Abstract

This thesis case studies the production of Electronic Entry Register as a spatiality during the covid-19 pandemic in the city of Seoul. Electronic Entry Register is a spatial strategy that the South Korean government developed to control the circulation of bodies on the move as a response to the pandemic. Showcasing an experimental and a short-term approach typically intensified in times of an emergency, its developments indicate how digital technologies mediate organisations of the urban. Criticising undertheorization of human agencies in the production of digitally mediated space, this thesis adopts a posthumanist approach to bring forward the data-producing bodies to study how digitally mediated spaces come into being. For example, some of the research participants came to embody digital speed by using the ‘shaking’ or automation functions of the smartphones, to erase frictions and to further compress time inside their smartphones; ultimately leading to minimisation of time-space at the sites of the Electronic Entry Register across the city of Seoul. Posthumanist perspective helps the researcher overcome the dichotomous spatial imagination where human beings are often deemed to be ‘surrounded’ by digital urban environments. As Lefebvre (2013) asserts that time-space is produced through practice, the posthuman performances by the citizens of Seoul reproduced the instantaneous materiality of the digital onto the urban landscape. This thesis proposes that the study of digitally mediated cities, including smart city discourse, could take posthumanist perspective more productively.