Contemporary Japanese New Media Art

  ________________________________________________________________________ Bachelor Thesis Liberal Arts & Sciences Major: Humanities Academic Year of 2015/2016 Tilburg University              

 

 

Supervisor: Dr. Kathryn J. Brown

By: Megan Phipps ANR: 748361

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS   TABLE  OF  CONTENTS  

1  

ABSTRACT  

3  

INTRODUCTION  

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CHAPTER  1:  JAPANESE  NATIONAL  IDENTITY  AMIDST  HIGH-­‐TECHNOLOGY  AND  NEW   MEDIA  ART   9   THE  EVOLUTION  OF  NEW  MEDIA  IN  “THE  INFORMATION  SOCIETY”   THE  “CAPITALIST”  PERFORMER:  TAKASHI  MURAKAMI   THE  CRITICS   THE  VIRTUAL  REALM:  ‘ANTI-­‐JAPANESE’  NEW  MEDIA  AS  ‘JAPANESE’  IDENTITY  

11   11   16   24  

CHAPTER  2:  CORPOREALITY,  GENDER  AND  THE  BODY  IN  JAPANESE  NEW  MEDIA  ART   31   GENDER  STEREOTYPES  IN  JAPANESE  ART   JAPANESE  FEMALE  NEW  MEDIA  ARTISTS  RESPONDING  TO  THE  DOMINANT  MALE  GAZE   THE  CYBORG  RETELLING  THE  STORIES  OF  NATURALIZED  IDENTITIES   THE  VIRTUAL  NATURE  OF  TECHNOLOGY  AND  NEW  MEDIA  VS.  THE  FEMALE  BODY  AS  FLESH  

32   39   46   51  

CHAPTER  3:  NATURE  AND  THE  ECOLOGY  OF  NEW  MEDIA  

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ARTIFICIAL  CORPOREALITY:  GENETIC  ALGORITHMS  AND  THE  ORGANIC  RANDOMNESS  OF  THE   VIRTUALLY  ARTIFICIAL   59   CORPOREALITY  OF  THE  MATERIALIZED  DIGITAL  ORGANISM:  THE  COMPUTER  AS  ‘THE  GARDEN  OF   MATHEMATICS’   67   THE  TECHNOLOGICAL  AND  URBANIZED  ECOSYSTEM:  CULTURAL  EMBODIMENT  OF  TECHNO-­‐ SCIENTIFIC  UNIVERSALISM   72   CONCLUSION  

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BIBLIOGRAPHY  

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ABSTRACT   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.  

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INTRODUCTION The term ‘New Media’ refers to the amalgamation of technology, science, communication and information platforms, virtual and interactive interfaces, and images.1 Throughout the development of New Media from the late twentieth century to the present, concerns regarding the relationship of the human body to technology have grown in scholarly and scientific debate. Contemporary artists have also examined these anxieties by questioning the human body’s place in a virtual, globalized and interactive realm, examining the role of technology in sustaining a Cartesian-based view of man vs. machine, and exploring distinctions posed between the organic and the artificial. Responses to these questions have influenced many collective cultural ideas about embodiment: namely, the body perceived as a “prediscursive phenomenon that plays a central role in perception, cognition, action and nature to a way of living or inhabiting the world through one’s accultured body.”2 Put broadly, embodiment relates to the body’s role within culture and personal experience, or as Weiss and Haber phrase it, “the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world.”3

                                                                                                                1  Socha, Bailey & Eber-Schmid, Barbara. “Defining New Media Isn’t Easy.” What is New Media? New Media Institute (2014). Retrieved from: http://www.newmedia.org/what-is-new-media.html   2

Weiss, Gail & Haber, Honi Fern. Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of

Nature and Culture. Routledge (1999), p. xvi. 3  Weiss

 

& Haber, p.143  

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The aim of this thesis is to examine the linked themes of embodiment and corporeality in a selection of contemporary artworks that employ the resources of New Media. I contend that the most optimal nation to look towards for the purpose of this study is Japan. I shall argue that Japan’s cultural and technological history provides a unique assessment of the influence of New Media upon a nation and its culture. More importantly, the background influence of Shintō beliefs regarding human-technology cohabitation on Japanese New Media artists has helped to shape a distinctive approach to the creative possibilities of New Media. Consequently, the artworks I shall discuss offer an alternative perspective on traditional “Western” ideas about embodiment. The primary question I will address is: How do Japanese artists thematize and question conceptions of embodiment and corporeality in New Media art?

I will begin by giving a brief overview of the impact of technology, industrialization, and New Media on Japanese culture. In chapter one, I will focus primarily on technological developments in twentieth-century Japan and examine how these developments impacted ideas concerning national identity and cultural production. I will then discuss a range of New Media artworks that exemplify and problematize these consequences. Firstly, I will begin by examining Takashi Murakami’s art as performing a “capitalist” approach towards Japan as ‘information society’ I shall argue that Murakami is an artist who problematizes and, in some measure, encourages an embodied, but commoditized identity within Japanese metropolitan society. I will then examine artists that have critically responded to this portrayal and to the dense urban living environment, such as Arata Isozaki and Eiko Ishioka, Dumb Type, Masato Nakamura, and Tatsuo Miyajima. Lastly, I

 

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will examine the works and philosophy of Masaki Fujihata who uses (virtual) globalization to avoid (cultural) definitions of what it means to be “Japanese.” I shall argue that by using technology to create a “nationless” environment and to redefine physical space, Fujihata provides a fresh outlook on cultural embodiment and corporeal values.

