• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.27-40
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• 2015

Live cinema theatre is the latest installment of multimedia show where the filming of the performance of dramatic texts becomes the live stage event. Here, the actors perform before the camera and all the audio-visual effects are produced and constructed live. Mediated through the camera and projection screen, the stage image becomes a real-time production situation where all the scenes are put together right in front of a live audience. The very concept of live cinema as dramatic theatre has been developed by English stage director Katie Mitchell who attempts to present the stage as a cohesive representation system; this is more than a provisional experimentation where the ever-changing notion of in-betweenness is constantly tested. It is rather a predetermined operational system where the relationship between cinema and theatre is governed by the logic of synchrony, therefore maintain their own individual institutional reality. Here, the presence of camera has an effect not only on the organization of stage but also an affect on how human body exists within the situation.

• 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.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.27-34
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• 2016

The application of computer graphics, which is characterized by reality, has even reinforced reality of image and motion expression in digital animation. But reality of digital animation succeeds to traditional aesthetic characteristics of animation for overcoming physical limitations of the real world and realizing imagination through transformation, rather than copying actuality as it is. But it does not succeed to drawing animation wholly. Digital animation adds cartoonish transformation, based on three-dimensional realistic expression and those animation situations look as if they get over realistic restrictions, while drawing animation constantly reminds of mediality in drawing motion, based on two-dimensional plane and handwork. n other words, cartoonish exaggeration that is intermittently inserted between these reinforced realities, expresses digital animation's own aesthetic characteristics as a dialectical sum by crashing into contrast coming from a cross between reality and imagination.

• Review of Culture and Economy
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.21-50
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• 2017

The rise of Hallyu (Korean Wave) has generated a treasury of historiographic and cultural inquiries into the phenomenal success of South Korea's media entertainment industry. Whereas the majority of such studies focus on TV dramas and popular music, there is a medium, or rather a hybrid sub-genre within the medium category of short films, that must be reexamined and thus appreciated as the archetypal predecessor of popular Hallyu contents: music videos. The rapidly changing social, political, and economic climate in the mid- to late 1990s called for content that would grasp the attention of a younger, increasingly mobile population with diversified interests and routines that no longer guaranteed fixed-time viewership. Meanwhile, the advent of cable TV channels and high-speed internet service ensured greater temporal and infrastructural accessibility. The media entertainment industry's response to the new opportunities and challenges arising from these sudden growths in the scale, range, connectivity, and mobility of consumer demographics was synergetic cross-sector collaboration in the form of dramatized blockbuster music videos, which combined two popular and lucrative genres: trendy dramas and ballad music. In this essay, by relocating Hallyu's archetypal medium/genre, I claim that increasing upward and sideways mobility across sectors not only inspired new production but also reconfigured the very concept, form, and impact of media-driven cultural imaginary in South Korea.