Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_XJidrGLI

In his latest mash-up, DJ Masa remixes songs by all the most famous k*pop groups, including Girls Generation, SHINee, 2NE1, Big Bang, and Super Junior, into one bangin’ dance track known succinctly as ULTIMATE K-POP SONG.

Carlos Henrique Brandão, self-taught DJ, is quickly gaining popularity in the mash-up genre, especially among k-pop fans.  Mixing under the name DJ Masa, this 24-year-old Brazilian has been featured internationally in MTV-K, the Korean Broadcasting System, and TEENS magazine from Singapore, among others.

On his fan-friendly website, DJ Masa explains that he has been following the musical trends of Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan since 2003.  His love of Asian pop music inspired him to start making mixes and posting them to international music forums.  After receiving an overwhelmingly positive response, he started playing his mixes for friends at college parties, and the project eventually grew into a website with an impressive fan base.

To accompany some of his track releases, DJ Masa started making mash-up videos that are just as harmoniously composed as his music.  The compilations are filled with k*pop goodies for knowledgeable fans, like chocolate eggs in an Easter basket, but the DJ also has treats that appeal to a much wider audience.  Many of his tracks mix Asian artists with famous American pop artists, creating some unique combos such as Girls Generation and Lil John, SHINee and Lady GaGa, and U-Kiss and Jennifer Lopez.  With something for everyone to love, this k*pop-fan-turned-international-DJ is an inspiration to us all.

You can download DJ Masa’s mixes at http://new.official.fm/masamixes.

Like modernism and postmodernism, metamodernism is expressed through many mindsets, practices, art forms, media and genres.  The most notable is Romanticism, or the more updated version, New Romanticism.  New Romanticism is a response to the postmodern and the modern, like how Romanticism was a response to the Enlightenment.  Modernity is characterized by an anxiety to reconstruct the everyday in the name of this or that universalism, while postmodernism is the neurosis to deconstruct the everyday along the heterogeneous lines of race, gender, and place.  New Romanticism seeks to come to terms with the commonplace as it is and at the same time imagine how it could be but never will be.

Novalis, a philosopher, once said that in order to discover the original meaning of the world, it must be romanticized.  To romanticize something means to give it a qualitative heightening, like presenting the ordinary with mystery, or making something familiar seem unfamiliar.  Romanticism concentrates on the tragic and the sublime, the uncanny and the mystical, in order to present the commonplace with significance.  But, because the commonplace can never become wholly significant, it is forever becoming and never perfected.  Isaiah Berlin said that if there were one word to describe Romanticism it would be contradiction, because it is always oscillating between attempt and failure.  Because of the hesitation that occurs as a result of oscillation, Romanticism inclines toward the tragic.  Romanticism can have many different definitions.  He said Romanticism is unity and multiplicity, beauty and ugliness, art for art’s sake, art as instrument of social salvation, strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, love of life and love of death.  It is an attitude, or sensibility, rather than an aesthetic regime or system of thought.

Though Romanticism leans toward the tragic, it is not the same distrust in reason that characterizes postmodernism.  Postmodernism turns to pluralism, irony, Postmodernism irony is bound to apathy, but Romantic Irony is bound to desire.  Romanticism is the dissatisfaction about the present and a desire for a future that has not been planned, while postmodernism just seeks to deconstruct the present that is given.

Romanticism began to reappear in the early 2000s with artist such as Olafur Eliasson and Catherine Opie.  Some Romantic artists include Armin Boehm, Gregory Crewdson, and Glenn Rubsamen.

Mi Yuming is a Chinese photographic artist working somewhere between reality and virtuality.  Combining real photographic images with digitally created media, the surreal pieces she composes blur the boundaries between what can be perceived as real in a society overflowing with images.  In works described as a “cyber-rave fairy tale,” the viewer is visually bombarded into questioning how the constant stream of images we encounter changes the way we think.

