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Most of the mannequins in works of art have conveyed messages of violation against social norms, dealt with taboo territory, and have been the object of disgust. Freud makes it clear that a mannequin belongs to the “uncanny,” and “ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.” Based on the common nature of mannequins and art, imitation and simulacra, this study asks what role mannequins play in artistic creation, and traces the fascination and disgust that mannequins evoke. Since the Renaissance, mannequins have functioned as tools in the artist’s studio, but they have not been seen in paintings depicting artists’ studios. This was because the mannequins reminded people of the mechanical properties of painting and the image of the artist as a worker. With Parisian street culture in the 19th century, mannequins were used by surrealist artists as tools to criticize product fetishism, and as materials to reveal a disturbing eroticism. The mannequins in contemporary artworks reveal the animality and cruelty inherent in humans, and are often combined with other species to become objects of disgust. The mannequins that arouse such disgust can be said to serve as actors of creation beyond simple tools or materials in the art creation process. In this case, a mannequin is not a model resembling a human being, but rather an object with mechanical properties and materiality that allows the artist to freely transform, combine, and dispose of its bodies, and can be said to be the artist’s “intimate partner.”

In the situation of the pandemic, intelligent machines have come closer to our lives. However, the potential of these machines to replace humans in the actual conditions of our labor can always be realized. The imagination of a future in which replacement will be completed reminds us of the death of the “Human.” Whenever we encounter such machines, an unknown fear is evoked in us. The uncanny felt about an android is a human response to this ontological situation. Robot engineers D. Hanson, K. F. McDorman, and Ishiguro Hiroshi brought Masahiro Mori’s “Uncanny Valley”(1970) hypothesis to the present. They propose various empirical methods in aesthetic, sociocultural, and neuroscientific contexts to resolve the uncanny they felt about their own androids. Contrary to their expectations, the uncanny is not removed empirically. This point is evidenced by the fact that every time they try to create more and more human-like androids with Android Science, a new uncanny is experienced from the machine again. The uncanny is a more fundamental condition than the experienced. However, android development will not stop because intelligent machines dictate the future in the capitalist system as cutting-edge technology. Android Science thus realizes an interdependent relationship that repeatedly recurs between humans and machines. This is a painful aspect of becoming-posthuman with traces of the uncanny inscribed in itself.

This article examines the meaning of the relationship between humans and AI robots, focusing on various present aspects that appear abandoned, that is, “death.” AIBO Funeral shows that AI robots are basically non-human beings and are not human-centered instrumental objects, and humans are building new relationships with them. They doubly project the ghost as “dead labor” implied by the existing capitalist commodity economy and the ghost where a “non-human object” accumulates human experiences in the process of relating to humans. The movie Sayonara, produced by Hiroshi Ishiguro and starring “Geminoid F” raises these questions. This movie depicts a departure from the relationship of “controlling human/controlled nonhuman” by preparing for the death of both. However, when considering the relationship between human and non-human beings as such an individual relationship, there is a point that is invisible. It is an aspect of the convergence and propriety of current technologies. An AI robot called DX9, described in Yusuke Miyauchi’s Johannesburg Angels, was initially developed as music-producing artificial intelligence, but various convergences occur in the process of popularizing the technology. This novel critically examines the fact that technology is used in different ways by humans, but humans cannot know the full extent of the system and control its use.

The four gracious plants of Chinese paintings are projected with shadows through the ideas and emotions of the mind of a nobleman. A nobleman means having talent for administration in government and a righteous man in contrast with a worthless person. Among them, they were related to an attitude of atmosphere, and devoted to the king and the people as the obligations of a minister. These are personified or satirized plants, and the style of painting creates the common life of a transcendental name and reality and gain and loss, and coincides with the beauty of personality and nature and art of the elevated taste of a literary man. Also think over first of all intent rather than brush. Therefore the intention aim for suitable virtue, occur the flavor of retired life and rest, pursue beauty and comfort and delight. But the handling of a brush is so characteristic regulation of energy and mind. This is expressed poetic sentiment and meaning of drawing, united capability and inactivity and artificiality, immanent aesthetic sense. In my view, methinks multiple beauty that unity essential element and meaning of many quarters compose heaven and earth, form structure of the middle stratum, fuse into one religious ceremonies and muscical·artistical fine arts and the zen.

