Behind the Stage of Technology
Minkyeong Kang
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People hold both expectations and fears toward technologies that can "autonomously" accomplish tasks. I do not want to call these technologies themselves an "illusion." Rather, they are much closer to the performance. However, the notion of illusion arises when a well-crafted stage is all we know about technology. This research focuses on autonomous vehicle accidents, exposing the tension embedded in these staged scenes and revealing what lies behind the stage. By doing so, it aims to dismantle the illusions and fears we have about technology. The once abstract concept of technology as a weapon will be reframed as concrete issues that we have to engage with.
Minkyeong is interested in those who are excluded from science and technology(S&T) and their development. From this focus, Minkyeong seeks to reimagine and reconstruct science and technology. Minkyeong is studying at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy and exploring the intersections of S&T and the disability art scene.
Beauty Lies in the Eyes of Biometrics
Sooah Kwak
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In Korea, where aesthetically modifying the body and its representations (photographs) has become a gendered cultural practice, automated facial recognition systems emerge as a site of tension between biometric technology’s assumption of a “fixed body” and the continual reconfiguration of the face. Can these aesthetic interventions of Korean women create fissures in surveillance infrastructures? Can they become a form of bodily resistance against biometric control? Or, do they reinforce technological regulation and normative beauty standards over Korean women?
Sooah Kwak (b. 1999) is a researcher, museum professional, and artist-activist based in Seoul and New York. Putting together her training in anthropology, sociology of science, and art, her work probes into the logic of technoscientific control over bodies and nature.
Very Personal
Seungbum Kim
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Rapidly proliferating AI and large language models (LLMs), along with the numerous services emerging from them—yet the ways in which end-users encounter and explore AI/LLM remain insufficient for a "Very Personal" experience. Revisiting carefully the concept of "Personal" inside the Personal Computer—which shaped the digital culture we inhabit today—we realize current AI/LLMs still aren't adequately "Personal." To become truly a "Personal Object"—an intimate entity that evokes one's uniquely individual thoughts and emotions—we now require different attempts and new modes of interaction.
Imagining the “Agora” Online and Offline: Exploring the Potential of Twitter(‘X’) as a Social Media Agora
YeonJu Kim
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Amid the impeachment situation in South Korea, the conversation about what agora means to people has exploded. The zine explores the potential and limitations of online agora, resonating with the current protests out on the streets in Seoul and focusing on its real-time characteristics. The article argues that agora is not defined by specific locations or geographical characteristics but rather by affects, such as relationships, stories, and voices.
YeonJu Kim, who majored in critical literature, wrote her thesis on youth novels. She is interested in the manifold worlds that are connected through stories and centered her research on interdisplinarily. She explores the possibility of solidarity through narratives and delves into the act of reading and seeing to identify multiple discussion points.
Collective Intelligence and
Large Language Models
Hyunchul Kim
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Large language models and conversational interfaces, such as ChatGPT and Claude, provide an exceptionally convenient knowledge consumption experience. Many people now prefer reading AI-generated information over searching for human-written content. However, this convenience may lead to a decline in the culture of voluntary knowledge sharing. This article examines relevant cases and literature to explore these concerns and investigates design approaches for large language model interfaces that can foster collaborative knowledge production.
Analysis of the Blaming Politics in Feminist Discourse on Twitter
Dahyun Ryu
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After the feminism reboot in South Korea, it has become impossible to examine Korean feminism without considering digital space. Feminism reboot dispersed with the online “Affective Public Sphere” characteristics, and the popularization of feminism has been followed by concurrent anti-feminist discourse. This study conducts a quantitative analysis of 380,000 tweets of the keyword “Femi” (a suffix of feminism in Korean) and a qualitative analysis of their content, examining the emotional dynamics, solidarity, and exclusionary frameworks present in online feminism discourse. Through this approach, it aims to explore conflicts within and beyond the feminist movement and offer an emotionally strategic reflection on the movement.
