• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.89-103
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• 2011

The recent innovations in technoscience have changed the patterns of everyday lives for women and their politics of identity. Among the various debates on a women's relationship to technoscience, Donna J. Haraway's theory of the cyborg has been one of the most influential, as it provides new modes of conceiving subjectivity as well as new notions of women's shared experiences. For Haraway, the cyborg is an image of a female subject that will lead the future of science and technology as an amalgamation of non-hierarchical differences. This study examines the characteristics and meanings for the distortion, anti-aesthetic body, and clothing in fashion design through the cyborg feminism theory. Characteristics and meanings of the cyborg in fashion designs find their expression through mechanical images, distorted physical transformations, reconstruction of a destructed body, expression of an anatomical and heterogeneous body, and the persona image. Such expressions are not simply an act of distorting and destroying a body image but extending the category of a body, but of going beyond the limit of a real body and create a new body.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2022

As the discourse on Anthropocene grows, this exploratory research investigates the interrelationship and interconnectivity between humanity and technology by analyzing a sound art installation created by the author. Crying Sea is a sound installation that uses plastic wastes collected from the shore to create symbolic narratives and artistic experience connecting humans, objects, and nature through interactive digital technology. In this installation, the audiences are guided to walk over the wastes, and the sounds created by the footsteps are recorded in real-time, which then are distorted and amplified into disturbing sounds through speakers filling up the room. In analyzing this artwork, three theories from technological, philosophical, and ecological backgrounds were used; specifically, Bernard Stiegler's pharmakon theory, Dona Haraway's cyborg manifesto, and Timothy Morton's dark ecology theory. A common factor revealed from all three theories by analyzing the Crying Sea is that humans, technologies, and all other entities within nature are interconnected and resonated. The awareness of this recursive relationship allows us to consider sustainable balancing.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.50
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• pp.299-325
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• 2018

Humans have made a third person over a long history and differentiated them from each other. Discrimination of 'us' and 'them' has led Derrida to make works to look upon the human nature towards animal strangers. This study tries to examine upon the expansion of animal strangers by focusing on 'The Animal That Therefore I am.' Furthermore, the research asserts to pay more attention to animal strangers by looking at his works of how modern people think about animals in the current society. Derrida expresses his 'humiliation' that he felt when he faced his cat after a shower. This emotion brings up the topic that was neglected in the conventional wisdom and casts doubts on this. This emotion of humuliation is only felt by humans, and he explains this is one way of feeling like a 'human.' The researcher therefore focuses on the 'experiences of humans' and looks at the ambivalence of humans in culture and the irony in natural animals. This perspective criticizes Speciesism, which considers people other than oneself able to be suffered. This view also tried to escape anthro-pocentrism and looked at the animals on their own. This study examines current animal strangers with theories of Donna Haraway and Jane Goodal, and analyzes Derrida's artworks with Susan Sontag's philosophy. This aims to lead to a conclusion of how to reach an optimal relationship between human and animal. By focusing on Derrida, who has not been highlighted yet in this country, hopes to create effective communication between human and animal by explaining his artworks through new philosophy of animals.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.69-80
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• 2018

D. J. Haraway's cyber-feminism and Kim Seon Hee's eco-feminism are so different in the perspective of the modern scientific technology. While cyber-feminism thinks the outcome of the modern scientific technology positively, eco-feminism criticizes the totalitarianism and the human negation which the modern scientific technology gives rise to. Cyber-feminism gives us an image of the future female, but exposes an easygoing way of thinking of the modern scientific technology. On the other hand eco-feminism takes notice of the risk, that the modern scientific technology can be abused by the power of the minority, but fails in overcoming of the traditional view of female.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.836-848
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• 2019

This paper aims at providing a critical view over the cybernetics theory especially of first generation on which the artificial intelligence heavily depends nowadays. There has been a commonly accepted thought that the conception of artificial intelligence could not has been possible without being influenced by N. Wiener's cybernetic feedback based information system. Despite the founder of contemporary cybernetics' ethical concerns in order to avoid an increasing entropy phenomena(social violence, economic misery, wars) produced through a negative dynamics of the western modernity regarded as the most advanced form of humanism. In this civilizationally changing atmosphere, the newly born cybernetic technology was thus firmly believed as an antidote to these vices deeply rooted in humanism itself. But cybernetics has been turned out to be a self-organizing, self-controlling mechanical system that entails the possibility of telegraphing human brain (which are transformed into patterns) through the uploading of human brain neurons digitalized by the artificial intelligence embedded into computing technology. On this background emerges posthuman (or posthumanism) movement of which concepts have been theorized mainly by its ardent apostles like N. K. Hayles, Neil Bedington, Laurent Alexandre, Donna J. Haraway. The converging of NBIC Technologies leading to the opening of a much more digitalizing society has served as a catalyst to promote the posthuman representations and different narratives especially in the contemporary visual arts as well as in the study of humanities including philosophy and fictional literature. Once Bruno Latour wrote "Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism, either as a way of saluting the birth of 'man' or as a way of announcing his death. But this habit is itself modern, because it remains asymmetrical. It overlooks the simultaneous birth of 'nonhumaniy' - things, or objects, or beasts, - and the equally strange beginning of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines."4) These highly suggestive ideas enable us to better understand what kind of human beings would emerge following the dazzlingly accelerating advancement of artificial intelligence technology. We wonder whether or not this newly born humankind would become essentially Homo Artificialis as a neuronal man stripping off his biological apparatus. However due to this unprecedented situation humans should deal with enormous challenges involving ethical, metaphysical, existential implications on their life.