The goal of this study is to understand the function and meaning of technology by examining technology culturally and phenomenologically, focusing on Ernst Cassirer’s symbolic function, especially the function of representation. First, this study intends to grasp technology as a certain mental structure, and asks about the nature of technology and the conditions for the possibility of operation and formation of technology. For this purpose, among the symbolic functions, especially the representation function is taken as a basic concept. The representation function is involved when an image depicting something has a referential relationship to it. When technology is conceived in terms of the function of representation, the relationship between technology and spirit, between technology and form will be revealed. Second, this study considers that it is necessary to elucidate the relationship between technology and other symbolic form, that is, art in order to grasp the overall meaning of culture. In this way, it would like to reveal that technology and art can reach their highest achievements through the free spirit and creativity of human beings, and that moral and practical self- consciousness is involved in the achievement of this culture.

Francis Bacon painted the body without organs and its intensive fact, its living reality. What is the body without organs and what is reality? The body without organs is nonorganic life. It does not have organic senses, but nonorganic yet living sensations. The reality of the body without organs is not opposed to the virtual, but to the possible. That is, the reality of the body without organs is a reality that becomes real when “something (quelque chose)” realizes the possible. What is it that realizes the possible? This paper deals with the realization of the possible and the problem of reality. Therefore, as a preliminary work, we will first explore the chaos of eternal return, accidents and events, sufficient reasons, and sensations of the body without organs and its organs, because reality is related to chaos before the occurrence of the world-universe. Deleuze determines this chaos as the virtual-the possible (but it doesn’t exist). It is this problem of reality that is analyzed along with the possibility of chaos. Also, for Bacon, the diagram is not a primitive chaos, but a chaos manipulated by hands, and it creates traces of the accident of that chaos. This paper analyzes how the original reality of the body without organs is acquired, and finally compares this reality with the possibility of fact in a diagram.

This study aims to examine the absurd image works of Eva Hesse based on the affect theory in Jean-François Lyotard’s later studies. Lyotard discovered “affect” in the case of Sigmund Freud’s Emma and looked into trauma affect based on this. Lyotard sees affect as inarticulate. Affect is a state and moment that cannot be expressed in words, so the expression becomes unclear. So, the part of affect that cannot be segmented attempts “arbitrary representation (visualization) (arbitrary representative).” This affect makes the trauma more evident. Affect is a means of mediating to reactivate memories lost due to trauma and a motivation to clarify the trauma. Emma’s case reveals that affect is distinct from conscious emotion. Just as the linguistic expression of absurdity is reflected in images for Hesse, her traumatic affective existence may be reflected in images that are arbitrary representations in a form similar to absurdity.

Michael Fried’s article “Art and Objecthood,” published in 1967 intervened with great polemical force into discussions of minimalism and what we would generally call postmodernism. It sharply criticized the coldness, inertness or blankness of minimalist (literalist) objects claiming that they failed to meet up the condition of ‘art.’ In his writing, the concept of ‘theatricality,’ detrimental to such a condition was both controversial and significant in the discourse of art history. Since the 2000s Fried has focused on contemporary photography. Among the artists he spotlighted, this paper highlights Thomas Demand’s work in relation to Fried’s reading of Barthes’s ‘punctum.’ Fried has insisted that it should be read as a mark of ‘antitheatricality’ coming from its unintendedness. In Demand’s photography, however, Fried has shown that he “intentionally” makes cold, lifeless and blank images, which also brings up antitheatricality and does not allow the beholder to become involved in it. This paper thus attempts to trace the relationship between antitheatricality and the artist’s intentionality in photography. In doing so, it sheds light on the antitheatrical way in which the subjective experience of the beholder and the artist’s intentionality grow apart.

The graffiti artist Banksy’s artwork and its process are markedly different from traditional artistic postures and grammar. This sense of distance not only rejects the representation of art and its stylistic framework, but also generates a sentiment of social action that seeks to dismantle the capitalist authority produced from it. In Banksy’s works, the theatrical characteristics of the historical avant-garde and Happening art, which have been confirmed in terms of theatre history, appear in common. This is because he is rational and conceptual, and emphasizes the practical characteristics that strongly operate performativity. The performative characteristics of Banksy’s art are closely related to emergence and event. His work is exactly in line with the performative tendency of contemporary applied theater, which wants the theater to come out and contemplate the actual change of the audience and share its possibilities. Thus, Banksy’s art reflects the aesthetic principle from performativity that operates the event character rather than the logos system, and has the characteristic of directing social action oriented toward a practical attitude.