Dahyun Ryu is a research activist with interests in feminism, social movements, gender, and inequality. She bridges research and activism as she navigates her life. She is an organizer in Flaming Feminist Action, a grassroots feminist collective. Her current research focuses on feminism discourse in digital spaces, particularly on emotions, solidarity, exclusion, and sustainability. Moving forward, she aims to further explore political discussions in digital spaces, the relationship between minority movements and emotions, and the sustainability of emotions. Her research seeks to provide new insights by integrating quantitative analysis of large-scale, real-time digital data (SNS, online communities, etc.) with in-depth qualitative analysis.
Mindful Agency of Things: Exploring Care and Maintenance through Interaction with PARO
Solin Yoon
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Let's explore the mind of PARO, an AI psychotherapy robot. Invented to provide humans with a sense of emotional interaction to heal psychological degeneration, this robot implies an interpersonal shift around care in that it implements care services by providing an object to care for, and it forms a new relationship between nonhuman and human in which care and technology are intertwined. This research attempts to trace the identity of former users through interaction with used AI robots. By observing the data-substituted protocols and the emotional transitions that necessarily and arbitrarily occur between them, the elements left behind in the system are revisited through the concept of an “object's memory.” Furthermore, it discusses "care" as a way to reconfigure the relationship between technology and humans in terms of its liberating potential, intersecting with gender performativity.
Solin Yoon is a visual artist based in Seoul. She mainly works on conceptual projects using installation and video as main media. She is interested in re-imagining subjectivity through the vulnerability that is found when critically passing between conflicting ideas, focusing on the ambivalent psychological state that occurs when personal experiences are overlapped with socio-cultural contexts. More recently, she has been exploring the subtly reconfigured relationships in the changing technological environment and is interested in the possibility of constituting performativity through the interaction between non-humans and a human.
AI Covers Distill the Myth of Singing Ability into Habit and Voice
JEONBIN
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This research departs from famous memes of an online AI cover of New Jeans or Hatsune Miku music being sung by a Korean comedian, of Hatsune Miku and her non-vocaloid voice overlapping, and of the sound of a toothbrush being machine-learned and replicated across various vocal scenarios. This study looks at the culture of synthetic voice consumption wherein the voice unwillingly “became” a musical instrument. This work also delves into how AI covers have the potential of copyleft.
JEONBIN studies contemporary art and is interested in marginalized episodes that can be renewed through a form of visual art. He believes in the power of summoning old practices that have seemingly expired as well as buried cultures that once shined but have since disappeared into the hurricane.
From a Developmental State to Real-Time Cities: The Transformation of Korean Telecommunications Geography 1961-2016
Gayoun Jang
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This research traces the genealogy of geographic information and telecommunications infrastructure in South Korea.In the 1960s, during the first and second five-year economic development plan periods, the national territory was vague due to the limitations of cadastral technology. However, radio towers were regarded as successful industrial and economic development. In the 1990s, as the cadastral technology was established, CAD maps were introduced, and cellular phone electric wave and vehicle navigation were experimented. In the 2010s, the expansion of the wireless Internet and the advent of smartphones make it easier to grasp space and time. Meanwhile, Gumdansan Relay Station, which symbolized the development of the country in the 1960s, was rediscovered as something that damages national heritage.
Jang Gayoun is an activist, researcher, and curator with a background in history and theory of architecutre. She has worked on projects that revisit the making of contemporary architecture and expose the myths surrounding digital technology. She has also been an active member of the editorial team of SOFA(Society of Feminsit Architects). Her recent focus is to interpret Korea’s modern architecture from the perspectives of history of science and technology in Korea, postcolonialism, and feminism.
(Media) Art Activism: A Decade of Keywords
Sunjoo Choi
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This study reviews the technological point of centraflexure and related social incidents from 2014 to 2024, linking them to examples of (media) arts. It was motivated by an urge to remember a variety of past aesthetical attitudes. There have always been voices of resistance against certain phenomena, from social disasters to planetary crises such as big data, climate change, and war. The voices of resistance echo beyond the individual level; thus, this research takes the opportunity to discover the strength in those voices.