• Digital Contents
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• no.10 s.137
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• pp.88-91
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• 2004

1995년 일본 애니메이션에 파란을 일으키며 등장한 오시이 마모루 감독의‘공각기동대’는 수많은 마니아를 낳고 전세계로 파장의 강도를높여가며 유명세를 떨친 작품으로 기억된다. 수많은 아티스트들이 공각기동대의 오프닝에서 주인공 쿠사나기가 시니컬한 웃음을 지으며 열광학 위장술로 천천히 사라지던 장면을 비롯, 많은 부분을 자신들의 영화, 애니메이션에 차용하며 오시이 마모루 감독의 철학세계에 경배를 올렸다. 그후 9년, 독특한 철학과 영상으로 센세이션을 일으켰던 그가 다시 돌아왔다. 애니메이션 공각기동대의 속편인‘이노센스’로 말이다. 기획 2년, 제작 3년 등 5년 간의 작업 끝에 만들어진 이노센스(감독 오시이 마모루, 수입 대원C&A홀딩스)는 공각기동대의 주인공 쿠사나기가 육체를 버리고 네트워크 속으로 사라진 마지막 장면으로부터 3년이 지난 후의 이야기다. 10월 8일 국내 개봉 예정인 이노센스는 한층 더 심오한 철학세계를 펼쳐보인다. 공각기동대의 후속작으로 한층 더 진일보된 비주얼과 메시지를 전달하는 이노센스의 세계에 빠져본다.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.40
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• pp.111-131
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• 2015

An unusual success engendering loyalty among cult fans in the United States, Mamoru Oshii's 1995 cyberpunk anime, Ghost in the Shell (GITS) revolves around a female cyborg assassin named Motoko Kusanagi, a.k.a. "the Major." When the news came out last year that Scarlett Johansson was offered 10 million dollars for the role of the Major in the live action remake of GITS, the frustrated fans accused DreamWorks of "whitewashing" the classic Japanimation and turning it into a PG-13 film. While it would be premature to judge a film yet to be released, it appears timely to revisit the core achievement of Oshii's film untranslatable into the Hollywood formula. That is, unlike ultimately heteronormative and humanist sci-fi films produced in Hollywood, such as the Matrix trilogy or Cloud Atlas, GITS defies a Hollywoodization by evoking much bafflement in relation to its queer, posthuman characters and settings. This essay homes in on Major Kusanagi's body in order to update prior criticism from the perspectives of posthumanism and queer theory. If the Major's voluptuous cyborg body has been read as a liberating or as a commodified feminine body, latest critical work of posthumanism and queer theory causes us to move beyond the moralistic binaries of human/non-human and male/female. This deconstruction of binaries leads to a radical rethinking of "reality" and "identity" in an image-saturated, hypermediated age. Viewed from this perspective, Major Kusanagi's body can be better understood less as a reflection of "real" women than as an embodiment of our anxieties on the loss of self and interiority in the SNS-dominated society. As is warned by many posthumanist and queer critics, queer and posthuman components are too often used to reinforce the human. I argue that the Major's hybrid body is neither a mere amalgam of human and machine nor a superficial postmodern blurring of boundaries. Rather, the compelling combination of individuality, animality, and technology embodied in the Major redefines the human as always, already posthuman. This ethical act of revision-its shifting focus from oppressive humanism to a queer coexistence-evinces the lasting power of GITS.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.41-76
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• 2013

Based on an analysis of the Japanese animation director Kamiyama Kenji's Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, this paper discusses two important subjects in modern technoscience-cyborg and old age. In fact, age has been an important social and political category in the modern world, along with gender, race, and class. However, age has not been a significant research topic for STS scholars. Even though many of these investigators have extensively explored the complex relationship between gender and technoscience, especially after the publication of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (1991), few of them have been interested in how age is reconfigured by modern science and technology. If women, as Haraway has claimed, can have a different political and cultural outlook by becoming cyborgs, then, can we expect a similar socio-cultural transformation with regard to the interaction between cyborg and old age? Do the elderly experience lesser age discrimination through the growth of biomedicine and technoscience? Indeed, it is believed that seniors are increasingly becoming cyborgs with advancing age, since their declining bodily functions are consistently replaced and assisted by various biomedical technologies. Does this enable them to overcome ageism and age discrimination as well as their alleged physiological and mental limitations? As an answer to this question, Mike Featherstone has asserted that becoming a cyborg in old age could make the wrinkled skin a mere mask and create diverse new possibilities that were hitherto unavailable to an aging person. Based on my reading of Ghost in the Shell, however, I analyze a more complex set of problems when the senile cyborg is created through the encounter between the elderly and technoscience. I argue that while the senile cyborg could challenge traditional family ideology and nationalism it would leave ageism intact and define a new individualistic life form through a body controlled within the globalized internet and capitalist economy.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.150-159
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• 2007

The remark by Andy Clark that the cleverer our world is, the more difficult we perceive our world and ourselves, is very significant to us living in digital world. As the huge power of Technology are dominating the world, the people are drifting with their body fragmented in diverse kinds of chaos, being are faced with the situation that they should reorganize themselves about personal life and ways of thinking in a new technological environment. This paper approach some characteristics of contemporary society through 'Cyborg' which is the product of limitless human desire and technology. The characteristics in modern times, such as boundary disjoint, hybridity, transformation, fusion, communication with image, digital sensitivity, womanness correspond to those of the Cyborg. This paper also investigates the history of modern Cyborg through animation, one of the remarkable medium in digital age and analyze the cyber punk animation, and by Oshii Mamoru, which provoked the extension of the concept of Cyborg. This paper will give a moment to diagnose what this age is like and to present a reference line of our contemporaries exposed to the surplus images and technology.