2021, Vol.63, No.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.81

pISSN : 1229-0246
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksasa

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.