Professor Ji hoon Kim, Director of the Center for Cinema and Media Studies (CCMS), has published a new article in New Media & Society, Volume 27, Issue 8.

Issue 27, Number 8 is a special issue on the Digital Twin, offering a critical examination of digital twin technology—not only as a tool for production processes and urban infrastructure but also as a burgeoning technology for the governance, management, and prediction of the planet and its environment. Guest-edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, this special issue features contributions from prominent media scholars, including Jussi Parikka and Orit Halpern.

In his article, “Digital twins as planetary media in Europe and China: Optimization and resilience in scientific and sociotechnical domains,” Director Ji-hoon Kim argues for a shift in perspective. He contends that digital twins—currently acclaimed as the core infrastructure for eco-friendly future cities like Saudi Arabia’s NEOM—should be understood beyond economic and industrial logic. Instead, they should be viewed as “planetary media” that shape knowledge of the Earth’s natural and ecological dimensions and anthropocentrically reconfigure the global environment.

To support this argument, Director Kim analyzes digital twin-based climate and environmental change models developed in Chinese and European Earth system engineering. He reveals how these models align with the policies of the EU and China, which have promoted the use of digital technology for human-centered environmental development as a “sustainable future industry.” Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that digital twins in the scientific realm of Earth system engineering and the sociotechnical realm of future industries and smart cities share a common logic of optimization and resilience.

The full article can be accessed at the link below.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448251336434

Center for Cinema and Media Studies
Contact : cauccms@gmail.com