• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.49
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• pp.59-93
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• 2017

This paper provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between cinema and Giorgio Agamben's aesthetics and philosophy. Intersecting Agamben's key concepts including gesture, mediality, biopolitics, historicity, and profanation with historical and aesthetic dimensions of cinema, I argue for his ambivalent view on cinema and visual media. On the one hand, Agamben linked cinema and visual media to his discussion on biopolitics and spectacle as he considered them as apparatus for capturing and controlling gestures. On the other hand, he also argued that cinema could restore the image with capacity to preserve and recuperate gestures based on his consideration of montage as cinema's key aesthetic and technical component (an operation of profanation) and his Benjaminian thought on the ways in which montage suspended linear flow of images and activated an alternative memory of them. Drawing on history of cinema and optical devices in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as examples of found footages of filmmaking predicated upon stoppage and repetition of images, I argue that Agamben's concept of potentialities can be extended into his thought on cinema and visual media apparatuses in general.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.77
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• pp.137-163
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• 2016

In the early 1900, photography, magic lantern and cinema were simultaneously introduced and experienced until the mid-1910s as mysterious and magical symbol of modern science and technology. The technology of vision, cinema in particular demonstrated its commercially expandable potentials through serial films in the mid-1910s, silent cinema in the 1920s and talkies in 1930s. I argue that a metaphor 'like a movie' which was would be spoken out by peoples as a cliche ever since the late 1910s whenever they encountered something uncanny, mysterious, and looking wholly new phenomena informs how cinematic technology worked in colonial society at the turning point to the early 20th century. Mass in colonial society accepted cinema and other visual technologies not only as an advanced science of the times but as texts of modernity that is the reason why cinema had so quickly taken cultural hegemony over the colony. Until the mid-1920s, discourse on cinema focused not on cinema itself, rather more on the theatre matters such as hygiene, facilities for public use, disturbance, quarrels and fights, theft, and etc. Since the mid-1920s and especially in wartime 1930s, discourses about negative influences and effects of cinema on behavior, mind and spirit of masses, bodily health, morality and crime were articulated and delivered by Japanese authorities and agencies like as police, newspapers and magazines, and collaborate Korean intellectuals. Theories and research reports stemming from disciplines of psychology, sociology, and mass-psychology that emphasized vulnerability and susceptibility of the crowd and mass consumers who would be exposed to visual images, spectacles and strong toxic stimulus in everyday lives. Those negative discourse on influences and effects of cinema was intimately associated with fear of the crowd and mass as well as new technology which does not allow clear understanding about how it works in future. The fact that cinema as a technology of vision could be used as an apparatus of ideology and propaganda stirred up doubts and pessimistic perspectives on cinema influence. Discourse on visual technology cinema constructed under colonial governance is doomed to be technology of mass control for empire's own sake.

• 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.