Yuriko Furuhata | McGill University (original) (raw)
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Books by Yuriko Furuhata
Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in Japan, 2019
Papers by Yuriko Furuhata
e-flux architecture accumulation, 2023
The Nuclear Geopolitics of Anthropogenic Clouds Unlike the enduring half-life of radioactive mate... more The Nuclear Geopolitics of Anthropogenic Clouds Unlike the enduring half-life of radioactive materials whose toxicity lasts for thousands of years, evanescent clouds in the sky are the embodiment of impermanence and ephemerality. The proliferation of anthropogenic clouds such as airplane contrails, nuclear mushroom clouds, and factory smoke in the atmosphere has been integral to the history of human-induced climate change. They contribute to the greenhouse effect by trapping heat, and the rising temperature of the planet in turn dissolves the low-hanging stratocumulus clouds in the subtropics that offer shade and cool down the earth's surface. Caught in the feedback loop of global warming, clouds are one of the most uncertain factors of climate change.
Representations, 2022
This article focuses on the animated Japanese film Weathering with You (2019) in order to think c... more This article focuses on the animated Japanese film Weathering with You (2019) in order to think critically about the limits and merits of site-specific, local approaches to the anthropogenic climate crisis, and to the Anthropocene and its mythopoetic tendency. While the geological period of the Anthropocene is thoroughly historical and rooted in the modern scientific paradigm of Earth history, the mythologizing tendency in search of new cosmologies within the discourse of the Anthropocene complicates this linear trajectory of time. Anthropocene discourse invites its critics to revive and reinvent local myths. When these myths appear within the planetary scale of Anthropocene discourse, they take on a cosmological, if not universal, outlook. It is this spatial and temporal paradox of myths within the geological framework of the Anthropocene that this article investigates through the mediation of Weathering with You.
Public Culture, 2021
This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in... more This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan's development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan's northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following anticolonial and archipelagic scholarship, the author reads across earthly archives of geological strata and colonial archives of historical documents to elucidate the conceptual duality of the archipelago as both a geological formation and a geopolitical territory. In tracing this formative era of Japan's resource extraction and settler colonialism, which precedes and informs the current rush to extract rare earth minerals necessary to maintain global digital infrastructures, this article aims to both de‐Westernize the methodological orientation known as media geology and offer a prehistory of contemporary rare earth mining in the Pacific Ocean.
Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, 2019
Yuriko Furuhata explores the fog sculptures of artist Nakaya Fujiko. Nakaya's deployment of fog a... more Yuriko Furuhata explores the fog sculptures of artist Nakaya Fujiko. Nakaya's deployment of fog and smoke recalls other expanded cinema practitioners and environmental artists in the postwar period, yet her experiments take on a different significance when seen not as a descendant of the phantasmagoria but as part of an assemblage linked to the development of smoke screens for aerial warfare. Paying particular attention to the dual function of fog screens-which obfuscate visibility yet also make visible such qualities as temperature, humidity, and wind-Furuhata historicizes the epistemological and political conditions behind the turn to fog and smoke within expanded cinema and the environmental arts during the Cold War. In so doing, Furuhata provides a geopolitically nuanced twist to the recent interest in 'atmospheric media' and 'elemental media'.
Much of the current debate and critical approaches to media ecol ogy and ubiquitous computing ech... more Much of the current debate and critical approaches to media ecol ogy and ubiquitous computing echoes architectural discourse on the media-saturated urban environment from the 1960s. It was then that the rapid growth of telecommunication networks and the intensification of data traffic prompted architects to consider urban space in relation to technical media. For these architects, thinking about urban design became inseparable from thinking about communication and information technologies, and architectural criticism became contiguous with media theory. While an echo from the past is only part of the conversation in the pres ent, the reverberations between Japa nese architectural theory from the 1960s and current media theory are worth considering, if only to contextualize the historical specificity of the former and to gain a comparative perspective on the latter.
