뒷받침하는 작품들을 분석한다.
This paper characterizes documentary moving image installations produced and exhibited globally since the 1990s as documentary’s ‘expanded dispositif,’ while also theorizing their aesthetic and technical strategies and their viewers’ experiences in terms of the ideas of ‘relocation’ and ‘redistribution.’ Developed from the ideas of Thomas Elsaesser, Raymond Bellour, and Adrian Martin, documentary’s ‘expanded dispositif’ refers to the installations’ arrangement of heterogeneous technical and aesthetic elements, which results in the various moving image expressions that are linked to the theater-based standardized documentary cinema but at the same time not totally identical to it. The concept of relocation, originally coined by Francesco Casetti, points to the double operation of documentary installations through which some elements of the standardized documentary cinema are maintained while other material, technical, and spectatorial elements inherent in the installations are added. The idea of redistribution, derived from Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible,’ refers to the ways in which the material, technical, and architectural elements of documentary installations, including their screens, exhibition space, and audiovisual devices, transform and rearrange not simply the system of distinguishing fact and fiction in documentary cinema but also its formal, sensory, and rhetorical components. Investigating an array of artworks, this paper illuminates how the operations of dislocation and redistribution are applied to the modes of documentary practice, its audiovisual elements, and its themes such as migration and diaspora.
This paper characterizes documentary moving image installations produced and exhibited globally since the 1990s as documentary’s ‘expanded dispositif,’ while also theorizing their aesthetic and technical strategies and their viewers’ experiences in terms of the ideas of ‘relocation’ and ‘redistribution.’ Developed from the ideas of Thomas Elsaesser, Raymond Bellour, and Adrian Martin, documentary’s ‘expanded dispositif’ refers to the installations’ arrangement of heterogeneous technical and aesthetic elements, which results in the various moving image expressions that are linked to the theater-based standardized documentary cinema but at the same time not totally identical to it. The concept of relocation, originally coined by Francesco Casetti, points to the double operation of documentary installations through which some elements of the standardized documentary cinema are maintained while other material, technical, and spectatorial elements inherent in the installations are added. The idea of redistribution, derived from Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible,’ refers to the ways in which the material, technical, and architectural elements of documentary installations, including their screens, exhibition space, and audiovisual devices, transform and rearrange not simply the system of distinguishing fact and fiction in documentary cinema but also its formal, sensory, and rhetorical components. Investigating an array of artworks, this paper illuminates how the operations of dislocation and redistribution are applied to the modes of documentary practice, its audiovisual elements, and its themes such as migration and diaspora.
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이 논문은 최근 10년 간 한국 독립영화 비평에서 주목을 받아 온 정재훈과 임철민의 영화를 ‘디지털 실험 다큐멘터리(digital experimental documentary)’의 관점에서 논의한다. 여기서 실험 다큐멘터리는 영화 제작의 목적과 양식 및 영화의 상영에 있어 서로 구별되는 두 범주로 인식되어 왔던 다큐멘터리와 실험영화의 생산적 교차와 상호 영향을 바탕으로 한 영화적 실천의 결과물을 가리킨다. 이렇게 볼 때... more
이 논문은 최근 10년 간 한국 독립영화 비평에서 주목을 받아 온 정재훈과 임철민의 영화를 ‘디지털 실험 다큐멘터리(digital experimental documentary)’의 관점에서 논의한다. 여기서 실험 다큐멘터리는 영화 제작의 목적과 양식 및 영화의 상영에 있어 서로 구별되는 두 범주로 인식되어 왔던 다큐멘터리와 실험영화의 생산적 교차와 상호 영향을 바탕으로 한 영화적 실천의 결과물을 가리킨다. 이렇게 볼 때 디지털 실험 다큐멘터리는 디지털 테크놀로지의 다양한 활용이 이와 같은 두 범주의 혼종적인 교환을 가동시키는 데 결정적인 역할을 수행하는 영화적 실천으로 정의된다. 정재훈(<호수길> [2009], <도돌이 언덕에 난기류> [2017])과 임철민(<프리즈마> [2013], <야광> [2018])의 영화적 실천을 디지털 실험 다큐멘터리의 관점에서 분석함으로써 이 논문은 한편으로는 이들의 영화가 필름 영화와는 다른 디지털 테크놀로지의 미학적, 형식적, 경험적 새로움을 탐구하면서도 다른 한편으로는 이와 동시에 이 테크놀로지의 매체-특정적 특징들을 영화사에서의 실험 다큐멘터리의 형태, 기법 및 관습과 연결한 결과로 볼 수 있음을 밝힌다.
