Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self by Paul Roquet (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ambient media: Japanese atmospheres of self, by Paul Roquet (book review)
International Journal of Communication, 2020
The term “ambient,” an English adjective derived from the Latin verb ambire to indicate the encompassing or encircling of an atmosphere or environment, has become a popular aesthetic referent across contemporary media cultures ranging from electronic music, video art, informatics, architecture, and urban design. As Paul Roquet notes in the first pages of this monograph, a subtle emphasis on subjective mediation differentiates “ambient” from the related concept of “atmosphere,” reinjecting a certain measure of agency and embodiment into environmental imaginations and foregrounding “the mediating role of human sense perception in a person’s relationship to the surrounding world” (p. 4). Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self takes stock of the genealogy of its titular concept and offers a fascinating tour de force of its uptake and rearticulation in Japan, decentering the global framing of ambient media and situating it in the context of Japanese cultural production. For Roquet, ambient media are tools of atmospheric selfmediation, and the Japanese uptake of the transliteration ambiento to define a specific style of artistic and aesthetic production clearly indexes a distinction from atmospheric and environmental conceptions of media.
Creative Climate: Expressive Media in the Aesthetics of Watsuji, Nishida, and Merleau-Ponty
2013
In different ways, Watsuji, Nishida, and Merleau-Ponty describe a self that extends beyond the skin through a sort of dialectic of internal/external space of perception and action, which has implications for understanding the relationship between art and nature in artistic creation. Through an exposition of Watsuji’s conception of human being in relation to a climatic milieu, Nishida’s theory of the expressive body as the site of the world’s own self-transformations, and certain claims made by Merleau-Ponty in his essays on painting, this article provides a way of understanding how material media may become expressive when they are taken up by artists.
Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art (Introduction)
Duke University Press eBooks, 2022
Subjects Media Studies, Asian Studies > East Asia, Art and Visual Culture > Art Criticism and Theory In Feeling Media Miryam Sas explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan. Opening media studies and affect theory up to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America, Sas offers a framework of analysis she calls the affective scale—the space where artists and theorists work between the level of the individual and larger global and historical shifts. She examines intermedia, experimental animation, and Marxist theories of the culture industries of the 1960s and 1970s in the work of artists and thinkers ranging from filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, photographer Nakahira Takuma, and the Three Animators' Group to art critic Hanada Kiyoteru and landscape theorist Matsuda Masao. She also outlines how twenty-first-century Japanese artists—especially those responding to the Fukushima disaster—adopt and adapt this earlier work to reframe ideas about collectivity, community, and connectivity in the space between the individual and the system.
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.
The article asks in what ways the Japanese sound artist, Ryoichi Kurokawa’s audiovisual installation, Rheo: 5 Horisonz (2010), is “digital.” Using professor Lars Elleström’s concept of “mediality,” the main claim in this article is that Rheo not only uses digital technology but also interrogates digital mediality as such. This argument is pursued in an analysis of Rheo that draws in various descriptions of digital media by N. Catherine Hayles, Lev Manovic, Bolter and Grusin among other. The article will show how the critical potential in Rheo is directed both towards digital media as a language (Meyrowitz) (or a place for representation) and towards the digital as a milieu (Meyrowitz) or as our culture (Gere). The overall goal of the article is not just analyse this singular artwork, but also to show how sound art can contribute to our understanding of our own contemporary culture as a digital culture.
With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular attention was paid to contributions that clarify how the structural features - the modes - of the arts, their perception, and their signifying potential in terms of content are interrelated and how they are to be understood in communicative and thus socioculturally relevant terms. Thus, in addition to neuroscientific contributions, those from cultural anthropology, art history, image and art studies, and literary studies were included.
Philosophy of Photography, 2014
Rapidly changing intersectional processes of globalization, media and technology generate an urgent need for the reconsideration of experiential conditions involving time, space, place and the body. In Senses of Embodiment, editors Mika Elo and Miika Luoto have assembled nine essays from a diverse group of authors and artists in order to explore questions concerning the relationship between diverse and evolving media forms and the embodiment of 'sense'. Of course, sense, in the context of contemporary art practice and media studies, is a multifarious concept that refers to questions of ontology, affect and bodily perception. Elo and Luoto define the collection's approach through what they call 'mediality of sense', a phrase that denotes intersections between artistic presentation through new technologies, bodily capacity and aesthetic experience, and the reflexive interaction that may occur between the individual subject and technology.
nioi A study of resonance in Japanese aesthetics
2020
In this article I will attempt a definition of “resonance”: first reflecting about it in general terms and then trying to address its role in Japanese aesthetics, in particular poetics. While far from being limited to East Asian aesthetic expressions, I will show how the experience of “resonance” has played a comparatively more central role in this cultural context, shaping peculiar forms of poetry. It is therefore useful to observe non-European sources, if only to understand our hidden cultural assumptions before this kind of phenomenon and suspend our prejudices more effectively in examining it. After examining the use of atmospheric resonance in waka and in renga I will focus on haikai 俳諧 poetics and on the notions of hibiki 響き (echo) and nioi 匂い (scent) in the theoretical discussions on poetry among Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 (1844-1894) and his disciples.