In chapter two, I will analyze the ways in which contemporary Japanese artists use New Media for the purpose of reflecting on contemporary embodied gender identities within Japanese society. I will first reference Slavoj Žižek’s theory of the “Digitilized Real”4 in order to explain how contemporary gender roles are perpetuated virtually and artistically in contemporary society. This will develop the discussion of chapter one, namely the values associated with Murakami’s aesthetic, Japan as an ‘information society,’ and the role of virtuality in (culturally) embodied identities. I will then discuss a selection of New Media artworks by Japanese women that demonstrate or challenge these predominant values that are attached to the body. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway discusses culturally predominant gender values and how they can be overcome with the use of new technology. I will apply Haraway’s theory by arguing that certain Japanese female artists are furthering her optimistic outlook through their use of New Media. The artists I will                                                                                                                 4 Zizek, Slavoj. Cyberspace, Or The Virtuality of The Real. Journal for the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. Retrieved from: http://www.jcfar.org/past_papers/Cyberspace%20and%20the%20Virtuality%20of%20the %20Real%20-%20Slavoj%20Zizek.pdf.    

 

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discuss in this context are Naoko Motoyoshi, Midori Kitagawa, Saki Satom, Naoko Tosa, and Mariko Mori. The aim of this discussion is to show how New Media can have both positive and negative effects upon shaping human corporeal values and cultural values about embodiment. This will extend the theme of technology and cultural embodiment as discussed in chapter one by linking the topic of human corporeality particularly to that of gender.

In chapter three, I will discuss ways in which contemporary Japanese artists use technology and a non-Cartesian approach to test human corporeal values in their works. Firstly, I will examine artists who use computer algorithms in their works and will argue that this offers an unprecedented approach towards preconceptions about the distinction between the organic and the artificial. The artists on whom I will focus are Yoishiro Kawaguchi and Ryoichiro Debuchi. I will explain how, by linking their geometric naturalism to environmental embodiment and breaking free from a division between the organic and the artificial, these artists provide liberation from the physical laws ruling environmental embodiment and corporeality. Developing the arguments of the preceding chapters, I will show how redefinitions of corporeality in Japanese New Media art involves a reassessment of the natural environment and promotes a conception of technoscientific universalism. Techno-scientific universalism “may be seen as inculcating a ‘deep’ ecological sense of the immanent vitality of human and non-human cohabitation.”5

                                                                                                                5  Jensen, Caspar Bruun & Blok, Anders. ‘Techno-animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-Network Theory, and the Enabling Powers of Non-Human  Agencies.’ Theory,

 

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This discussion will include works by Masaki Fujihata, Yasushi Matoba and Hiroshi Matoba, dNA, and Kawaguchi. By examining distinctions between the artificial and organic in an unparadigmic way, corporeal values and our relationship with technology is envisaged as subject-subject as opposed to Cartesian subject-object; techno-scientific universalism amplifies this subject-subject relationship. I contend that this perspective is beneficial to the dominant discussion of corporeality and embodiment and to our relationship with technology.

Through a combination of close readings of individual artworks, the examination of trends in contemporary Japanese art, and the application of selected philosophical theories regarding New Media, corporeality, and embodiment, I shall show how Japanese New Media artists offer a unique perspective on the notion of embodiment in a contemporary technological society.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Culture, and Society. Sage Publications (2013), p. 101. DOI: 10.1177/0263276412456564.    

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CHAPTER 1: JAPANESE NATIONAL IDENTITY AMIDST HIGHTECHNOLOGY AND NEW MEDIA ART

Japanese technologically influenced cultural embodiment has had a long and complex relationship with the West. Beginning at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Tokugawa administration shifted its powerbase and closed Japan off from the outside world. During the mid-nineteenth century, Commodore Perry initiated entry into the ports of Tokyo after receiving demands for trade by the U.S. The West’s power was seeping across the world in the form of industrialization, and Japan had greater exposure to the technologies and lifestyles of societies beyond its borders. In order for Japan to succeed economically and politically, it adopted and emulated many practices from other nations, including developments in technology and industrialization.6 It gradually established relations of trade and cultural exchange with the West.

Japan’s recent history coincides with UNESCO’s definition of the origins and causes of an ‘information society.’ UNESCO defines these origins and causes as being attributed to two interrelated developments a) technological change and b) long-term economic development. The definition of an ‘information society’ in this context refers to a society where information and communication technologies are used intensively within economic, social and political life. This embrace of technology has profoundly influenced                                                                                                                 6  Castile, Rand. “Tokyo and the West.” Tokyo: Form and Spirit. Japan: Walker Art Center (1986), p.14.  

