디지털 기술시대의 대중예술과 소녀의 복제

Abstract

This paper proposes ‘cultural engineering’ as a new term for cultural analysis and explores the social meaning of pop-art in the digital age. Based upon Jody Berland's notion of "cultural technologies," this paper takes note of the digital-based lifestyle that allows contemporary urban laborers to use digital spatial-temporal modes of existence at their commands. By framing such digital transformation through the tools of 'copy,' 'cut,' 'past,' and 'send' in the context of genetic engineering technologies such as gene-splicing and cloning, it makes attempts to understand the social dimensions surrounding the popular desire for re-making the original and to muse over the social potentials of the new digital culture: whether it will be able to promise the social empowerment for the digital masses as Walter Benjamin responded to the emergence of the cinema in the early twentieth century. As for praxis, this paper applies the new term to the analysis of director Kim Ji-woon's "Janghwa, Honglyeon" and Charles and Thomas Guard brother's "The Uninvited: A Tale of Two Sisters"and tries to reveal the patriarchal lag that two cinematic editions of a traditional Korean folk tale "Janghwa and Honglyeon" conceal in the process of cloning the sexuality and body of "Sonyeo." In doing so, this paper suggests Korean teen-age girls still remain the specter of the patriarchal texts of girlhood since Janghwa and Honglyeon.