This paper investigates the films of Jung Jae-hoon and Lim Cheol-min, which have received notable critical reception in Korean independent film criticism during the last decade, in terms of digital experimental documentary. Here, experimental documentary refers to a kind of films predicated upon the productive intersection and cross-influence of experimental film and documentary, two categories that have largely been regarded as mutually distinct or exclusive in the light of the purpose and mode of film practice, as well as of film exhibition. In this sense, digital experimental documentary can be defined as a set of films in which digital technology plays a vital role in facilitating the hybridized exchange between experimental cinema and documentary. Through the lens of digital experimental documentary, this paper demonstrates that the films of Jung (Hosu-gil [2009] and Turbulence at Dodoli Hill [2017]) and Lim (Prisma [2013] and Glow Job [2018]) explore digital technology’s formal, aesthetic, and experiential novelties while also linking its medium-specific features to the forms, conventions, and techniques of experimental documentary that have been developed in the history of cinema.
This paper investigates the films of Jung Jae-hoon and Lim Cheol-min, which have received notable critical reception in Korean independent film criticism during the last decade, in terms of digital experimental documentary. Here, experimental documentary refers to a kind of films predicated upon the productive intersection and cross-influence of experimental film and documentary, two categories that have largely been regarded as mutually distinct or exclusive in the light of the purpose and mode of film practice, as well as of film exhibition. In this sense, digital experimental documentary can be defined as a set of films in which digital technology plays a vital role in facilitating the hybridized exchange between experimental cinema and documentary. Through the lens of digital experimental documentary, this paper demonstrates that the films of Jung (Hosu-gil [2009] and Turbulence at Dodoli Hill [2017]) and Lim (Prisma [2013] and Glow Job [2018]) explore digital technology’s formal, aesthetic, and experiential novelties while also linking its medium-specific features to the forms, conventions, and techniques of experimental documentary that have been developed in the history of cinema.
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This paper characterizes the wide-ranging uses of archival of found footage in the contemporary Korean documentary since the 2010s as the ‘archival turn,’ while also arguing for its two implications. First, this term suggests that the... more
This paper characterizes the wide-ranging uses of archival of found footage in the contemporary Korean documentary since the 2010s as the ‘archival turn,’ while also arguing for its two implications. First, this term suggests that the extensive uses of found footage allow filmmakers to develop other modes of documentary filmmaking—compilation documentary and the essay film—besides the participatory mode distinguished by the supremacy of the camera’s on-the-spot witnessing of reality. Second, this term indicates that Walter Benjamin’s idea of historiography is shared by the filmmakers, as their appropriation and manipulation of found footage are motivated by the desire to endow it with a new historical perspective in relation to their engagement with the politics of the present. Drawing on Non-fiction Diary (Jung Yoon-suk, 2013), 88/18 (KBS Sports, 2018), and Cyclical Night (Paik Jongkwan, 2016), this paper demonstrates the ways in which these two implications are linked to and activate Benjamin’s key concepts.
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This paper closely examines the theory and video essays of Hito Steyerl while also arguing that they are mapped onto three interrelated concepts. The first is post-representation, which signifies a fundamental break from the paradigm of... more
This paper closely examines the theory and video essays of Hito Steyerl while also arguing that they are mapped onto three interrelated concepts. The first is post-representation, which signifies a fundamental break from the paradigm of modern visial culture that assumes an image as a transparent and stable representation of the pre-existing world. The second is post-truth, which explains a rupture from the aesthetic and epistemolotical assumptions of traditional documentary, and which underlies Steyerl’s elaboration of the essay film in her videos. The final concept is post-internet, which points to the situation that the expressions of the internet, as well as digital technologies’ techniques and ways of accessing and using information, have not be perceived as being grounded in digitally unique forms and platforms but fundamentally permeated with contemporary subject and world. This situation is what Steyerl has recursively addressed and critiqued in her writings and videos since the 2010s.
