2017, Vol.10, No.2

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 2092-6081 / eISSN : 2383-9899
https://journal.kci.go.kr/eih

This paper discusses the aesthetic significance of novelistic thought experiments on epistemological and ethical typologies, focusing on Stanislaw Rem’s SF Solaris (1961). Solaris is a masterpiece of modern science fiction that proves that it is a work of literature which invented a new world model. It is also a great achievement that SF works in literary formulas that are different from the work of traditional realistic narratives such as representation and reflection or world view. In science fiction, ‘science’ needs to be understood as ‘cognition’ to perform a creative approach to reality, and ‘novel’ as ‘defamilization’ to reconstruct a new world through the function of cognition. The planet ‘Solaris’ in the novel is an epistemologically unrecognizable ‘other’ from Descartes’s ‘res cogitans’ to Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ (Ding an sich). At the same time, it also implies the concept of ‘sublime’ which is aesthetically reproducible, and at the same time unrepresentable. This paper argues that Solaris is a work that simultaneously performed epistemological inquiry into the outer world and ethical inquiry into neighborhood.

This paper tries to diagnose the meaning of the ‘world’ today. I sought to analyze the web drama Dramworld and the cultural, technological conditions surrounding it. Dramaworld is a type of time-slip drama in which two worlds, “reality-America” and “virtual-Korea(drama),” overlap. Here I have raised three questions and tried to approach the meaning of the world today. First, what is ‘Dramaworld’? Second, what is the meaning of the overlap between these two worlds, America(reality) and Korea(drama)? Finally, what is the relationship between new media, especially smartphone, and the world? In the technological conditions of new media, users resemble like Leibniz’s monad. It looks like a self-enclosed being with “no windows.” However, paradoxically, it results in a connection with the whole, not a separation from the world. The world today seems to have blurred the boundaries between the whole and part, universal and particular, and reality and virtual. Loss of standard usually leads to loss of stability. For that reason, the voices of far right-wing and fundamentalism are revitalized in some parts of the world. What they demand is a society/ state without “windows,” as a pseudo-monadic society/state, that has no relationship to the other. But that reactionary demand only causes the catastrophe rather than bringing stability. At the end of Dramaworld, the stage of the drama is switched over to the real world, not the virtual-drama world. The boundary between two worlds seems to have disappeared. It indicates that it is impossible to secure stability with a sense of the past.

This study explores the initial reception process of Nam June Paik in French public art museums during the 1970s. Paik’s video art was first introduced to French art museums in the mid-70s in a series of historical video art exhibitions held at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (Art Vidéo, Confrontation 74, ARC2; Rétrospective de Nam June Paik, 1978– 1979) and at the Musée national d’art moderne - MNAM/CCI ( Jardin- Vidéos, 1978). The paper analyzes the historical contexts, characteristics, and socio-cultural meaning of these early video art exhibitions in relation to the French museum and artistic landscape of the 1970s. In particular, the study examines the favorable cultural and institutional context that fostered the historical reception of Paik’s video art in France: the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou (1977), a new type of museum that reserved specific space for new media and contemporary art, offering a desperately awaited new dimension to late modern and contemporary art. The paper also discusses the top-down intraduction process of Paik’s early video art in France as well as its significant influence in the development of early French video art history, specifically in relation to the environment of post-68 local artistic scene. In so doing, the study aims to deconstruct the somewhat monolithic and mythical existing historical discourses concerning the artist, suggesting the need for further studies of his work in relation to the cultural, social, political, and historical contexts of its emergence and institutionalization.