In her artist statement, Yuming says her works are a visual representation of our current “bustling and vibrant post-industrial society,” which she calls “Super Modern Society.”  She believes that in addition to a form of expression, image is “a significant means to tell changes and developments of the civil society, and to record the history and future.”  Record the future?  Sounds crazy, but seems plausible in a world where technology allows one to replace reality with their own virtuality.

With her visually harsh but captivating virtual worlds, Yuming exemplifies the power technology gives us, and stresses the importance of thinking about what type of reality we want to create.  Perhaps we should consider upgrading from “Super Modern Society” to Super Happy Funtime Modern Society Extravaganza!!!

We already know that metamodernism is an oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, which makes it a huge struggle for people to understand if they don’t have working definitions for every aspect of the modern and postmodern.  For this post, we must first define the mo and the pomo in terms of art.

The modern is associated with utopism, formalism, functionalism, sequences and series, syntaxis, restlessness, alienation, streams of consciousness, cubism, Reason, trauma, mass production, and schizophrenia.  The postmodern is associated with dystopism, the ‘end of history’, differance, relativism, irony, pastiche, consumption, multiculturalism, deconstruction, cyberspace, virtualization, pluralism, parataxis, the ‘unrepresentable’, and interesse.  Jacques Ranciere says that both modernism and postmodernism show democratization of the relationship between the sayable and the visible.

Metamodernism in art unlike modernism and postmodernism because it no longer merely seeks to deconstruct the commonplace, but also to reconstruct it.  Metamodernists take concepts or meanings and exaggerate, mystify, and alienate them in an attempt to resignify them.  They are trying to create within the commonplace an uncommon space, which sounds very Romantic.

Metamodern was described by Jorg Heiser as Romantic Conceptualism.  He describes Romantic Conceptualism as a tendency with conceptual art that replaces the rational with the emotional and the calculated with the coincidental.

Metamodernism can also be expressed in performatism.  Raoul Eshelman describes performatism as an act of willful self-deceit, in which the truth that is acted out cannot be true.  A holistic, coherent identity is established, but the identity that is formed cannot exist.  This concept of performatism is best articulated in quirky movies such as Amelie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Rushmore, and Juno.  Quirky here is defined as informed naivety.

Metamodernist concepts such as resignification, exaggeration, and alienation can also be seen in freak folk musicians such as Antony & the Johnsons, Devendra Banhart, Best Coast, and Coco Rosie.  These musicians as well as the previously listed movies all have in common the oscillation, as they unsuccessfully negotiate between two opposite poles.  These artists set out to accomplish a tasks they will not, can never, and should never accomplish.  This can also be thought of as an ongoing discussion without an answer, like a blog.

Art critic Jerry Saltz also mentioned in a review he wrote in May 2010 that he had been noticing a new approach to artmaking in recent gallery and museum shows.  He describes the art as having an attitude that says ‘I know the art I’m making may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t serious.’  This indicates that artists are creating art from a compound-complex state of mind in which their the art is knowingly self-conscious, yet unafraid and unashamed.  Saltz also noted that artists have been leaping from medium to medium a lot more lately.

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese sound artist, or electronic composer, born in 1966 in Gifu, Japan.  Ikeda’s music uses beat patterns and raw sounds such as sine tones, noise, and frequencies nearly outside human hearing, to slowly build futuristic soundscapes in his tracks.  His focus is on the characteristics of sound itself.  Ikeda is also a visual artist, using sublime imagery with his sonic media to create live performances and installations.

May through June of 2011, Ikeda had an installation in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall called The Transfinite.  He used a large screen to create a visual and sonic environment that submerged visitors in transformative environment of projected synchronized data.  The work flooded the senses with the use of scale, light, electronic sounds, and rhythm, and forced visitors to confront data on a scale that defies comprehension.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Nl47j5gEy_Q

Datamatics is another work by Ikeda that uses sound and new media to explore the ways in which abstracted views of reality, as in the form of data, are used to understand and control the world.  He manipulates binary data transformed to sound and moving image to create a new world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eaIrSZIyxxk

Taeyoon Choi works in both Seoul and New York City as a new media and performance artist.  He also categorizes himself as a cultural organizer.  Choi works mostly in video, photo, drawing, and robotics.