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This paper provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between cinema and Giorgio Agamben’s aesthetics and philosophy. Intersecting Agamben’s key concepts including gesture, mediality, biopolitics, historicity, and profanation... more
This paper provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between cinema and Giorgio Agamben’s aesthetics and philosophy. Intersecting Agamben’s key concepts including gesture, mediality, biopolitics, historicity, and profanation with historical and aesthetic dimensions of cinema, I argue for his ambivalent view on cinema and visual media. On the one hand, Agamben linked cinema and visual media to his discussion on biopolitics and spectacle as he considered them as apparatus for capturing and controlling gestures. On the other hand, he also argued that cinema could restore the image with capacity to preserve and recuperate gestures based on his consideration of montage as cinema’s key aesthetic and technical component (an operation of profanation) and his Benjaminian thought on the ways in which montage suspended linear flow of images and activated an alternative memory of them. Drawing on history of cinema and optical devices in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as examples of found footages of filmmaking predicated upon stoppage and repetition of images, I argue that Agamben’s concept of potentialities can be extended into his thought on cinema and visual media apparatuses in general.
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This paper discusses the impacts of the drone camera and GopPro as new recording apparatuses afforded by digital technology on the conceptual and aesthetic dimensions of the documentary camera and on the spectatorship of documentary.... more
This paper discusses the impacts of the drone camera and GopPro as new recording apparatuses afforded by digital technology on the conceptual and aesthetic dimensions of the documentary camera and on the spectatorship of documentary. Considering the traditions of documentary cinema, the technological advancement of recording apparatuses since the introduction of lightweight 16mm cameras has developed the anthropomorphic model of the documentary camera which embodies a cinematographer’s perception. While acknowledging that digital video(DV) cameras and smartphone bulit-in cameras have contribued to proliferating and amplifying the concept of the anthromorphic, embodied camera, this paper argues that the technical features of the drone camera and GoPro allow for a different model of the documentary camera, namely, a disembodied, posthuman camera. Providing the remote-controlled vertical aerial view and targeting its object from a distance, the drone camera activates the digital apparatus’ trancendental gaze that is not totally attributed to the intention of its operator. Moving in accordance with not simply a human body in motion but also any vechile to which it is attached, GoPro is liberated from the traditioal camera’s imperatives to framing and focusing, therefore making it possible to record the posthuman world in which a camera’s body is decentralized and exists equally in things. Drawing on Omer Fast’s 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) and Sensory Ethnography Lab’s Leviathan (2013), this paper demonstrates the ways in which the disembodied, posthuman vision of the drone camera and GoPro stimulates the viewer’s embodied perception and thereby expands the knowledge of our contemporary world.
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This paper offers a multifaceted, close reading of the ‘post-medium’ discourse proposed by art critic Rosalid E. Krauss since the late 1990s. I argue that Krauss’s ‘post-medium’ discourse is meaningful in its two ways of reconfiguring the... more
This paper offers a multifaceted, close reading of the
‘post-medium’ discourse proposed by art critic Rosalid E.
Krauss since the late 1990s. I argue that Krauss’s ‘post-medium’
discourse is meaningful in its two ways of reconfiguring the
ideas of medium, more than declaring the demise of modernist
medium specificity thesis. The first lies in Krauss’s conception
of the medium as internally heterogeneous, self-differing, and
opening itself to new relations to its neighboring arts and their
corresponding material, technical, and aesthetic components. The
second lies in Krauss’s elaboration on Walter Benjamin’s idea
on the redemptive possibilities of the outmoded, which leads to
her critical evaluation of the artistic practicies that recuperate
the aesthetic potential and cultural memory from now obsolete
technical supports. While discussing the implications and
influences of these two conceptual layers in Krauss’s
‘post-medium’ discourse, this paper also argues for its limitation,
that is, her strict dichotomy between her idea of the medium
open to renivention and the media as the means of
communication that threatens to annihilate the idea of medium
specificity. My comparative reading of the ‘post-medium’ and
the ‘post-media’ discourses offers a useful insight into this
limitation caused by Krauss’s binary oppostion.
‘post-medium’ discourse proposed by art critic Rosalid E.
Krauss since the late 1990s. I argue that Krauss’s ‘post-medium’
discourse is meaningful in its two ways of reconfiguring the
ideas of medium, more than declaring the demise of modernist
medium specificity thesis. The first lies in Krauss’s conception
of the medium as internally heterogeneous, self-differing, and
opening itself to new relations to its neighboring arts and their
corresponding material, technical, and aesthetic components. The
second lies in Krauss’s elaboration on Walter Benjamin’s idea
on the redemptive possibilities of the outmoded, which leads to
her critical evaluation of the artistic practicies that recuperate
the aesthetic potential and cultural memory from now obsolete
technical supports. While discussing the implications and
influences of these two conceptual layers in Krauss’s
‘post-medium’ discourse, this paper also argues for its limitation,
that is, her strict dichotomy between her idea of the medium
open to renivention and the media as the means of
communication that threatens to annihilate the idea of medium
specificity. My comparative reading of the ‘post-medium’ and
the ‘post-media’ discourses offers a useful insight into this
limitation caused by Krauss’s binary oppostion.