 

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Japanese society and has resulted in many contemporary artists contributing to the evolution of New Media art. As Jean Ippolito states in The Search for New Media: Late 20th Century Art and Technology in Japan: “Japan now has assimilated the term ‘New Media’ for digital and electronic art, a by-product of the ‘information society’.”7 New Media art has “become a catch-all phrase for any kind of artwork that utilizes electronic media whether visual, audio, fine, commercial, conceptual or popular art.”8 Within the New Media art arena, Lauren Herr argues that this had led contemporary Japanese artists primarily towards the medium of computer graphics:

In a country as media-saturated as Japan, where the preservation of traditional social and aesthetic forms has been balanced over the past 120 years by a relentless quest for new ideas, fashions and techniques, computer graphics has found favor because of its novelty, expressive power and futuristic look.9

The attempt to balance social and aesthetic forms, noted by Herr, involves juggling Western and Japanese social and aesthetic forms, as well as traditional Japanese and new ‘high-tech’ Japanese forms. Japanese New Media artists continue to face these questions of national identity in terms of medium, style, and content and have come to ask                                                                                                                 7 Ippolito, Jean. The Search for New Media: Late 20th Century Art and Technology in Japan. Common Ground Publishing LLC (2012), p. 126. 8

Ippolito, 141.

9

Herr, Lauren. ‘Japanese Computer Graphics: Challenges and Opportunities,” Computer

Graphics: SIGGRAPH Proceedings. (1983), p. 191.    

 

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themselves: What is inherently Japanese versus inherently Western? What is technology and industrialization for Japanese culture and how does it influence our values concerning embodiment and corporeality? Is it possible to, in turn, use technology to break free from the cultured embodiment of an ‘information society’? Among these questions concerning technology and cultural embodiment, includes the city that was the center of the nineteenth century industrial change, and remains the core of Japan’s ‘information society,’ Tokyo.

The Evolution of New Media in “The Information Society” The “Capitalist” Performer: Takashi Murakami   After the bursting of the economic bubble in 1986, Japan’s economy was plummeting. Japan had been seen as a technologically booming nation since the 1950s, but this perception had changed by the 1980s. In turn, Japan remained eager to maintain its international image as technologically innovative, advanced, and progressive. In order to sustain this image Japan looked towards its export industry. In Before and After Superflat, Adrian Favell describes the consequences of this:

What [politicians] talked about, as the economy remained stagnant and Japan’s influence on the world declined, was culture: how to rebrand and repackage Japan’s international image. And so they put manga and anime on official

 

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brochures. Video games and toy character stars replaced cars and computers as the image of Japan’s principle export industries.10

In the 21st century, this tendency has bled into the contemporary art world and has led to a focus on commoditization and high-tech appeal. Consequently, as Ippolito argues, Japan has become an “electronically mesmerized society,” and “the new generation of artists of the 21st century have discovered a way to market their art in a tangible form. The curious technological objects are purchased by consumers because they have popular appeal.”11

Takashi Murakami is an artist who hones this artistic philosophy and states that his primary artistic goal is to “merge high art and culture with popular consumerist society.”12 He deliberately places his art within the commercial industry by collaborating with luxury-brands such as Louis Vuitton and Kanye West. He then introduces commercialism directly into the art industry – for example by featuring a Louis Vuitton sales kiosk at his exhibitions.12 In using this approach, he has become extremely successful. In 2008, Murakami was the only artist listed among the 100 most influential persons of the year in Time magazine. In 2009, Art Review ranked him as no.17 of the 100 most important persons in the global art world. Among the three Asian names that                                                                                                                 10 Favell, Adrian. Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011. Timezone (2012), p. 41. 11

Ippolito, 148

12

Ippolito, 149  

 

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appeared on the Art Review list, he was the only Japanese artist.13 Consequently, Murakami became the face of Japanese art on a global scale.

In Giant Magical Princess! She’s Walking Down The Streets of Akihabara! (2009), Murakami depicts a ‘rebranded’ version of Akihabara, Tokyo in a fun and positive light. As described by the Akihabara official website: “It is absolute that Akihabara is the largest town collection all kinds of electronic appliances and devices in the world. The products at the very top of technology are always abundantly available here.” Within Murakami’s work, the commoditization of art and high-technology are idealized in the bright portrayal of the district.

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Fig. 1. Murakami, Takashi & Louis Vuitton. Cherry Blossom [Textile].

                                                                                                                13 Favell, 8-9. 14  Cherry

Blossom. [Textile] Retrieved from

https://www.flickr.com/photos/achimh/3301145074/  

 

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Fig. 2. Murakami, Takashi. Giant Magical Princess! She’s Walking Down the Streets of Akihabara!

