• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.14
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• pp.87-124
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• 2012

This paper focuses on the social implication of new media art, which has evolved with the advance of technology. To understand the notion of human-computer interactivity in media art, it examines the meaning of "cybernetics" theory invented by Norbert Wiener just after WWII, who provided "control and communication" as central components of his theory of messages. It goes on to investigate the application of cybernetics theory onto art since the 1960s, to which Roy Ascott made a significant contribution by developing telematic art, utilizing the network of telecommunication. This paper underlines the significance of the relationship between human and machine, art and technology in transforming the work of art as a site of communication and experience. The interactivity in new media art transforms the viewer into the user of the work, who is now provided free will to make decisions on his or her action with the work. The artist is no longer a godlike figure who determines the meaning of the work, yet becomes another user of his or her own work, with which to interact. This paper believes that the interaction between man and machine, art and technology can lead to various ways of interaction between humans, thereby restoring a sense of community while liberating humans from conventional limitations on their creativity. This paper considers the development of new media art more than a mere invention of new aesthetic styles employing advanced technology. Rather, new media art provides a critical shift in subverting the modernist autonomy that advocates the medium specificity. New media art envisions a new art, which would embrace impurity into art, allowing the coexistence of autonomy and heteronomy, embracing a technological other, thereby expanding human relations. By enabling the birth of the user in experiencing the work, interactive new media art produces an open arena, in which the user can create the work while communicating with the work and other users. The user now has freedom to visit the work, to take a journey on his or her own, and to make decisions on what to choose and what to do with the work. This paper contends that there is a significant parallel between new media artists' interest in creating new experiences of the art and Jacques Ranci$\grave{e}$re's concept of the aesthetic regime of art. In his argument for eliminating hierarchy in art and for embracing impurity, Ranci$\grave{e}$re provides a vision for art, which is related to life and ultimately reshapes life. Ranci$\grave{e}$re's critique of both formalist modernism and Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodern view underlines the social implication of new media art practices, which seek to form "the common of a community."

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.83-103
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• 2013

This paper focuses on the function of suicidal images in the history of art including literature. Death has been romanticized or repoliticized into an existential act of defiance and rebellion in literary works, so questions remain about the correlation between literary suicide and the essence of suicide. Although Jacques Ranciere insists that the order of art contrasts with the order of common people whose acts and gestures can express either their specific purposes nor the rationalities of their frustration, literary suicide reflects the outside life of readers. In fact, images of suicide produces the order of things about the real world. William Shakespeare's Hamlet handled two oppositional self-murder significantly. As Ron M. Brown pointed out, Hamlet, by choosing confrontation, seeks out an end which is voluntary, thus he avoids self-destruction and feels triumph of heroic fashion. Ophelia's self-chosen death stems from loss, frailty and the disintegration of reason, which demeans the act and diminishes her from the tragic to the pathetic(16). In the $19^{th}$ century, the resurrection of Ophelia acted as the context for later periods where life itself is fictionalized from the differing periods of network of signifier and texts. Finally, in Ophelia's case, fiction became life(Brown 285). Her suicidal image was fixed in the Victorian Culture whose visual discourse was strikingly similar to that of the men. Likewise, the ambiguities of the suicide became intertwined with the social, cultural issues of a certain period, and the paradigm of suicide was conformed to the changing needs of successive generations. However, if literary art understands that a European culture grappled with the almost impossible task and coming to terms with this strangest and most persistent of phenomena, it will be able to focus on of the multi-layered suicide by recognizing the inherent instability of the verbal sign which cannot reveal the design and grammar of truth.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.163-177
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• 2019

This study is concerned with "fiction" as a new form of writing over the limits of the post-modernist theater/arts. Fiction is not something illusory that demands the audience's empathy but something that unveils form's disinterest in content. Thus, in this paper, I examine a fiction as the opposition of any representational norm and words' old mimesis. Rebutting the crisis of post-modern art and the end of images, philosopher Jacque $Ranci{\grave{e}}re$ mentions the possibility of appropriating similarity in an imitative way by twisting Platonic mimesis. The image of this similarity wanders alongside the loss of signification, unmasking the form's indifference to content. These wandering words represent their own truth "in a way fossils or grooved stones encapsulate histories" as hieroglyphics. This "fiction" as an alternative of post-modernist plays is not any confrontation of reality but the "movement of thinking" that allows the human spirit to play in a way of shaping "some substantiality." In this sense, I examines works by two French writers, $Jo{\ddot{e}}l$ Pommerat (1963~) and Jean-Claude Grumberg (1939~ ) who have carried out their writing practices of appropriating similarity that dissolves any simple "immediate reflection" for non-intermediate relations between the producing and the produced. Their writing is a cross of literary creation and "le politique" as a new aesthetic practice of writing and reveals the movement of thinking, departing from the preexisting concept of fiction.