Wearing Media. Technology, Popular Culture and Art in Japanese Daily Life (original) (raw)
Related papers
Re:live. Media Art Histories. Refereed Conference Proceedings. Melbourne, 2009
In 1970, French philosopher Roland Barthes declared Japan as a model for a kind of system liberated from any (Western) signification-overload, at an important moment in time when art in the West as well as in the East began forming an alliance with technology. The emergence of the new medium video then became symptomatically representative of and a contributor to the changes that occurred. Its inherent function as an ‘electronic mirror’ unfolded, not least through its direct cultural use: it remains a symbol in the West because it is still regarded as subject-loaded and therefore exposed to the reproach of narcissism, whereas the East regards it as a signifier for the emptiness of symbols. In Japanese linguistic usage the word Art is understood in a wider sense of Life and the World in their multiplex manifestations. This is of course both traditional and ‘hyper-modern’, understood as an experiment, an attempt to say something new – just as, in the early days of the Gutai-Group, J. Yoshihara ordered to his pupils not to do anything that anybody else would do: an effort to go beyond the commonly accepted boundary of our daily reality, to think and to live in a different way.
Contemporary Japanese New Media Art
Recent discussions of the relationship between humankind and technology have been shaped by ideas about embodiment and corporeality. Social and technological advances such as the availability of new media devices, urbanization, and globalization have led to the constant reassessment of social values, including humankind’s place within nature, the relationship between the organic and the artificial and the impact of technology upon national identity and cultural production. As technology continues to gain momentum in pertinence and availability, contemporary artists have used their art to express sophisticated ideas about the possibilities of a machine-dominated society. This thesis discusses contemporary New Media artworks that express, challenge, or celebrate the role of technology in society. Chapters focus on: a) conceptions of embodiment in a self-consciously media-driven ‘information society’, b) the use of new media in art for the purpose of challenging stereotypes relating to gender identity, and c) artworks that provide a fresh perspective on the connection between embodiment and corporeality in the relationship between humans and non-humans (including the ecological consequences of redefining humankind’s relationship to the natural world). The thesis focuses solely on artworks by Japanese artists. It is argued that Japan’s economic history combined with its high levels of urbanization and media-driven culture offer a unique perspective on notions of embodiment and corporeality in the 21st century. Furthermore, the thesis shows that the background influence of Shinto beliefs regarding human-technology cohabitation has helped to shape a distinctive approach to the creative possibilities of contemporary new media art.
Worn Technology: Altering Social Spaces
Open 11 Hybrid Space, NAi Uitgevers, NL ISBN 90-5662-536-5 / 978-90-5662-536-8, 2006., 2006
Clothing and accessories have always served as a membrane between the outside public world and the inside private world of our body. But what happens when you put the mediated outside world on your skin and so largely do away with the boundary between public and private? Kristina Andersen and Joanna Berzowska, two artists and research workers, use their wide experience of working with wearable technologies – ‘wearables’ – to speculate on the nature of the experiences created by this increasingly permeable membrane.
CFE - VCS -Visual Culture Studies: "Wearable – Media to be worn"
VCS#7 - "Wearable – Media to be worn", 2023
This is the CFE for the seventh number of VCS, Visual Culture Studies: an Italian magazine that deals with dialogue between different disciplines, each committed to reflecting on the visual, the visual and the iconic, each on their own, with no intention of flattening the results of each of them. Art historians and theorists, image aesthetics and philosophers, semioticians, cultural sociologists and anthropologists, cinema and moving image scholars, art and media historians and archaeologists, graphics and design specialists find their home "inside" VCS , economists, data scientists, and many more.
Wearable Technology for Artistic Expression
University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz, 2020
Embodiment is used to draw particular attention to the role of the body."-Paul Dourish, in where the Action is-This workshop's primary participants were middle school students between the age of 14-16. It was interesting for me to experiment among extended cultural communities.
