#Mia reading sebastian her poem tv#

While reading The World’s Lightest Motorcycle this spring, I felt as if I’d encountered an oracular text that predicted with stunning precision where humans have ended up. How technocapitalism alters what people are and what they create might feel like a well-worn trope, particularly after a pandemic year when many did little more than sit in front of screens, think about what sitting in front of screens means, and imagine what they could have done differently to avoid the whole situation. Lew-is “ I Click Therefore I Am,” a title that succinctly expresses her ontological concerns.) Further, Koh and Cancio-Bello observe that Yi Won’s work positions South Korea “within complex systems around the globe,” thus vividly rendering “feedback loops that define our interconnectedness, our universality.” In this context, as Koh and Cancio-Bello note, Yi Won’s writing “has been lauded for its paradigm shifts about the information age and digital civilization.” (One of Yi Won’s best-known poems-not included in the new volume but previously translated by Walter K. It was also the time when South Korea emerged as the most connected country in the world. These two works bookend roughly a decade, 1996 to 2007, in which the world entered a new century and grappled with the imagined anxieties and unimaginable actualities that came with that transition.

Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello the other half is The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, the eponymous collection published 11 years later. When They Ruled the Earth makes up the first half of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), a new volume translated by E.J. This work announced to Korean readers a posthumanist poetics in which personal computers, plastic bags, particulate-filled air, and shadows cast on asphalt are animated and, in turn, animate the lyric subject. He simply had to make legible, and therefore realizable, a composite of what technocapitalism had determined humans should strive to become.Ī year before Cyber Singer Adam came to conquer this world, the South Korean poet Yi Won published her debut collection, When They Ruled the Earth. Miraculously, Adam begat without ever becoming human. But a generation later, scores of K-pop stars, cosmopolitans who can afford trendy touch-ups, and anyone using a beauty filter on Snapchat appear to carry his genes. In the 1990s, no one I encountered in Seoul or even saw on television looked anything like Adam. The pity I feel is not for Adam himself but for my own naïve conviction that, because he was virtual, Adam couldn't be real. He insisted his special talent was ad-libbing on the guitar and that his favorite food was kimchi-jjigae (kimchi stew). Despite his peach-crayon skin, impossibly sharp nose, and perfectly V-shaped chin, Adam declared himself a real Korean boy looking for his human Eve. Although I’m flooded with pity thinking of Adam now, at the time I found his desperation to come across as human rather creepy.

#Mia reading sebastian her poem tv#

Unveiled in 1997, Adam signaled the dawn of immaculately manufactured K-pop idols at a time when most people still believed in the inherent separation between “the real” and “the virtual.” In 1998, Adam released an album titled Genesis (what else?), but it was his novelty that put him all over South Korean TV and doomed him to be a one-hit wonder. Earlier this year, I came across a 15-minute video from a YouTuber called Weekly Weird Kpop that introduced global Anglophone viewers to Cyber Singer Adam, South Korea’s first virtual pop star.