[Wall Print]. (2009)

In the Vice documentary ‘Schoolgirls for Sale,’ however, is it shown that the Akihabara district is also known for the selling of schoolgirls, sometimes only for a conversation, yet also for sexual acts. As Murakami positioned the ‘giant magical princess’ with her legs spread open for the district’s consumers to pass through, a reference to the district’s

                                                                                                                15  Giant Magical Princess! She’s Walking Down the Streets of Akihabara! [Wall Print]. (2009). Retrieved from http://ling-yao.tumblr.com/    

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commoditization of sex can be inferred. Furthermore, as this sexualized, kawaii , anime Α

girl is depicted as ‘giant,’ she is portrayed as the dominant trait of the district. Yet, the ‘giant magical princess’ raises her arm up high in a pleased and proud manner, once again symbolizing Murakami’s joyful idealization of her and her district’s culture, a culture that combines the selling of electronics and the selling of sex in an ‘information society.’ Together, the princess and the abundance of advertisements symbolizes the seduction of images and the seduction of the Akihabara district, a combination that links commoditized high-technology to the circulation of images in both the artworld and in popular culture.

While economic and commercial interests are interwoven and thematized in Murakami’s artworks, what does this entail for the embodied culture of Japan? In Japan Style, Gian Carlo Calza argues that this combination of ideas risks blinding society to the danger of losing attentiveness, and instead, “substituting for it a guarantee of material and technological progress.”16 He continues that “[t]echnology and mechanization cannot foster personal growth.”16 Some Japanese New Media artists have expressed similar views, and they have responded critically to this commercial prioritization in art, the circumstances that led to it (i.e. metropolitan industrialization), and the consequences it has brought about.                                                                                                                    “Kawaii” is a term used in contemporary popular Japanese culture to describe an entity

Α

that is ‘cute,’ see pg. 35 or see Favell, 10.     16  Calza,

 

Gian Carlo. Japan Style. Phaidon Press Limited (2007), p. 15.    

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The Critics   In 1986, Prime Minister Nakasone addressed Japan as a “high-level information society” in his party speech, a society that was “agitated” and “dense.”17 As explained, the Japanese government and certain mainstream media artists have embraced this highinformation society, the commoditization of art, and the media-metropolitan life of Tokyo. Yet, others express the agitation that Prime Minister Nakasone addressed, such as Masato Nakamura, Arata Isozaki, Eiko Ishioka, Dumb Type, and Tatsuo Miyajima.

Nakamura circulates in the same art-world as Murakami, yet his philosophy is drastically different. As opposed to Murakami’s anti-art stance and emphasis on consumerism, Nakamura examines art as a social intervention and as a means of changing society. In 1997, Nakamura exhibited an installation at SCAI The Bathhouse with 3331 Arts Chiyoda, entitled TRAUMATRAUMA. For the installation, he convinced four major convenience store companies to allow him to borrow the neon strip lights hung at the front of their shop. These colors are known to be the most visible urban iconography of Japanese cities, including Japanese convenience stores in cities all around Asia. TRAUMATRAUMA also has the alternative title "Consumer Identities,” which seems to indicate Nakamura’s opinion on the impact of consumerism upon the individual’s identity: the consumer identity alternatively implies double, or excess, ‘trauma.’ TRAUMATRAUMA offers a counterpoint to Murakami’s work by responding negatively

                                                                                                                17 Ippolito, 75.

 

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to a national image structured by technology and consumerism. In this case, the assumption of a consumer identity generates psychological trauma for the individual.

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Fig. 3. Nakamura, Masato. TRAUMATRAUMA [Installation]. (1996).

Concerns regarding individual emotional or mental freedom in a dense, metropolitan ‘information society’ continue to appear as a fear or frustration for New Media artists living within ‘high-tech’ Japan. Ikuro Choh, a telecommunications artist, argues:

Here in Tokyo, information is considered to be something that should be consumed, making the progress of consumption limitless like a huge cogwheel                                                                                                                 18  TRAUMATRAUMA [Installation]. (1996). Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=L6ta_zRaVP8C&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=Masato+Nakamura+trau matrauma  

 

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[…] At an eye-opening speed, high technology entwines the underground and the skies of this megalopolis with its ever-growing branches and leaves… The technology with a terrifying power can be effectively utilized in the economic system, but it has not worked at all upon the individual space of the people.19

The exhibition Tokyo: Form and Spirit took place the same year of Prime Minister Nakasone’s party speech, and included the same focal theme: Japan as an agitated, dense, high-level information society. In 1986, Paul Goldberger wrote an article in The New York Times describing the Tokyo: Form and Spirit as a movement analyzing Japanese culture, with Tokyo being the most visible element.20 In the exhibition’s title, and Goldberger’s summary, the urban space of Tokyo became a metaphor for cultural identity based on urbanization, industrialization, and consumerism. The curator of the exhibition, Martin Friedman, assembled a book containing articles on the exhibition and its philosophy, in which he states: “[t]his publication, Tokyo: Form and Spirit, and the exhibition that inspired it represent an effort to illuminate the relationship of Japanese artistic activity to various aspects of urban existence and to stress the durability of Japanese artistic attitudes from historical times to the present.”21 In turn, the exhibition included New Media artworks revolving around Japanese culture, the relationship of

                                                                                                                19  Choh, Ikuro. Statement for FaxArt Event ’89. 20

Goldberger, Paul. Architecture: Tokyo Show at I.B.M. The New York Times (1986).

