MEDIUM

Why, now, MEDIUM?

This research project began with a deceptively simple question: Why does the same utterance sound entirely different in different contexts? Why does identical data yield contradictory conclusions when passed through different algorithms? Why do scientific findings shift depending on the instruments and protocols of the laboratory? These questions may appear unrelated, yet beneath them lies a shared structure—the processes of transmission and transformation alter the content itself. 

Across the disciplines today, the recurring question is no longer simply "what is true?" In the natural sciences, the ways in which the observational environment, the medium, and the configuration of instruments intervene in results have emerged as central concerns. In engineering and information science, there is growing recognition that meaning shifts fundamentally depending on the pathways and structures through which data passes. The humanities and cultural studies, too, confront the limits of explaining communication, interpretation, trust, and authority through content alone. 

These problems, raised across distinct fields, increasingly converge on a single shared challenge: How do the processes of transmitting, transforming, and mediating constitute the result itself? Our research center organizes this challenge through the concept of MEDIUM. Here, MEDIUM is not a term belonging to any single discipline but rather a problematic point of contact demanded by the contemporary research landscape—and it is precisely this multivalence that makes it a keyword capable of enabling transdisciplinary thought. 

The transdisciplinary research programs at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study have aimed not merely at interdisciplinary collaboration, but at reconstituting problems—those that individual disciplines cannot resolve within their own boundaries—through contact with other modes of thinking. The theme of MEDIUM aligns precisely with this aim. The problems of medium and media, of mediation and transformation, do not arise solely within any single discipline; they emerge necessarily in the spaces between disciplines, between theory and practice, between observation and interpretation. 

The rapid proliferation of AI and large language models (LLMs), the pervasive turn toward digital media environments, and the everyday normalization of virtual and augmented reality technologies have made the problem of MEDIUM all the more urgent. As the boundaries between human and machine, real and virtual, original and copy grow blurred, we can no longer avoid asking after the role and operation of that which mediates and transforms. While recognizing this urgency, our research center seeks not to chase the surface of technological phenomena, but to explore the epistemological and ontological problems at their foundation through interdisciplinary dialogue.