The contemporary city increasingly manifests as an urbanscape where digital screen and architectural space converge to create new forms of cultural experience.
Seoul, with its high degree of media saturation, exemplifies a city interwoven with advanced digital technology that articulates distinct combinations of corporeal, emotional, and spatial perceptions.
Within the context of the convergence of communication technology and urban space, referred to as “the media city” or “the communicative city”, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), designed by the late Zaha Hadid, stands out as a notable example of “massive media,” presenting monumental and iconic architectural expressions through large-scale projection and high-resolution media façades.
In this talk, focusing on the recent two site-specific projection installations at DDP, Yiyun Kang’s Geofuture (2022) and Je Baak’s Lucid Dream (2021), I explore how these works of media art contribute to constructing a distinctive form of media spectacle that negotiates between global architectural aesthetics and local cultural narratives while articulating a new form of Seoul’s urban identity.
In doing so, I argue that the DDP’s media spectacle exposes the shift from a conventional screen-interface to an immersive screen-scape, thereby establishing the material conditions for the synthesis of a new collective perception, that is, the techno-sublime.
About the speaker
Jaeho Kang is Professor in Department of Communication at Seoul National University. He was Senior Lecturer in Critical Media and Cultural Studies at SOAS, the University of London (2012-2018), Assistant Professor in Sociology of Media at The New School in New York City (2005-2012), and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Institut für Sozialforschung, the University of Frankfurt (2004-2005).
The author of Walter Benjamin and the Media: The Spectacle of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014) and a co-editor of Siegfried Kracauer: Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda and Political Communication (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), Kang has tried to bring the theoretical contributions of Critical Theory to the development of Korean media and cultural studies. He is currently working on a project that examines Seoul as a techno-city with a particular focus on screen, spectacle, and senses.
[Image: Yiyun Kang, Geofuture (2022) DDP, Seoul, South Korea. Courtesy of the artist.]