21

Friedman, Martin. ‘A View Outside.’ Tokyo: Form and Spirit. Walker Art Center

(1986), p. 7.  

 

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technology to man, the sprawling urbanization of Tokyo, the influx of media and advertisements, and consumerism.

Arata Isozaki and Eiko Ishioka, graphic designer and art director, collaborated on an installation for Tokyo: Form and Spirit entitled Performing Space (1986). Andrew Blauvelt, of Walker Art Center, describes the piece: “Performing Space featured 60 video monitors displaying Japanese television ads.”22 This installation represented some of the major themes of the entire exhibition, such as consumerism, the physical and psychological claustrophobia citizens feel that arises out of the density of Tokyo, and the overwhelming nature of advertisements within the city. The impact of this was shown wittily as the artists placed the advertisements in one of most common symbols of prepackaged Tokyo consumption, a bento box. The exhibition and the themes of Performing Space exemplified many of the frustrations and anxieties of contemporary New Media artists in regards to Japan as a high-level information society and Tokyo’s dense, industrialized, urban living.

                                                                                                                22  Blauvelt, Andrew. Metamuseum. Tumblr (2013). Retrieved from: http://metamuseum.tumblr.com/post/48611823487/performing-space-designed-by-arataisozaki-and    

 

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Fig. 4. Isozaki, Arata & Ishioka, Eiko. Performing Space [Mixed Media Installation]. (1986)

Another group of “frustrated artists”24 that focus on Japan as a high-technology and highlevel ‘information society’ is the artists’ collective known as Dumb Type (1984). In their catalogue they explain that they came together to mirror their understanding of new Japan, “an ancestral yet technologically sophisticated society immersed in competing bits of information.”25 Dumb Type explains that while in practical terms, communication becomes easier within an ‘information society,’ technology also generates greater emotional distances within human relationships. They responded to these issues in their                                                                                                                 23  Performing Space [Mixed Media Installation]. (1986). Retrieved from: http://metamuseum.tumblr.com/post/48611823487/performing-space-designed-by-arataisozaki-and   24  Ippolito, 25

 

109.

Ippolito, 110.    

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performance entitled Pleasure Life (1988), which attempted to specifically reflect “hightech urban living in an information based society.”24

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Fig. 5. Dumb Type. Pleasure Life [Mixed Media Performance]. (1988)

Pleasure Life “consisted of a custom designed performance area with rounded pedestals within a grid-like pattern on the floor. The pedestals supported an assortment of modern day media devices, as well as various other mundane household items.”24 The assortment of devices symbolizes the widespread consumerism that has accompanied technological advancement in Japan. Yet the grid-like pattern and balanced organization of the pedestals give way to the correlation between pre-packaged consumerism, mapping                                                                                                                 26  Pleasure Life [Mixed Media Performance]. (1988). Retrieved from http://www.epidemic.net/en/photos/dumbtype/pleasure_life/photo1.html  

 

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urbanism, and the rise of an ‘information society’ as things that are psychologically detrimental to the individual. Dumb Type see Japan as the scientific term “ph7”, which conventionally means a balanced center; but to them this also symbolizes a destructive limbo, reaching neither heaven nor hell.27 The composed grid-like pattern and organized pedestals convey this structure and balance, but in fact these consumer items and balanced-illusion just keep the individual in an emotionally destructive limbo.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s use of technology in art attempts to provide a space away from the mentally claustrophobic metropolitan environment. His work focuses on the use of digital light-emitting diode (LED) counters. C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia describes his piece life palace (tea room) (2013):

A chamber, covered in red leather on the outside, hosts one visitor at a time into a cavernous constellation of flickering digital numerals and blue lights. The environment created within the work encourages contemplation and isolationphilosophical aspects that in today’s frenetic metropolitan life are seldom attained.28

                                                                                                                27  Cooper, Bridget. Furuhashi Teiji: Dumb Type. KYOTO Journal. Retrieved from: http://www.kyotojournal.org/the-journal/culture-arts/furuhashi-teiji-dumb-type/ 28

Ardia, C.A. Xuan Mai. These 10 Japanese Artists Are Changing the Meaning of Art.

The Culture Trip (2015). Retrieved from: http://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/10japanese-contemporary-artists-who-are-revolutionising-art/

 

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Miyajima ascribes ‘Three Concepts’ to all of his artworks, those being ‘Keep Changing,’ ‘Connect With Everything,’ and ‘Continue Forever.’ Within the concept ‘Connect With Everything’, he writes, “[a]rt has long been isolated from the real world, and spoiled within a framework of the ‘art world.”29 While the Superflat art of Murakami portrays Tokyo-living through happy 2-D figures, this is countered by portrayals of the stressful psychological aspects of the dense urban geography by other contemporary Japanese artists.