Japan's Contemporary Media Culture between Local and Global. Content, Practice and Theory
2021
Zoltan Kacsuk draws on his work in the Japanese Visual Media Graph (JVMG) project, using metadata collected from anime, manga, and video game fan communities to revisit Azuma's classic, now twenty years old, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Kacsuk focuses on two main theses from Azuma's work, but specifically the one in which Azuma noted a significant shift in the production of manga, anime, and video game characters towards a database-based production and consumption. The chapter suggests instead that this type of production seems to have always operated in this template, instead of being a distinct characteristic of the so-called otaku subculture, in which Azuma has positioned it. Luca Bruno brings us a systematic understanding of the genre of visual novel games, based on data-driven examinations, through data gathered by fan-curated databases like the Japanese Visual Media Graph project. While Japanese visual novel games have attracted a great number of fans and, indeed, a global audience since the 1990s, an overall picture of its production, reception, and practice remains understudied. The author explores the underlying affordances of the environment in which Japanese visual novel games are produced and received, and demonstrates how the particular agencies-character design, plots, player interaction, etc.-are closely interconnected in that environment. Through these analyses, the author also responds to and opens a new stage at the debate on "database consumption" proposed by Azuma in the 2000s. examining how they are performed through two modes of acting utilized in concert with certain technologies: embodied acting in the usage of motion-capture, and figurative acting in the facial expressions from anime performed on a digital avatar after getting filtered through facial recognition technology. Analysing the varying tendencies of embodied and figurative acting of Vtubers, this chapter concentrates on the popular Vtuber Kizuna Ai, who is an "official cultural diplomat" for Japan, but also has an official Chinese "version" of herself on BiliBili. Through her existence across platforms, nations, and languages, Kizuna Ai raises questions about the contemporary intersection between digital, national, and cultural boundaries, and how we perform ourselves in digital media, at the intersection of different modes of selfhood. Melanie Fritsch presents an overview on the field of ludomusicology, and points out the still existent manifold blank spaces in the academic study of game music created by Japanese composers as well as the music of games produced by Japanese companies. The author makes us sensitive to some missing pieces in this field by proposing that aspects of the cultural context, such as the situation in the game industry in Japan, corporate culture, as well as doujin games and fan culture, touch points between game music and other dominant trends on the Japanese music market at the time, among other topics, are also yet to authors contributed a rich set of inspiring inquiries and comments to this endeavor. The DAAD funded the exchange that led to this volume. Uta Friedrich at Leipzig University provided invaluable support by dealing with the financial side of this project-literally ensuring the survival of the participants. The participants turned the workshops into a fantastic, stimulating experience, and the authors contributed chapters, columns, and comments without which this volume would not exist. Anna Yeadell-Moore provided rigorous copyediting in a very short timeframe-without which the publication of this volume would have been delayed considerably. Our publisher Crossasia eBooks and especially Nicole Merkel, who supported this project and Frank Krabbes, who provided the layout for the volume. Ai Ikeda provided the cover design and Benjamin Roth created the artwork it is based on. And last but certainly not least, Masako Hashimoto, who suggested this volume initially, has worked tirelessly since, coordinating the efforts enclosed in this book. Thank you all for making this possible!
Wo. Defy - designing wearable technology in the context of historical cultural resistance practices.
ISEA '13 Proceedings of the International Symposium of Electronic Art, 2013
"This paper presents the design process and technical development of Wo.Defy, an interactive kinetic garment that explores a suffragette cultural critique of the 'Self-Combing Sisters', a group of women in early twentieth century Chinese society who challenged and questioned the role of women's agency.Through elements of self-connection with hair and breath, Wo.Defy investigates intimacy with natural materials and technology that are close to one's skin, and provokes self-actuation through critique of social expectation within one's culture. We gathered feedback from participants at 5 exhibitions through open-ended interviews. Self-reported experience illustrated that wearable interaction can support self-reflection contextualized through cultural artifacts such as interactive clothing. "