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PROJECT 04

K-Pop and the Smart City:Mythologies and Techniques of Future Prosperity

This paper draws attention to the interdependency between popular media text and a city: K-Pop music videos (MV) and a smart city of Songdo. It is an exploratory endeavor to figure out how both media and the city have become integral to the broader discursive formation regarding the future and the practices of future-making in South Korea. The interdependent relationship between the smart city’s physical urban environment and affective space of K-Pop MV serves as a crucial site through which a particular modality of enunciating the future in South Korea unfolds.

 

This paper shows how this specific coordination characterizes the specificity of South Korean creative economy that bridges the aspiration for the transnational flow, the idea of a future city conflated with a mythology of the nation-state, and institutional arrangements for nurturing creative economy that involves a shifting mode of governing the economy, urban life, and the self.

References

GCF Songdo Style by Psy (Oct 15, 2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6SLIW3NhrA

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