                         

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Fig. 6. Miyajima, Tatsuo. Life palace (tea room) [Mixed Media]. (2013)  

                                                                                                                29 Miyajima, Tatsuo. Concepts. Retrieved from: http://tatsuomiyajima.com/concepts/     30  Life

palace (tea room) [Mixed Media]. (2013). Retrieved from

http://www.designboom.com/art/tatsuo-miyajima-exhibits-hypnotic-digital-installations-  

 

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The Virtual Realm: ‘Anti-Japanese’ New Media as ‘Japanese’ Identity Questions concerning the relationship between tradition versus high-tech or ‘Eastern’ versus ‘Western’ are abandoned altogether by some New Media Japanese artists. These artists feel that using commoditization and defining a national artistic style clouds the artistic process and creates distorted interpretations of Japan in the eyes of non-domestic audiences. Tadashi Kawamata, a contemporary installation artist, has argued:

There is no need to talk about nationality in Japan. Foreigners [non-Japanese] often depend on unusual interpretations in order to find something ‘Japanese.’ There is a tendency among Japanese artists abroad to create something japonesque just so that foreigners can identify those works as Japanese. 31

In turn, certain Japanese artists have attempted to create a “nationless” world through New Media art. Masaki Fujihata, for example, attempted to create a virtual technological sculpture defying the boundaries of nationality in the work Global Interior Project (1996). As Juan Downey has termed it, the artist utilized the concept of ‘invisible architecture,’ “an all-encompassing cybernetic web of relations that he intends to transgress all of society, including all material boundaries.”32 Fujihata’s philosophies                                                                                                                 31 Fox, Howard N. A Primal Spirit: Ten Contemporary Japanese Sculptors. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1990), p. 70. 32

Hessler, Stefanie. “Technology, Feedback and Exile In Art and Politics In Santiago de

Chile.” Art Review. Vol. 67: No. 9. (December 2015), p. 79.    

 

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regarding cultural embodiment, commoditization, and materiality thus differ drastically from Murakami’s apparent celebration of capitalism within and beyond Japanese society.

In Global Interior Project, Fujihata tried to connect virtual and physical realities through the use of a “Matrix-Cube” kinetic sculpture. Fujihata describes the technical and conceptual aspects of the work:

As part of the installation ‘Matrix-Cube’ is a kinetic sculpture constructed as a metaphoric map of the virtual world. It represents the real world because it is a real installation. It consists of a number of boxes arranged in the form of a matrix. The individual cubes of Matrix-Cube interact with participants in virtual rooms that can be explored at each Cubical-Terminal. In short, while you are in a virtual room X, the door of room X of the Matrix-Cube opens. Usually, several doors of the Matrix-Cube are open simultaneously, since each participant explores the matrix in a different way.33

The physical installation alongside the metaphoric map of the virtual world enables users to redefine the nature of physical space versus virtual space.

                                                                                                                33 Fujihata, Masaki. Statement for “Global Interior Project: Networked Multi-User Virtual Environment Project” in “The Bridge: SIGGRAPH ’96 Art Show,” edit. Jean M. Ippolito. Visual Proceedings: The Art and Interdisciplinary Programs of SIGGRAPH’96. The Association for Computering Machinery (1996), p. 26.

 

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34

Fig. 7. Fujihata, Masaki. Global Interiors Project [Matrix-Cube]. (1996)

35

Fig. 8. Fujihata, Masaki. Design for Global Interiors Project. [Developed using the “InterSpace”

platform by NTT Human Interface Laboratories].

                                                                                                                34  Global Interiors Project [Matrix-Cube]. (1996). Retrieved from http://235media.de/1997/09/masaki-fujihata-2/?lang=en  

 

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Through the use of personal avatars, users can travel through the virtual space and engage in visual and verbal communication with other users in the same virtual room. 36 Thus, within the virtual sphere of Matrix-Cube, it does not matter who you are or where you are from, each individual’s action is entirely democratic. The room’s parameters are indicated by a particular object, such as a door knob, an apple, or a hat. There are no nationalities in the Global Interior Project, and thus no nationalistic values or culturally embodied representatives in this virtual world. In Critical Theory of Technology, Andrew Feenberg states:

Where, further, society is organized around technology, technological power is the principle form of power in society… A democratic transformation from below can shorten the feedback loops from damaged human lives and nature and guide a radical reform of the technical sphere.”37

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          35  Design for Global Interiors Project. [Developed using the “InterSpace” platform by NTT Human Interface Laboratories]. Retrieved from http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Archive/1995/The_Museum_Inside_The_Network/revival/fujihat a/index-e.html   36

Ippolito, 131-2.

37

Feenberg, Andrew. “Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview.” Tailoring

Biotechnologies Vol. 1:1 (2005), p. 49.  Retrieved from: https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/books/critbio.pdf  

 

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Taking up Feenberg’s ideas, Fujihata’s democratic virtual world could be understood as radically reforming identity associated with cultural embodiment. This democratization could enable individuals to dispense with stereotypes associated with their nation’s history. Effectively, Fujihata’s redefinition of spatiality enables users to analyze the prominence of cultural embodiment and the nature of their body’s role through their active involvement in both the physical and virtual space.