Lumpens is a group of young Koreans working as “animators,” using video, projections, light shows, and performance.  They often collaborate with musicians and dancers.  Their main focus is how to escape the screen and interact with the audience as they pursue the fantasy of the visual and auditory senses.  Their work falls somewhere between fine art and commercialism.  “Lumpens is a German word for “class lower than the bourgeoisie.”

Yeondoo Jung is a photographer from Seoul, South Korea.  He is a magician-like visual artist who can be described as an “anti-illusionist” working with human technology.  Jung feels that people today live in a fantasy world because of media and the Internet, so the idea of what is real and what is not real has become meaningless.  One of his photo series is called “Wonderland.”  For this series, he collected thousands of children’s drawings and picked several of them to recreate in photography.

“Documentary Nostalgia” is a six-scene movie that was recorded in one take.  The camera was left in a fixed position and the sets changed within the shot.  Elderly people were interviewed about the most memorable events of their lives, and the sets were created based on those stories.

The WTF (what the fuck) Aesthetic, or the aesthetic of the absurd, is becoming more prominent in the Internet Age.  WTF Aesthetic reflects the way consumer-content interaction has changed since the Internet and social media networking has become more commonplace in society.  WTF Aesthetic can be seen in Burger King and Starburst commercials, as well as late-night comedy shows such as Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show Great Job

The aesthetics of the absurd are appealing because audiences find themselves unable to pin point the humor in it.  The inaccessibility of the material is what makes it cool.  Chuck Klosterman, an American author who focuses on American popular culture, describes ‘cool’ as anything that embraces semi-original, semi-elitist cultural artifacts that remain just out of reach to those who desire them.

The adoption of the absurdist aesthetic reflects a greater social change.   Technological changed have altered the way in which we interact with our media objects.  Because of the Internet, the relationship between content and consumer is no longer a one-way street.

Kazys Varnelis is the director of the Network Architecture Lab at Colombia University Graduate School of Architecture.  He wrote Culture in the Age of Networks: A Critical History, a book which comes to terms with the changed conditions in culture that characterize our new, networked age.  His thesis is the network is not just a technology, but rather a cultural dominant, because not only does the network connect the world, it reconfigures economy, culture, and even subjectivity.

Network culture, according to Varnelis, is an intensification of conditions that are normally suppressed in modernity and post modernity.  Art, media, and the public sphere are all changing, but the change is a process in which existing conditions intensify to entirely new conditions.

Varnelis uses the term “network culture” instead of “metamodernism.”

Network culture is basically a networked information society that follows a system of production, distribution, and consumption of information goods that is characterized by widely distributed non-market products that don’t depend on market strategies to be consumed.  “Networked information society” is a term coined by Yochai Benkler.  Because of this networked information society, end-users, rather than manufacturers, become responsible for a large amount of product innovation.  This concept is called “user innovation” by Eric von Hippel.  Thanks to the Internet, the cost of making products available has declined drastically.  Because users become responsible for innovation and more people can become producers, network culture leads to greater cultural diversity.  Not only does network culture create diversity, it changes the way society thinks.  For example, Benkler states that bogs and other modes of participatory nature can lead to a more critical and self-reflective culture, since people are having their work constantly reviewed, and have to think about what they say more.

Web 2.0 is the basis for this new networked culture.  Web 2.0 sites allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community.  It basically includes web applications that facilitate this participatory information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the Web.  Websites that are not Web 2.0 include sites where users, or consumers, are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them.  Web 2.0 is all about user-creation and sharing.

Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and cultural theorist associated with postmodernism, was concerned with the way technological advancements affect social change, as well.  He is best known for analysis on the modes of mediation and technological communication, so he applies directly to Network Culture and Web 2.0.  He was also famous for his concept of Simulation, in which he states all is composed of references, which creates a hyperreality.  Baudrillard also felt that the speed at which society moves has destabilized the linearity of history.

In February 2012 Korean fashion designer Lie Sang Bong did a presentation at MAD called Lie Sang Bong:  Fashion, Art, and Korean Culture.  The Korea Society partnered with MAD to make the presentation possible.  LSB used a multimedia presentation to illustrate the many aspects of Korean culture that influenced his designs, such as traditional paintings, calligraphy, and architecture.  His fashions have been worn by celebrities like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.  The presentation “emphasized the incredible dynamism of Korean culture today.”

I was really excited for this presentation, but didn’t anticipate the huge turn out.  The show was totally sold out by the time I got to MAD, and the lobby was filled with mostly Korean, mostly very fashionable people.  Luckily, after waiting a while, I was able to get a rush ticket and a seat near the front!

From what I observed, many people in the audience were fashion students who seemed very eager to learn from Lie Sang Bong and were diligently taking notes.  I don’t know that much about fashion, but I had heard the designers name and knew he would have some interesting things to say, especially about his Korean influences and how traditional Korean heritage has affected his very contemporary and edgy work as a fashion designer.

The first things LSB said was that fashion is not just about clothes, but also history and heritage.  The presentation was organized into three parts: inspirations/themes, culture and fashion, and art and fashion.  His first example was about Hangul, the Korean alphabet.  Hangul was created in the mid-15^th century by Sejong the Great, a Korean king.  Its purpose was to make it easier for more people to become literate.  LSB considers Hangul the greatest heritage Korea has, and one of the greatest cultural assets of the world.  He uses the characters from the Korean alphabet as prints in his clothing.  The Hangul collection has been worn by actress Lindsay Lohan and Korean figure skater Yuna Kim.  He mentioned that when he was working on the collection with his staff in Paris, they were surprised to learn that Korea had its own alphabet.  The show he did involving the Hangul fashion was called Heaven, People, Earth.

LSB also stated that his fashion philosophy was to create a fusion of East and West.  In his 2007 show called Zen, he tried to answer the question of how Korea is different from the Asia that the West sees through Japan and China.  In Zen, LSB used the fluid grace of arched lines to create representations of mountains, wind, waves, and clouds.

Another show in 2012, Dancheong,  was inspired by traditional Korean architecture such as decorative wooden buildings, old Korean furniture, and traditional motifs or fixtures such as butterfly hinges.  LSB said he used traditional motifs, but brought them into the future, and created clothes that juxtapose Eastern sensitivities with Western ideas.  Lie Sang Bong believes the “undercurrent of tradition” is present in all of his works.

LSB also discussed cubism in his designs, describing how the movement deconstructs an image and make something new from it.  This show was inspired by jogakbo, traditional Korean quilt cloth.

There were several models at the presentation wearing different seasons of LSB’s clothes.  Towards the end of his presentation, he slipped in his special relationship with birds and left the stage.  He was a very cute and very talented guy.

Source

Transjourney is a future media festival that was held in Taiwan from January 1^st through February 19^th of 2012.  It is the first major event in Taiwan to focus on new media art.  Held by the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (KdMoFA), the festival shows new formats of creative digital artwork from recent years, with the goal of bringing new artistic languages together with technology.  Participants consist of locally and internationally renowned artists and talents from research institutes that focus on the field of applied art and design.  One of the featured artists is Nam June Paik, a Korean American video installation artist.  The festival celebrates media technology and the art world embracing new media that seeks to spark a series of stimulating conversations in art and aesthetics.  The festival “puts forward a new creative possibility in the globalized context, integrating art, performance, sound, video, gaming, lifestyle, and technology, to illustrate the trajectory of future arts,” creating “a sensual experience in both the imagined and real world.”

Source