Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An exploration of the tensions between East and West and digital and analog in Japanese new-media art.

This book grew out of Yvonne Spielmann's 2005-2006 and 2009 visits to Japan, where she explored the technological and aesthetic origins of Japanese new-media art--which was known for pioneering interactive and virtual media applications in the 1990s. Spielmann discovered an essential hybridity in Japan's media culture: an internal hybridity, a mixture of digital-analog connections together with a non-Western development of modernity separate from but not immune to Western media aesthetics; and external hybridity, produced by the international, transcultural travel of aesthetic concepts.

Spielmann describes the innovative technology context in Japan, in which developers, engineers, and artists collaborate, and traces the Japanese fondness for precision and functionality to the poetics of unobtrusiveness and detail. She examines work by artists including Masaki Fujihata, whose art is both formally and thematically hybrid; Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, who build special devices for a new sense of human-machine interaction; Toshio Iwai, who connects traditional media forms with computing; and Tatsuo Miyajima, who anchors his LED artwork in Buddhist philosophy. Spielmann views hybridity as a positive aesthetic value--perhaps the defining aesthetic of a global culture. Hybridity offers a conceptual approach for considering the ambivalent linkages of contradictory elements; its dynamic and fluid characteristics are neither conclusive nor categorical but are meant to stimulate fusions.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Useful for scholars of new media, globalization, and Asian studies, this important volume by Spielmann (Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore) examines the intersection of art, technology, religion, and culture in contemporary Japan. Spielmann writes with an understanding of the longstanding history of cultural exchange between East and West. Her overarching concern is hybridity (cultural mixing); the study is divided into three parts broadly focused on aesthetic debates, processes of interactivity, and interventionism. A broad range of artwork is included: work produced with computer code, installation, performance, video, modified consumer objects, data manipulation, performance, immersive environments, robotics, and data visualization. While most of the work takes a self-reflexive approach with respect to the impact of technology on society, the religious practices of the East are an important undercurrent. The artists featured in the study include Masaki Fujihata, Sota Ichikawa, Ryoji Ikeda, Toshio Iwai, Ryota Kuwakubo, Seiko Mikami, Tatsuo Miyajima, Takuro Osaka, and Fiona Tan. The translation results in some awkward phrasing in places, and the black-and-white illustrations are clustered at the end of the volume; however, these flaws do not prevent the book from making a significant scholarly contribution to the study of new media. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and above. E. K. Mix Butler University