Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

Through in-depth case studies of three artists and artist groups, the present paper traces a trajectory along which inter-cultural communication expands into multi-sensorial and performative sites of belonging. I analyze three South Korean and Japanese new media art projects that demystify mutual communication and reinvent the technologies of verbal conversation: Japanese media artist and theorist Fujihata Masaki’s Beyond Pages (1994), an interactive environment for learning new languages; Seoul-based media art collective Young Hye Chang Heavy Industries’s text animations distributed in multiple languages on the Internet; and Omotenashi Mask (2016), Japanese design engineer group Takram’s online reality installation that reenacts a Japanese taxi driver’s dialogue with a foreign visitor without translation. These works share an issue of what roles and necessities languages play in the age of new media and digital culture, if the reconstruction of experience is possible without any written / spoken explanation and description. These works allow us to reconsider what structures have dominated our conception of our individual and collective subjectivities and to question how neutrally those structures have been operated. I answer the question of how these artists’ aesthetic practices dismantle the current system of language, which they deem impediment of interactivity. In addition, by scrutinizing the concerns and needs South Korea and Japan shared in the 1990s, I demonstrate the methodological significance of the “transnational,” more specifically “the trans-Asian,” for remapping the topography of contemporary new media art.