공중부양의 시대, 움직이는 미디어와 자유 낙하 = In the Time of Levitation, Media in Mobile and Free Falling

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay, which examines levitation images in today’s short-form videos, attempts to articulate historical insights from the dual mobility of cinematic images of spatial frames and continuous time frames. As filmic media become more deeply embedded in modern life, more and more technologies and devices are being used as invisible. Likewise, backgrounds are often removed and images are circulated with a simple drag-and-drop as if floating in the air, that is, without any ground, foundation or source. With these flimsy images, our senses of being in the world is often eroded by the fragmented images that overflood in social media. The dual structure of continuous time of moving images makes film an excellent art for capturing passing reality, which simultaneously activates our attention and distraction. Just as Jonathan Crary points out the cultural and historical significance of the 19th century levitation images produced through animation techniques of the time, the human eye recognizes new realities of movements by adapting adjusted its vision to the light and new speeds opened up by various new media. In other words, in the impossible challenge of a fixed gaze toward a moving world, moving images create visibility by controlling their speed, and for this purpose, the dispersed and volatilized attention has repeated the illusion and the dissolution of the illusion. Meanwhile, we realize that images fixed in linear perspective do not translate reality as it is, but are merely ideal images that exist only on a virtual plane. The moment we break that mold, we may fall, but we gain new perspectives and visions.
This paper shows that confronting the laws of the physical world called gravity by recreating the trajectory of falls and flights that contemporary art has always aimed for but failed, may be the only force that can help us overcome the extreme lightness and cynicism in today’s world where short-form videos abound.