Sungyong Ahn

I am a media studies scholar studying current smart technologies and consequent ontological conundrums we face as these machines become smarter than us at telling how things are within ourselves and around our worlds. My previous research on the Internet of Things (IoT) was about these hidden arrangements of things in our background that machines constantly remind us of as those we should always be a little paranoid of, and how this normalized paranoia leads us to accept the IoT as a new smarter technique of self-governance. My first book Internet-ontologies-Things: Smart Objects, Hidden Problems, and their Symmetries (2023) argues these popular narratives of smart lives as our strategic and speculative responses to such common feelings: "Something is there, so embedded in our bodies, homes, and neighbourhoods. We feel it but cannot grasp it!"

Digital ontology is the term that best describes the nature of my research but it's less relevant to a pure philosophical inquiry about how things are in the world. Ontology in my practical and critical concern is rather related to the new capitalist ideology (or realism) that runs media industries’ current speculative economy. So, my critical reading of the ontological turn in humanities and social sciences focuses on its strategic dimension. How does this turn draw our attention to the things that our too-human perception always fails to pay the right attention to? How does this in turn mobilize our constant speculation about things beyond our perceptions and control, not only as the inexhaustible source of our anxieties but also as the inexhaustible resource of cultural production?

My current research interests include Digital Ontology, New Materialism, Speculative (Capitalist) Realism, Quantum Physics as Cultural Imagination, Science and Technology Studies, Actor-Network Theory, French Philosophers (e.g. Foucault, Deleuze, and Badiou), Eco- and Geo-philosophy/criticism, new materialist film and videogame studies.