We Are Living in a Big Steel Factory: Pohang Steel’s Media Experiments on Data Infrastructure

This talk casts light on the steel manufacturing industry’s place in South Korea’s media culture from the 1960s to the present that transcends the boundary of industrialist and post-industrialist society. By covering a series of pioneering yet unknown media experiments led by Pohang Steel (now POSCO), South Korea’s largest steel-making company established in 1968, I demonstrate how the company has fulfilled the seemingly impossible task of rendering intangible data flow palpable. In introducing the company’s expansion to the data management industry since 1989 by recasting the steel factory operation experience, Pohang Steel imagined “information society” as an extension of the steel factory where data flow is no different from molten iron that strikes steelworker’s bodily sensoria through its heat and glow. Just as a steelworker bodily maps out the rhythm of molten iron running through the factory, the immersive effect created by audiovisual and haptic media technologies in Pohang Steel’s art pavilion, TV commercials, and museums led the viewer to “feel” the data infrastructure propping Korea. Accordingly, my presentation promotes a comprehensive understanding of Korean media culture where steel manufacturing is not a banal subject of bygone industrialist propaganda, but a mode of comprehending and depicting Korea’s emergence as an information and telecommunications power. 

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About the speaker: 
Chan Yong Bu is a postdoctoral fellow in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research focuses on the entanglements of the body, science, and technology within media culture as crucial sites for human-nonhuman relations. In particular, Chan Yong works on industrial media in South and North Korea, media spectacles in the form of science-themed megaevents in East Asia, and contemporary Korean media depictions of industrial ruins and waste. His current book project casts light on the steel manufacturing industry’s place in South and North Korea’s media culture from the 1950s to the present, crossing the boundaries of Cold War ideologies as well as of industrialist and post-industrialist societies. He received his A.B. in Korean Language and Literature (2016, summa cum laude) at Yonsei University and Ph.D. in East Asian Studies (2022) at Princeton University.