In fostering this democratic and cultureless approach, and playing with the nature of cultural embodiment and physical space, Fujihata worked with GPS Technology and Geographically Based Profiles in order to map out location and record time cumulatively. In Works@Alasce (2002), Fujihata created a custom-made panoramic camera to collect shortened video clips taken at specific locations. He then pieced them together according to intersecting chronologies “forming both a record of movement over time and an associated database of amassed moments.”38 Ippolito argues that there is a difference between Fujihata’s desire to establish a tangible reality for a virtual space and the desire to express cultural characteristics of place. Ippolito continues:

“[t]he purpose of these visual databases, however, is to record the nonlinear character of a unique place, no matter where the place is physically located…to record and convey the character of that place and its unique inhabitants regardless of their cultural origins or ideological persuasions… one of the great differences between physical place and virtual space is that one that is intangible has the                                                                                                                 38 Ippolito, 134-5.  

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potential for endless interpretations whether philosophical, spiritual or fantasyfilled.”38

39

Fig. 8. Fujihata, Masaki. Field_Works@Alasce [Interactive Installation & Mixed Media]. (2005-2007)

Furthering Ippolito’s argument, if we compare Fujihata’s fantasy-filled work to that of Murakami’s, the familiar signs of a national identity are replaced by innovation and the possibilities of a “new place” and a “global collective memory.” Works@Alasce thus showcases the innovative potential that technology and art can have when divorced from culturally embodied characteristics. In comparison to Murakami’s return to the tangible, marketable art object, Fujihata’s intangible works may redefine the basis for culturally embodied stereotypes and notions of physical reality and corporeality.                                                                                                                 39  Field_Works@Alasce [Interactive Installation & Mixed Media]. (2005-2007). Retrieved from http://laboralcentrodearte.uoc.edu/?cat=172  

 

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In summary, the extension of economic trade relations with the West at the turn of the nineteenth century furthered industrialization, urbanization, and the evolution of new technology in Japan. In the twentieth century, this led to the production of culturally embodied stereotypes, dense urban living, and the rise of an ‘information society.’ Japanese New Media artists have both capitalized and critiqued this cultural development and its impact on embodiment. Hence, Japan’s economic past has played a vital role in the development of New Media art both thematically and technically.

Fujihata’s use of virtual space as a means of liberating artists and art content from physically embodied values derived from their nationality is one way in which technology might be used to redefine cultural embodiment and national identity. As I shall show in Chapter 2, the virtual realm has also been used as a space for reflecting on and reshaping notions of corporeality and gender.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER 2: CORPOREALITY, GENDER AND THE BODY IN JAPANESE NEW MEDIA ART

As illustrated by Giant Magical Princess! She’s Walking Down The Streets of Akihabara! discussed in Chapter 1, gender has been a prominent subject in mainstream, commercial, and pop-cultural media art, including Superflat, Micropop!, anime, and manga. It has been argued that male hegemony is exercised in these fields due to the use of stereotypes and the depiction of physical violence perpetrated on women. Some contemporary Japanese New Media artists have fostered this stereotypical role, while others have challenged it. Whether one is depicting or opposing these gender stereotypes, what remains the same is the embodiment of corporeal content: content concerning the nature of the human body. Also, since many of these depictions are done in the virtual realm, corporeality is increasingly essential in regards to the virtual body opposed to the body as flesh. Thus, within these contrasting views and methods, questions concerning embodiment and corporeality in technological or virtual terms are necessarily relevant.

Donna Haraway’s influential Cyborg Manifesto (first published in The Berkeley Socialist Review Collective [1985]) analyses themes of control and domination within the realm of science and technology. Throughout her analysis she examines existing and possible uses of technology that have contributed to male hegemonic biases within society. However, Haraway maintains that with technology and the cyborg, nature and culture can be reworked in a way that “the one can no longer be the resource for appropriated or

 

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incorporation by the other.”40 These opportunities derive from the fact that the Cyborg is genderless and sexless. This epicene nature further provides the possibility of disbanding the rigid distinctions separating “human” from “animal” and “human” from “machine.”

I will now examine some contrasting reactions to depictions of Japanese women in New Media Art and will also consider works by female Japanese New Media Artists in which technology and/or the cyborg are used as a means of claiming physical, intellectual, and creative power. I shall link such works to ideas discussed in Haraway’s essay. However, before doing so, I shall briefly provide some historical background to gender stereotypes in Japanese art.

Gender Stereotypes in Japanese Art

The visual idealization of the Japanese woman can be traced to ukiyo-e woodblock prints, popular from the 17th to the 19th century. One translation of ukiyo-e is ‘to escape into the ‘floating world’6: to leave all troubles behind and surrender to the fantasy, sin, and pleasures of the Red Light District of Yoshiwara. Many Japanese artists immersed themselves in this culture and, as a matter of course, the central content of their work was eroticized Japanese women. These women were commonly illustrated as young and glamorous. However, as the prostitutes of Yoshiwara District ordinarily modeled for                                                                                                                 40 Haraway, Donna. “Cyborg Manifesto.” The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge (2000), p. 298.

