South Korea to trial robot prison guards

It is just wrong on so many levels

So may we all look forward to the day when we toil in private prisons assembling Microsoft products under the watchful eye of our robot overlords!!

South Korean Landscapes of Capital

I've never forgotten that essay published in Logics of Television (edited by Patricia Mellencamp) all those years ago about how electronic freeway billboards offer a glimpse of what it might be like for all of us to live inside "one gigantic machine". This analogy points to how cityscapes can evoke circuitboards of desire, with the mobile privatization of the car, which is used to navigate public space, in effect reducing this space to a means to an end: individual consumption. One could refer to the Situationists in this context (we are becoming more beholden to "the spectacle" etc) as well. But rather than link to Ken Wark's animated history of the Situationists, which has gone viral,  I thought I'd draw attention to another piece that impresses in terms of its ambitious scale and accompanying bibliography: please check out Landscapes of Capital to help contextualize this South Korean example; it has relevance, of course, to other "global" cities as well. The critical point then is that the construction of these "dreamworlds" is dependent on a process of abstraction:

Abstracted, aestheticized, and decontextualized, the signifiers of landscape in corporate advertising have been cleansed of the ravages of Capital -- the shantytowns and barrios, unemployment lines, soup kitchens, polluted air and water, or IMF austerity measures and ensuing riots. What remains is less a contested terrain than a reflection of the wonderment brought on by Capital.

Another central element of this process must be referred to here: the elimination of any reference to the workers who ensure these products are manufactured, stocked, and then delivered to meet customers' expectations of "convenience". As an antidote I recommend the excellent documentary called Manufactured Landscapes, which shows the changes to landscapes due to industrial work and manufacturing. Such manufactured landscapes can be contrasted with the "second-order" landscapes removed from materiality (by the process of representation) utilized by the advertising industry, that we find in this South Korean example.

An open letter to Gord Sellar about South Korean sci fi

Hi again Gord,

Thought I'd drop you a quick line on something I've just across expanding on what I wrote in the comments thread. I haven't got to your series of posts yet, but I can see great potential in the following pieces.

I'm impressed by the way that Kim Soyoung reworks the concept of the public sphere in terms of South Korean independent filmmakers attempting to distribute their works outside the blockbuster circuit, as well as differentiating their form and content. This is because they in part define themselves against the way that local blockbusters reconfigure cultural nationalism and globalization in terms of the government's neoliberal policy agenda:


"The key issue that local blockbusters bring to the fore lies not so much in the actual amounts of real profit they generate as the investments they show of national cultural value. These investments go alongside a consistent emphasis on the virtues of the movie industry itself as something of an exemplary smog-free, post-industrial sector by the government since the 1990s which sits well with its new purpose in the popular imagination. Notwithstanding the often outrageous marketing fees and ticket sales, the film industry as a whole in the year of 2001 made profits that were only equivalent to those of a medium-size corporation. Nevertheless, what the film industry in its blockbuster mode displays and informs are the popular imagining of the working of finance capital and mass investment culture. The ‘Netizen Fund’ set up on the internet by film companies finds enthusiastic investors, often with such volume of usage that people complain about accessibility. Both the blockbuster movies and the related dissemination of blockbuster culture appear to announce a cultural era of investment that clearly plays a critical role in strengthening the hegemonic dominance of finance capital. This cultural intervention links the perceived interests of tens of millions of workers to its own by embedding ‘ investor practices’ into their everyday lives and by offering them the appearance of a stake within a neo-liberal order." (Harmes May-June 2001) 


Might this not also be construed, along with Shin, in terms of a limitation placed on civil society/public sphere by these dominant discourses? Afterall, "trans cinema" is marginalized. Furthermore, I think it's pretty obvious that if you're forced to work within the "trans cinema", the special effects budget usually demanded by sci fi cinema is going to be out of reach. Although much could be read into Kim Soyoung's piece about the fracturing of genre, which may contribute to the relative absence of indigenous sci fi per se, I also think it is not easy to pass up on  Moon Jae-cheol's critical observation that "recent Korean films are characterized by a desire for newness, and then reads in contemporary cinema the tendency to distance themselves from grand narratives, such as progress and ideology, to prioritize image over narrative and theme, and liberate themselves from responsibility to the societal role of films". As I alluded to in the comments thread, it is difficult to envisage sci fi without such grand narratives (there I mentioned "utopia" specifically). This too, might be classified as an inherent limitation.

