“Synthetic Experience” as Social Commentary and Alternative Media Practitioners in Contemporary Korean Art

Abstract

This article initially explores the way Korean visual artists Yeondoo Jung and Donghee Koo, and young “post internet” generational artists collect digital images and data floating around social networks in order to form an alternative narrative of mainstream social conditions and politics. These media artists in Korea employ a certain cinematic mode, producing experimental alternatives while responding to grand narratives on social media, from natural disasters, conflict, urban and economic crises, to more benign matters. Secondly, it analyzes the recent artistic activities and media practices by millennials in their use of technology, in particular, the SNS, while examining their unique ways of editing travelling digital images as social commentary of their own situations. Because the boundaries of the original and the copy are leak?not even visible on the digital screen?the artists nterplay with the conditions of the raison d’?tre of digitally travelling images. Finally, this essay introduces the newly built “alternative” spaces these young artists employ in addition to their media practices. Their working processes manipulate, distort, and crop digital images that roam the internet, thus producing sociopolitical comments on the artists’ generational predicaments. Consequently, the working processes addressed by these groups of artists in Korea mark theatrical manipulation and digital editing, and augment synthetic experience , the very title derived from Koo’s exhibition.