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This paper establishes a genealogy of the dimensional image, a variety of images that encompass both the viewer’s perceptual experience of three-dimensionality and the construction of the image space for the volumetric representation of... more
This paper establishes a genealogy of the dimensional image, a variety of images that encompass both the viewer’s perceptual experience of three-dimensionality and the construction of the image space for the volumetric representation of an object, from the 19th century to the digital age. Taking a media-archaeological approach as its methdological framework, this paper argues that a variety of three-dimensional images in the digital age are grounded in the cyclical repetition and overlapping of the two techniques developed by the pre-cinematic technology and the early computer and video arts respectively: first, the mechanical transformation of spatially and temporally discrete images into a three-dimensional image in the panorama, stereoscopy and chronophotography, and second, the creation of the synthetic space and the postfilmic transformation of an object into a three-dimensional hyperobject in video and computer, as illusrated in the artworks of early computer animation and image-processing video. Taking the works of Michael Naimark, Camille Utterback, and Ken Jacobs as well as the digital panoramic photography of Microsoft Photosynth as examples, I demonstrate that the various dimensional images in the digitial age adopt and complicate these two techniques in its predecessors and are classified into three aesthetic and technical categories: first, remediating the panoramic image in the computer-based synthetic space, second, the fluid coexistence of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality in digital slit-scan videos, and finally, the three-dimensional recombination of discrete frames in stereoscopy and chronophotography.
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This paper proposes ‘postfilimc metamorphosis’ and ‘reanimation’ as two concepts that aim at giving account to the aesthtetic tendencies and genealogies of what Suzanne Buchan calls ‘pervasive animation,’ a category that refers to the... more
This paper proposes ‘postfilimc metamorphosis’ and ‘reanimation’ as two concepts that aim at giving account to the aesthtetic tendencies and genealogies of what Suzanne Buchan calls ‘pervasive animation,’ a category that refers to the unprecedented expansion of animation’s formal, technological and experiential boundaries. Buchan’s term calls for an interdisciplinary approach to animation by highlighting a range of phenomena that signal the growing embracement of the images and media that transcend the traditional definition of animation, including the lens-based live-action image as the longstanding counterpart of the animation image, and the increasing uses of computer-generated imagery, and the ubiquity of various animated images dispersed across other media and platforms outside the movie theatre. While Buchan’s view suggests the impacts of digital technology as a determining factor for opening this interdisciplinary, hybrid fields of ‘pervasive animation,’ I elaborate upon the two concepts in order to argue that the various forms of metamorphorsis and motion found in these fields have their historical roots. That is, ‘postfilmic metamorphosis’ means that the transformative image in postfimic media such as video and the computer differs from that in traditional celluloid-based animation materially and technically, which demands a refashioned investigation into the history of the ‘image-processing’ video art which was categorized as experimental animation but largely marginalized. Likewise, ‘reanimation’ cne be defined as animating the still images (the photographic and the painterly images) or suspending the originally inscribed movement in the moving image and endowing it with a neewly created movement, and both technical procedues, developed in experimental filmmaking and now enabled by a variety of moving image installations in contemporary art, aim at reconsidering the borders between stillness and movement, and between film and photography. By discussing a group of contemporary moving image artworks (including those by Takeshi Murata, David Claerbout, and Ken Jacobs) that present the aesthetic features of ‘postfilmic metamorphosis’ and ‘reanimation’ in relation to their precursors, this paper argues that the aesthetic implications of the works that pertain to ‘pervasive animation’ lie in their challenging the tradition dichotomies of the graphic/the live-action images and stillness/movement. The two concepts, then, respond to a revisionist approach to reconfigure the history and ontology of other media images outside the traditional boundaries of animation as a way of offering a refasioned understanding of ‘pervasive animation.’
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Catalogue essay for <디지털 프롬나드>(Digital Promenade): SeMA 개관30주년 기념전(2018)
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book review of The Atlas of AI (Kate Crawford, Yale UP, 2021, Korean edition)