Writings on animation have often noted the plastic quality of the image: objects stretch, squash ... more Writings on animation have often noted the plastic quality of the image: objects stretch, squash and change forms. Such discussions of the plastic quality of animation tend to equate plasticity with the appearance of the image. This article proposes a rethinking of plasticity in animation, suggesting that it is not simply an attribute of the finished image, but an aspect of the material conditions of its production. Introducing the work of Imamura Taihei and Hanada Kiyoteru, two leftist Japanese intellectuals who wrote on Disney animation during the 1940s and 1950s, and contrasting their work with the writings of their European counterparts, this article will suggest that these Japanese thinkers focus our attention on the importance of Fordism in the production of Disney animation. The work of Imamura and Hanada enables us to critically approach plasticity in animation in terms of the material conditions of the image production within Fordism, thus enabling us to consider plasticity at the level of the medium as well as that of labor.
This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, to critique p... more This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, to critique photography's truth claim to the real by reading the photographic discourse of ''indexicality'' as a ''symptom,'' as defined in the work of Slavoj Ž ižek. The implications of this symptomatic relationship between photography and the real are analyzed in relation to the question of photographic spectatorship on the one hand, and to the inarticulability of a¤ect on the other. In conclusion this article turns to Kant's notion of subjective universality as it is challenged by Barthes's theory of photography.
The aim of this article is to explore the theoretical implications oJ'the popularity of Resistanc... more The aim of this article is to explore the theoretical implications oJ'the popularity of Resistance the South Korean frhn Shiri (7999) and, that of the acadernic be.stseller, Empire Globalization ( 2000 ) tu tltinking through the concept of 'resistance' . Though different in their N{etanarrative critirespectiva mediq and rliscursivc fields, both texts displall a splmptornatic cism dcnourrcarnent and recupertttion oJ'tha lurnanist clist'oursa oJ-'resistance' irt the Humanism age of globalizotion and metan(vrative criticism. What is qt stqke, it is arlpred, is Spectacle the collectit e. political fantasy of becornfitg vlmt Miclnel Wcvner cnlls 'thc rnass Mass Subject subject'. The operatiort these twro texts perfortn is to git'e the cortstuning rtlass subjects tlrc thrill ol imrninent revohttiort, accompaniacl b11 the spet:taL'ular destructiort o-[ the sot'ial order, nII tha v,hile mailrtairtirtg the basic tenet o.f humanist belief: the soliclarity nith J'ellov, 'hurnan' beinl1s.
Conferences (co-organized) by Yuriko Furuhata
Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in Japan, 2019
e-flux architecture accumulation, 2023
The Nuclear Geopolitics of Anthropogenic Clouds Unlike the enduring half-life of radioactive mate... more The Nuclear Geopolitics of Anthropogenic Clouds Unlike the enduring half-life of radioactive materials whose toxicity lasts for thousands of years, evanescent clouds in the sky are the embodiment of impermanence and ephemerality. The proliferation of anthropogenic clouds such as airplane contrails, nuclear mushroom clouds, and factory smoke in the atmosphere has been integral to the history of human-induced climate change. They contribute to the greenhouse effect by trapping heat, and the rising temperature of the planet in turn dissolves the low-hanging stratocumulus clouds in the subtropics that offer shade and cool down the earth's surface. Caught in the feedback loop of global warming, clouds are one of the most uncertain factors of climate change.
Representations, 2022
This article focuses on the animated Japanese film Weathering with You (2019) in order to think c... more This article focuses on the animated Japanese film Weathering with You (2019) in order to think critically about the limits and merits of site-specific, local approaches to the anthropogenic climate crisis, and to the Anthropocene and its mythopoetic tendency. While the geological period of the Anthropocene is thoroughly historical and rooted in the modern scientific paradigm of Earth history, the mythologizing tendency in search of new cosmologies within the discourse of the Anthropocene complicates this linear trajectory of time. Anthropocene discourse invites its critics to revive and reinvent local myths. When these myths appear within the planetary scale of Anthropocene discourse, they take on a cosmological, if not universal, outlook. It is this spatial and temporal paradox of myths within the geological framework of the Anthropocene that this article investigates through the mediation of Weathering with You.
Public Culture, 2021
This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in... more This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan's development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan's northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following anticolonial and archipelagic scholarship, the author reads across earthly archives of geological strata and colonial archives of historical documents to elucidate the conceptual duality of the archipelago as both a geological formation and a geopolitical territory. In tracing this formative era of Japan's resource extraction and settler colonialism, which precedes and informs the current rush to extract rare earth minerals necessary to maintain global digital infrastructures, this article aims to both de‐Westernize the methodological orientation known as media geology and offer a prehistory of contemporary rare earth mining in the Pacific Ocean.
Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, 2019
Yuriko Furuhata explores the fog sculptures of artist Nakaya Fujiko. Nakaya's deployment of fog a... more Yuriko Furuhata explores the fog sculptures of artist Nakaya Fujiko. Nakaya's deployment of fog and smoke recalls other expanded cinema practitioners and environmental artists in the postwar period, yet her experiments take on a different significance when seen not as a descendant of the phantasmagoria but as part of an assemblage linked to the development of smoke screens for aerial warfare. Paying particular attention to the dual function of fog screens-which obfuscate visibility yet also make visible such qualities as temperature, humidity, and wind-Furuhata historicizes the epistemological and political conditions behind the turn to fog and smoke within expanded cinema and the environmental arts during the Cold War. In so doing, Furuhata provides a geopolitically nuanced twist to the recent interest in 'atmospheric media' and 'elemental media'.
Much of the current debate and critical approaches to media ecol ogy and ubiquitous computing ech... more Much of the current debate and critical approaches to media ecol ogy and ubiquitous computing echoes architectural discourse on the media-saturated urban environment from the 1960s. It was then that the rapid growth of telecommunication networks and the intensification of data traffic prompted architects to consider urban space in relation to technical media. For these architects, thinking about urban design became inseparable from thinking about communication and information technologies, and architectural criticism became contiguous with media theory. While an echo from the past is only part of the conversation in the pres ent, the reverberations between Japa nese architectural theory from the 1960s and current media theory are worth considering, if only to contextualize the historical specificity of the former and to gain a comparative perspective on the latter.
Writings on animation have often noted the plastic quality of the image: objects stretch, squash ... more Writings on animation have often noted the plastic quality of the image: objects stretch, squash and change forms. Such discussions of the plastic quality of animation tend to equate plasticity with the appearance of the image. This article proposes a rethinking of plasticity in animation, suggesting that it is not simply an attribute of the finished image, but an aspect of the material conditions of its production. Introducing the work of Imamura Taihei and Hanada Kiyoteru, two leftist Japanese intellectuals who wrote on Disney animation during the 1940s and 1950s, and contrasting their work with the writings of their European counterparts, this article will suggest that these Japanese thinkers focus our attention on the importance of Fordism in the production of Disney animation. The work of Imamura and Hanada enables us to critically approach plasticity in animation in terms of the material conditions of the image production within Fordism, thus enabling us to consider plasticity at the level of the medium as well as that of labor.
This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, to critique p... more This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, to critique photography's truth claim to the real by reading the photographic discourse of ''indexicality'' as a ''symptom,'' as defined in the work of Slavoj Ž ižek. The implications of this symptomatic relationship between photography and the real are analyzed in relation to the question of photographic spectatorship on the one hand, and to the inarticulability of a¤ect on the other. In conclusion this article turns to Kant's notion of subjective universality as it is challenged by Barthes's theory of photography.
The aim of this article is to explore the theoretical implications oJ'the popularity of Resistanc... more The aim of this article is to explore the theoretical implications oJ'the popularity of Resistance the South Korean frhn Shiri (7999) and, that of the acadernic be.stseller, Empire Globalization ( 2000 ) tu tltinking through the concept of 'resistance' . Though different in their N{etanarrative critirespectiva mediq and rliscursivc fields, both texts displall a splmptornatic cism dcnourrcarnent and recupertttion oJ'tha lurnanist clist'oursa oJ-'resistance' irt the Humanism age of globalizotion and metan(vrative criticism. What is qt stqke, it is arlpred, is Spectacle the collectit e. political fantasy of becornfitg vlmt Miclnel Wcvner cnlls 'thc rnass Mass Subject subject'. The operatiort these twro texts perfortn is to git'e the cortstuning rtlass subjects tlrc thrill ol imrninent revohttiort, accompaniacl b11 the spet:taL'ular destructiort o-[ the sot'ial order, nII tha v,hile mailrtairtirtg the basic tenet o.f humanist belief: the soliclarity nith J'ellov, 'hurnan' beinl1s.