I've focused on South Korea's film industry, but remember, Thomas Whiteside warned us in The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing that the book publishing industry can be beholden to the film industry. So there might be something there that could account for the dearth of published South Korean sci fi as well, at least in recent years. To me, this suggests any answer is dependent on how much historical contextualization you want to use to frame how the genre has developed in South Korea. 


I'll let you know if I come up with anything else once I've read your series of posts.

Placing the Future in South Korea?

Just doing some rapid postings here of some stuff I will further investigate (in my own time, even if I don't post it here, because my interactions with Korean faculty and students of late obliges me to do so). So I don't have time to really shape this as an essay.


Anyway,  Gord Sellar is curious why sci fi hasn't put down roots in South Korea. To him, the question is perplexing, insofar as the country appears to be influenced by foreign sci fi:


In recent years, the government has advanced proposals for such insane things as robotic nannies who could teach English to children — and even a goal to put one in every home by 2015, no less (here’s where The Economistmentions it)… which should alarm those worried about government surveillance and privacy, since the bots will doubtless be running on wireless networks and a virus-susceptible Windows BotX edition. They also are hoping to get robotic patrol-botsset up to guard the DMZ. Autonomous bots! As Michael humorously points out, we’d better hope they’re multilingual, or there will be a lot of dead hakwon teachers and immigrant factory workers. Actually, they don’t seem to be coming along too quickly anyway.


Notwithstanding these parallels, Sellar wants to argue that one should be careful about mapping civilizational developmental narratives in Western terms, asking:


"Would a Korean postmodernity even look familiar to a Westerner? Need a Korean imagine the future the way an American does? Granted, Korea is likely to import whatever generalized postmodernity actually succeeds here, as it has modernity, and as academics in some fields at least have been doing for some time, but would it necessarily have to do so?" 


The essay remains inconclusive, supposedly on account of the absence of a strong South Korean sci fi tradition.  Please note though, the piece is part of a series, so I would recommend following the listed links to see where else he takes the argument. What is significant for present purposes though, is the reference to William Gibson's well-known piece, "Modern Boys and Mobile Girls", from which can (according to Sellar) be inferred that the telling difference has to do with how "Japan and China, interestingly, both share something specifically with the Anglophone West that Korea does not, which is an awkward colonialist history". Unfortunately, this aspect of the essay remains undeveloped. What I think is more telling then is how the reference to Gibson is reinforced by his most recent piece, which appeared in the New York Times. Gibson has not given up on the idea of finding the future in a place. The reality of globalization leads me to question the viability of this position. So I would instead conclude, along with Samuel Gerald Collins, that a more fruitful line of inquiry could be conducted in terms of "cultural arbitrage":


  "...the gap that opens up between global modernity and the kind of hopes and expectations people have for their lives. Looking somewhere else doesn't mean that our life will become more like their life. But it does open up the possibility for reflecting on similar conditions in the US. That is, the "gap" opens up onto our contradictory experiences and expectations and forces us to question the course of our own futures."


Hence, the said approach treats Seoul not "as as a window onto the future, but as a means for thinking about our mutual futures".


I'm very keen to see where this goes.

Militarism and Resistance in South Korea 한국 군사주의와 저항

South Korea has more citizens imprisoned for conscientious objection to military service than any other nation in the world. Over 700 are currently serving 18 month terms. Every year, men face the brutal choice to join the military complex or follow their conscience, facing social ostracism and imprisonment. A history of Japanese imperialism, a civil war sparked by the United States and Soviet jousting. Three decades of military dictatorship. Pervasive United States military presence. Violent destruction of farming villages for the expansion of U.S. bases. A National Security Act that restricts freedom of speech and opposition to military duty. Korea has recently begun to openly face its own contradictions of "democracy" and a deeply ingrained militarization.

seoulidarity.net
in korean - withoutwar.org

Gwangjuremembering the (be)coming insurrection

U.S. Involvement in the Gwangju Uprising George Katsiaficas

George Katsiaficas is currently living in Gwangju, South Korea. A visiting professor of sociology at Chonnam National University, he is finishing research on East Asian uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s.