• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.215-220
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• 2023

Network technology used as a physical interface to retrieve, store, and exchange data is leading the era of data capitalism in the 21st century. The capacity of network technology dominates almost all communication in everyday life, and makes social understanding and experiences in the physical world visible in cyberspace. The movements of human bodies and objects in cyberspace are placed in a social context. This paper paid attention to these phenomena and examined the cases of activism that raised real problems through cyberspace. In particular, the focus of the study is the digital activism of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which combines critical art and thinking for democracy with the realm of information and demonstrates aesthetic imagination. The first chapter of the main body briefly outlines the meaning activism as a social movement in cyberspace. The second chapter looks back on the alternatives of <FloodNet>, which represents the early activism performance of EDT. And then in the last chapter, the poetic significance of the <Transborder Immigrant Tool> is analyzed. Through this process, this paper demonstrates that the activism performance of the EDT is a critical aesthetics that encourages imagination for alternatives. It also argues that Electronic Disturbance Theater has contemporary value as an avant-garde art that actively utilizes the medium of network technology and integrates performance art and politics.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.10
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• pp.105-118
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• 2010

This study discusses the community of participants in new media-based art of Taeyoon Choi, Wafaa Bilal and Mushon Zer-Aviv in relation to current discourses on social functions of art by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jacques Ranciere. Focusing on these artists' participatory projects which aim to provide alternative perspectives on wars between countries, to raise awareness about expanding surveillance systems in city spaces, or to create new public spaces on the web, this paper argues that their works hybridize entertainment culture and political activism to suggest a new model for political art.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.16
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• pp.41-69
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• 2013

The inauguration of the collective Reality and Utterance (Hy$\breve{o}$nsil kwa Par$\breve{o}$n) in 1979 and 1980 marked a watershed moment in Korean art. This is not only because the collective gave birth to the politically-engaged art movement that would come to be labeled "Minjung Art" by the middle of the 80s, but also because it enthusiastically embraced a wide range of images from the urban culture. With a special focus on the members' early work, my research explores an issue largely neglected in the dominant narrative of Minjung art as a form of activism against the authoritarian Korean government during the 80s. The issue is what was at stake in Reality and Utterance's exploration of contemporary urban visual culture. The aim of this essay is to recognize the engagement with the urban visual culture as central to the group's early project and to consider it at some distance from the anti-urban and anti-mass culture perspective which was endorsed by the Minjung narrative. Focusing on members' turn to urban visual culture, this essay instead argues that this turn was by no means merely a means to making art as social critique, but more importantly, it was an experiment with the shared image world, as opposed to the rarefied visual vocabularies of abstract modernism. Visual productions such as advertisements, billboards, posters, and kitsch paintings, which come from outside the narrow confines of fine art, were definitely ominous signs of the colonization of everyday life in the capitalist city, but at the same time they were anticipated to be a catalyst for redefining Korean art in a more communicative, accessible, and democratized way. In this regard, in the early 1980s-in particular 1980 and 1982-the members' gesture oscillated between critique and embrace, which allowed the group to occupy a unique domain in the realm of Korean art production.

• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.53
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• pp.45-77
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• 2017

This study intends to rehabilitate the memories of the social other which have been gradually forgotten in the social events overloaded with the undemocratic violence in South Korea today. This study explores a case of Yongsan Tragedy in 2009 among the most tragic events. It notes the autonomous ways in which activist artists would like to memorize the socio-historical events anew despite the emptiness of public records. In other words, this study considers the Yongsan case to be significant that a group of the public, artists, grassroots activists, religion men got together in solidarity so as to create the contested narratives countering dominant memories and thus to signify the records written by the civil society. Among others, activist artists had documented the unofficial counter-memories of socially alienated peoples in terms of planning a series of artistic events such as opening some gallery exhibitions and performance events, issuing a volume of work books, comics and photographies, online broadcasting, and directing some documentaries. Especially, this paper tends to note the documentation of on-site activist artists to record the counter-memories against social oblivion. By doing so, it finally suggests how we could document the Yongsan Tragedy both to search out the archival implications of today's art activism and to insert those artistic records into the commonly shared counter-memories in a more inclusive way.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.717-729
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• 2019

This study defines critical fashion designs and investigate its critical messages on fashion itself. The critical messages on fashion are categorized into two major issues of a fashion industry system and fashion consumer culture. This study contributes to the understanding of meaning and value for critical fashion messages that match critical art. As the research method, this study combines a literature review and case studies and the research scope focuses on cases that have appeared in fashion media since the 2000s when social critical messages in fashion began to emerge. The results of the study are as follows. Critical designers such as Viktor & Rolf, Elisa van Joolen, Issey Miyake, and Mary Ping have delivered messages challenging the nature of fashion industry system that criticize the cycle and limitation of a fashion system and pursues changes in perception of sustainability. The critical message on fashion consumer culture articulated by designers such as Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Hussein Chalayan, and Ricarda Bigolin & Nella Themelios insist on the formation of community while delivering a critical message on social, political, and cultural problems that raise the mechanism of social awareness through fashion design.

• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.82
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• pp.275-309
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• 2024

This study examines artists' acts of resistance in the turbulent social climate of the 1960s and beyond, and considers the meaning of these documents in a contemporary context. It focuses on the Art Workers' Coalition, organised in 1969 by artists, writers, filmmakers and critics. Art Workers' Coalition demanded basic rights for artists in the art world and challenged war, discrimination, and injustice in society at large. Not only did they actively intervene in the structural problems of society through collective actions, protests, and statements, as seen in other acts of resistance, but they also expanded their reach through the medium of art. Studies of the Art Workers' Coalition, which can be considered as activist art of the late 1960s, have mainly chronicled their actions in the context of art history, without paying particular attention to the nature and value of the documentation produced in the process of resistance. However, the archives of Art Workers' Coalition have an informational and evidential value, which is a key value of archives, as they provide information not only about the activities of the organisation, but also about the activities of the individuals who comprised the unions, their intricate connections, and the social climate. In addition to the basic function of proving the activities of a group of artists, the archives of Art Workers' Coalition are also significant as a medium for providing information on people and events that have been marginalised in mainstream studies of artworks and artists, and for incorporating them into historical memory. Therefore, this study aims to identify the current status of Art Workers' Coalition-related archives as a medium to prove the activities of artists of the time, and to propose a different way of reading history through the contextual information of archives.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.184-193
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• 2021

Interactive documentary refers to a new style of documentary that is created and accepted through active interaction. It is attracting attention as a platform that forms a public sphere and mediates audiences to participate in social change. However, the possibilities was not systematically explored, and there was insufficient consideration on how to realize them. In this paper, discussions on the political aesthetics of Walter Benjamin are examined, and the media characteristics of interactive documentary are analyzed through text mining. Then, by connecting the two to each other, we draw a map of the political and aesthetic possibilities, and based on the map, we analyze the actual works. This study has the value of establishing a theoretical framework for the possibilities of interactive documentaries. In the follow-up study, we will consider the practical strategy of interactive documentary as a transmedia activism and develop a practical analysis and planning methodology.

• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.64
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• pp.27-62
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• 2020

The article has the characteristics of a preliminary writing about how to look at the trend of new archives 'fever' and 'impulsion' emerging around the domestic and foreign art world, which have not been paid much attention yet in the 'mainstream' archive research, and how to accept it independently. Specifically, this study aims to examine how archival art is involved in history and memory with aesthetic attitudes and methods through observation of recent tendency of domestic archive art, and what implications or influence the 'archival impulse' phenomenon in the art world can have on the research trend of 'archival studies.' First, I would like to look at the meaningful movement to reinterpret and actively accept archival impulses in concrete overseas cases, that is, the archive system of a public archive in the United States. This is followed by an attempt to explore the characteristics and characteristics of creative works that are carried out through the medium of archives, that has not yet reached the level of organization of specific archive methods but are sporadically attempted in the domestic art world. It examines how so-called 'archive artists' record unrecorded in a way that is not observed in the existing archival world, and how they summon and include excluded history in aesthetic language. In conclusion, this study explores the possibility of pulling the historical records of tradition out from archival boxes and reinterpreting them as living archives within the contemporary emotional structure from this new artistic trend called 'archival art'.

• Journal of Korean Theatre Studies Association
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• no.49
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• pp.171-208
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• 2013

Site-specific performance is always the real on-site work taking place at the site. Hence, it deals with the reality, in other words, the time of creation and formation. And it creates value and meaning through the interaction and continuous direct communication process between the performers, audience and the local residents. In this performance, the audience's status as the passive observer changes. They become the co-agent who actively lead and complete the performance through their own experience. We have examined the The Working Methods of Site-specific Performance and Aesthetics of Effect through four Korean performances ; Marie, An aesthetic experiment of site as the storyteller; Heterotopia and Urban Movement Research or Play: We Will Move Your Sofa, as performances which have Revealed history, politics, institution engraved in the site ; A Song of Mandala and Miracle, as a ritualistic site-specific performance at the historic site. Some remarks on Site-specific performance ; First, In Site-specific performance, the habitus peculiar to the stage art and the mode of reception are changed. Second, a new mode of theatrical communication requires creator and audience to have a sharp aesthetic sensibility and to change one's perceptual habit. Third, Site-specific performance can act as a demonstration for the viewpoints of political activism through what could be called a dramatic close-up effect. Fourth, Site-specific performance also has the risk of merely becoming an unfocused and scattered performance or degenerating into a pseudo-sightseeing. To avoid this, an in-depth study of the site and its socio-cultural context, and the clear motivation with which one is trying to reveal and tell from the site must be indispensable. As the co-agent, the audience should also be aware and think about what the given performance signifies today.