A Study on Content Reception Utilizing the Concept of Digital Imagination: Focusing on the Music Video of NewJeans’ album "Get-Up"

This paper aims to elucidate the process of audience reception of digital content, with a focus on the imagination experienced by spectators. It introduces a novel concept of digital imagination by utilizing theoretical concepts such as Bhabha’s hybridity, Deleuze’s time-image, and Flusser’s technical imagination. The study examines the audience’s imaginative experience through three frameworks: space and time, apparatus, and the perspective of the person and apparatus. To achieve this, the paper conducts in-depth interviews with music video spectators, paying attention to the strategies employed by the K-pop idol group NewJeans in their album <Get Up>, released in 2023, particularly in songs like ‘Super Shy’, ‘ETA’, and ‘Cool with You’, to stimulate fans’ imagination in the digital space. The research reveals that spectators experienced different spaces and layered temporality through heterotopia spaces and pure visual images. Additionally, audiences, within the unfamiliar yet familiar world presented by digital images, were seen to construct a ‘present’-centered, ‘inter-subjective’ relationship with the world. The significance of this study lies in proposing the concept of digital imagination to elucidate patterns of audience content reception and conceptualizing this process.