Moving Across Scale and Platform in Seoul Walker, Rider, Smartphone Talker In Ryu Shin’s 2014 Seoul Arcade Project, the author, in the persona of the “walker” (구보), explores Seoul through Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” focusing on the phantasmagoria of Korean capitalism and spectacle over the course of a day’s travel from Gangnam to Gangbuk and back again. That said, there are some significant differences between Ryu’s project and Benjamin’s, notably in the presence of two technologies altogether absent from Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece: the smart phone and the subway. More than just communication and travel, Ryu’s subway and smartphone combination fuels his narrator’s journey across multiple forms of transit to Seoul’s diverse spaces. Here, the project is a renewed call for analyses of urban mobility systems, but not only that—it’s a call to look into the ways urban practice involves this assemblage of movement, technology and communication. Th...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.