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This article explores a new model of urban practice that is not limited by environmental moralism by investigating theories of plastic, which is today’s prevailing environmental problem and also a ubiquitous strata of everyday life. In doing so, it investigates the following two things. The first is to speculate about the ontological dimensions of plastic. Often thrown away after a single use and thrown into the ocean in the form of microplastics, plastic is rubbish and also a toxic material influencing climate change on a global level. It is both a problematic material and an object to overcome. However, such an objectification is a result that does not pay enough attention to its ubiquity. By considering plastic as a crucial form of life, this article pays close attention to its ontological dimensions. The second thing is to examine “assemblage urbanism” as a new form of urban model that could be further explored in relation to the plastic ontology. Assemblage urbanism brings Gilles Deleuze’s notion of assemblage into urban discourses, thereby trying to rethink the conventional theories of the city, represented by its counterpart known as “critical urbanism” that highlights an analytical approach. This article examines the debate between those two camps, which appeared in serial issues of the journal City in 2011, as well as paying attention to the weak points of assemblage urbanism. What this article derives through the investigation is a theory called “plastic urbanism”, a new form of urban practice that is not subjugated by the Anthropocene as a grand narrative, but offers a microscopic and diagrammatic model of the city.

This study, at the intersection of decolonial studies and nonhuman discourses, attempts to address the materiality and vitality of plastic litter and its currents. Behind the flow of plastic waste and its natural environment occupation, we discover the dark side of the human-centered narrative of modernity. Plastic waste reproduces and fortifies the world’s racial, gendered, and socioeconomic structure by contaminating and impacting the marginalized lives of humans and nonhumans. Plastic creates the global environment’s flow and persistently engenders another form of colonial structure by revealing the limitations of the human-centered modern world view through natural and social crises. At the same time, plastic waste shows that unruly and vital materiality is out of human control throughout the world’s topography reformation. In this sense, the plastic flow visualizes the silenced nonhuman world, the otherness that is the colonial difference of the nonhuman power hidden in the anthropocentric modern world. By examining the figure of plastic litter in Alejandro Durán’s artistic project Washed Up, this study intends to analyze the possible forms of decolonial topography and coexistence between human and nonhuman lives.

This article deals with the theoretical possibilities of expanding object-oriented ontology. In the first half of the article, it is argued that both object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory can gain theoretical edges when applied together. This article uses some famous examples from science and technology studies (STS) to show this. After that, the concepts of hyperobjects and nano-objects are explored. Hyperobjects are objects that are so vastly spread out in time and space that humans cannot easily recognize them. Nano-objects, a new concept suggested in this article, lie on the opposite side of the spectrum to hyperobjects. Nano-objects are so miniscule that humans cannot easily recognize them. Five characteristics of nano-objects have been identified so far: translucency, global locality/local globality, technoscientific relatedness, crossover existence between the nature/culture divide, and their scattered existence. At the end of the article, artist Ji-Hye Yeom’s work will be analyzed as a case study.

This study explores the sociocultural meaning of plastic based on the works of Choi Jeonghwa, and reconsiders the status of plastic both as object and material in the historical context of Korean modernism. It specifically focuses on Lee Ufan’s artistic practices and critical discourses, which became highly influential in the development of experimental art of Korea in the late 1960s that was inclined to emphasize materiality and sheer objects. Lee argued for encountering the “world as it is,” as an alternative to European modernism’s anthropocentrism and the bipolar value system. This paper analyzes the discourse of materiality of Korean modern art in terms of new materialism and the Actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, as a way to avoid the essentialist perspective of Dansaekhwa that emphasized spirituality and “Korean-ness” in its promotion. If we reconsider materiality not only as an artistic medium, but also as a “non-human actor,” as suggested by Latour, it will shed new light on the progress of Korean art from the experimentation of the 1960s to Choi Jeonghwa’s active involvement with plastic as a primary material.

This paper aims to investigate the Nouvelle Figuration paintings of Gérard Fromanger by means of a Deleuzian concept, the machine. As is well known, in Francis Bacon, Logic of Sensation , Deleuze sets ‘capture of force’ against ‘representation of form (figuration)’, and gives priority to the former. But in his essay about Fromanger, we can find a different theory of painting that advocates pictorial struggles inside figuration more affirmatively. In this case, the point is not to extremely transform figuration, but to bring about new movements inside it through colors. To explain these movements, he disjoints Fromanger’s painting-machine, explores its operation, and elucidates its effect. In his point of view, the critical mind of the painter is summarized as follows. Leave the world full of merchandise images as it is, or activate something else inside it? Imbuing “the ugliness and the disgustingness” with “movements of colors which will constitute tomorrow’s life,” Fromanger creates a new way of overcoming figuration inside figuration.

It is an open theoretical fact today that aesthetics are not limited to discussions on artistic creations and their appreciation. The question of who realizes the aesthetic as the ‘ which’ has become a challenge of aesthetics. It is also a part of this theoretical trend to consider the aesthetics of robots as non-humans. With the concept of ‘sharing of the sensible’, J. Rancière thought about the ‘becoming-politicalsubjects’ of those who have no ability to rule and those who have no share, those who are denigrated as non-humans. B. Latour’s ANT, extended to ‘the politics of things’, tolerates the fluidity of the truth of knowledge and affirms the symmetrical power of non-human beings in the networks of actors including humans and non-humans. Looking back at the historical era of robotics, the genesis of the robot in the 1920s was related both to aesthetic situations and the production of techno-scientific knowledge (robotics). The illusion of the robot as a slave labor and the materiality of the robot as a machine are articulated in non-human characteristics. Its materiality, such as metallicity, automatism, and repeatability, defines the robot as a soulless, heteronomous, vulgar, threatening, and demonic being, and the non-human characteristics re-assemble the ontological minorities into disgusting beings.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has made ‘peoples’ lives easier. It seems that this development goes beyond the ancilla of human beings. AI has challenged art creativity, which has been considered an intrinsic ability of human beings. Based on the situation where AI artworks have been exhibited and sold, this paper discusses that how people can accept and experience AI artworks. Could work made by AI provide an aesthetic experience? If so, what kind of aesthetic experience could it be? For the purpose, this paper looks at recent technologies of AI creating artwork and the results. It is followed by the concept of aesthetic experience, which is considered to be found in human artworks. If we could find aesthetic experience in works made by AI, we would have to admit that AI artworks provide the same aesthetic experience as those made by people. Therefore, we look into what aesthetic experience is to figure out whether it is possible to accept AI works as art and to learn how to even appreciate them. As a result, we would find out whether the artworks of AI could provide a different and novel aesthetic experience that cannot be found in human art.

This paper investigates art’s new task and role in the ‘post-truth’ era where facts lose their grip on reality in the rise of fakeness that is more truthful than truth. The post-truth syndromes symptomized by fake news, manipulated information, deceitful and biased political opinions pose a concern that can hardly be resolved by any legal actions, while it also leaves a positive expectation about widening freedom of expression, political participation, and the role of new media, reassuring the possibility of reimagining the notion of truth. This paper delves into this antinomy of the post-truth syndrome, specifically focusing on three conditions: post-truth, post-media, and post-art, each of which illustrated by three recognized artists ― Ai Weiwei, Forensic Architecture, and Walid Raad, whose practices are set on a new relationship to the truth in question. Throughout the paper, we explore how these posttruth artists make convincing accounts of contemporary society, and how such accounts renew their tasks long related to the classical notion of truth.