Research purposes

Our research center does not fix any single case as its object of study. Rather, there exist several observation points that most vividly reveal the operation of MEDIUM, and these are repeatedly summoned across distinct disciplinary contexts. The moment in physics when the choice of medium alters observational outcomes, the scene in engineering where algorithmic and model structures reconstitute the meaning of results, the ways in which forms of mediation and performance organize the persuasiveness of interpretation in cultural practice—however different these objects may be, they share the same problem structure. 

The first observation point is the problem of translation and transformation. Not only translation between natural languages, but also transformation between code and language, between analog and digital, between the visual and the auditory—what is preserved, and what is altered? The advent of machine translation and large language models has pushed this problem to a new dimension. Is the text generated by an LLM "translation" or "creation"? What happens between input and output? Such questions extend beyond technical curiosity into fundamental inquiries about the nature of language and meaning, of understanding and generation. The problems of untranslatability, lossy compression, and semantic distortion in format conversion are raised, each in its own way, across the natural sciences, engineering, and the humanities. 

The second observation point is the problem of the interface and the surface of contact. What happens at the boundary where different systems meet? What is the role of mediation at the human-machine interface, at the contact surface between organism and environment, in the contact zones between one culture and another? In HCI (human-computer interaction) research, in ecology, and in studies of intercultural communication, this problem has been explored through different vocabularies. Our research center attempts to bring these into dialogue. 

The third observation point concerns how trust and authority are constituted. What makes a given claim believable? The credibility of scientific knowledge is established through experimental apparatus and protocols, peer-review systems, and publication media. In journalism and the public sphere, the reliability of information is shaped by the authority of the medium, fact-checking procedures, and algorithmic curation. In religion and ritual, sanctity and efficacy are produced through performance, repetition, and material mediators. Across all these domains, MEDIUM is not a mere conveyor but a constituent of the conditions of trust.

For instance, shamanism can be read not so much as a case of traditional belief but as a cultural practice that openly reveals how forms of mediation constitute interpretation and authority. In the gut ritual, the shaman claims to "transmit" the words of the spirits, yet that transmission is never transparent. The rhythm and dance, the costumes and offerings, the trembling of the body and the modulation of the voice—all of these are part of the message, and are the very conditions under which the message gains trust. Shamanism does not seek to prove the accuracy of information. Instead, through repetition, performance, and bodily rhythm, it organizes a persuasive order even amid uncertainty. In this sense, shamanism does not replace cases drawn from the natural sciences or engineering, yet it offers an important reference point for comparing and reflecting on the cultural modes of MEDIUM's operation. At the same time, this is a reconsideration of modes of knowledge production that have been excluded from academic systems centered on Western modern rationality.

Our research center takes such cases as points of departure, but does not limit its scope to them. The problem of MEDIUM recurs at every point where observation, computation, communication, and interpretation occur, and our research center takes this very structure of repetition as its object of inquiry.

The theoretical resources available to our work are diverse. As John Durham Peters demonstrated in Speaking into the Air, the history of communication is at once the history of the conditions that make communication possible—that is, the history of media, technologies, and institutions. Karen Barad's agential realism argues that the observing apparatus and the observed object cannot be separated, and that the act of measurement itself constitutes the phenomenon; this theorizes the very point where the MEDIUM problem in the natural sciences meets that of the humanities. Susan Leigh Star's concept of boundary objects attends to the objects and concepts that enable translation and coordination among different social worlds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's analysis of new media explores how the materiality of "storage" and "transmission" in digital environments connects to questions of power and memory. The concept of remediation proposed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin shows that new media always reference and transform prior media. These discussions resonate with our research center's concern to grasp MEDIUM not as a mere means of transmission but as an active agent that constitutes and articulates the world.

Our research center, however, does not adopt an approach that presupposes a particular theoretical framework and then applies it. Rather, as researchers from each disciplinary field approach the common theme of MEDIUM with their own concerns and methodologies, we seek to take the tensions and dialogues that arise in this process as the very content of our research. Theory is a resource for dialogue; it must not predetermine the dialogue's conclusions.

Of particular interest is the problem of MEDIUM in the East Asian context. The concepts corresponding to MEDIUM in East Asian traditions—qi (氣) and medium, shamanism and mediation, the thought of gan (間, the "in-between")—exhibit a different framing of the problem than that of the West. In East Asian traditions, for example, qi has been understood as something that flows across matter and spirit, body and mind; this intimates a possibility of thought distinct from the content/form and mind/matter dichotomies presupposed by the Western concept of media. Rather than applying Western theory uncritically, our research center seeks to explore how the MEDIUM problem is constituted differently in the East Asian context, and through this, to reflexively examine the limits of existing theoretical frameworks.