 

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ukiyo-e prints, these illustrations were unrealistic. The models for these works typically lived in poor conditions and, after undergoing years of physical and emotional stress, they and their bodies were far older than illustrated.41 Calza describes these circumstances within the influential artist Kitagawa Utamaro’s life and his idealization of sex work:

Utamaro… also depicted prostitutes of the lowest class. In this he departed from artistic convention (which had in any case been revolutionized in the ukiyo-e – pictures of the floating world – and, like his French successors, he discovered in these women a rich vein of humanity to portray. But he still almost always idealizes them, and even in the case of the most wretched prostitutes, the teppō, this idealization is achieved by giving them youthful bodies that they would surely not have had at their social level.42

Thus, it was during the Edo period (1615-1868), the time of the development and flourishing of ukiyo-e, that Japanese visual art made fantasy worlds, deviance, and the sexually idealized Japanese woman harmonious variables. Yet within this combination of youthful glamour and impoverished prostitution exists another paradox: the contradictory roles of femininity. Calza points out that a central focus of the Western interest in Japan has arisen from these highly contradictory roles of femininity: “[m]ythical and historical, heroic and domestic, professional and aristocratic, coquettish and grave, naïve and                                                                                                                 41  Calza, 51.   42

 

Calza, 49.

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mysterious.”42 Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941) claims that “the meaning, the magic, the fascination of Japanese femininity […] depend specifically on both separation from the object and the impulse attraction towards it.”41 Calza develops Shūzō’s argument by describing one of the ukiyo-e print Series of the Twelve Hours in the Green Houses (1795), in which Utamaro illustrates a Japanese woman in an idealized manner:

The orian seems lost in thought, absorbed in a world of her own which no one else is allowed to enter. Her height and the exaggerated slenderness of her body turn her into an other-worldly being. An aspect of her seductiveness is the way she appears to belong to a different sphere from the one inhabited by common mortals, including those who will meet her and possess her, and the background of gold dust emphasizes this, giving the figure a quasi-divine aura.41

In Cyberspace, or The Virtuality of the Real, Žižek states that in the virtual realm “we witness a return to pensée sauvage , to “concrete”, “sensual” thought.”4 This paradigm of Α

concrete, sensual thought is often portrayed as the working out of male, heterosexual fantasies. There is, I would argue, a recurrence of this pensée sauvage and an overlap between such portrayals of women in artworks in traditional media, those in New Media, and in popular Japanese culture. In many cases the “other-wordly,”divine, and idealized characteristic of women are perpetuated in contemporary New Media art, specifically in the virtual space of digital art, anime, and manga.                                                                                                                  “pensée sauvage” is a term coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work ‘La Pensée

Α

Sauvage’ (1962), it is used to describe collective human thought in its ‘untamed’ state  

 

34  

43

Fig. 10. Utmaro, Kitagawa. Series of the Twelve Hours in the Green Houses [Woodblock Print]. (1795)

As discussed above, Murakami became the face of Japanese art on a global scale and, in turn, Superflat art became a leading art style for an entire country. Superflat fashioned an image of Japanese culture as comprised of otaku (obsessive nerds), manga (comics), anime (cartoons), kawaii (cute), and moé (a term meaning an otaku nerd’s obsession of a young cute girl).44 Consequently, Favell claims that Japan, “was a land which during the 1990s and 2000s became a cartoon: full of cute-yet-seductive schoolgirls, super-nerds

                                                                                                                43  Series of the Twelve Hours in the Green Houses [Woodblock Print]. (1795). Retrieved from http://www.wikiart.org/en/kitagawa-utamaro/the-hour-of-the-snake  

 

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with weird fetishes, and a warped decadent pop culture.”44 Along with anime and manga obsessions, Favell comments on the impact this had:

The otaku mentality referenced by Superflat artists channeled above all the idea of hopeless, ageing, obsessive dame (loser) guys longing day and night for their unattainable, cute, and dangerously young girl idrou (idols). Intellectualized, it was presented as the core gender dynamic of an infantilized consumer society trapped in endless, introverted fantasy and escape.44

Developing Calza’s description of Series of the Twelve Hours in the Green Houses, the obsessive attraction to the young women depicted as anime in Superflat becomes clearer. The anime girl belongs to a different intellectual and physical sphere to the ‘common mortals’ who look upon her, and who want to posses her; she becomes the contemporary other-worldly being with a quasi-divine aura and contradictory feminine characteristics. Moreover, the common features of women depicted in anime and manga film are “that the heroines are all young girls, they are cute-looking, but they have a sophisticated understanding of the world and a mature sense of judgment.”45 Murakami’s cute-looking giant magical princess discussed in Chapter 1 exemplifies this ‘other-wordly’ being that is (physically) above the common mortals who also yearn to ‘possess’ or ‘consume’ her.

                                                                                                                44 Favell, 10. 45

Lloyd, Fran. Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art. Reakin Books

(2002), p.136.

 

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Thus, the “introverted fantasy escape” of idealized women in the ukiyo-e ‘floating world’ recurs in the virtual realm of manga, anime, and Murakami’s Superflat.

Although women in anime and manga are shown as sensual, powerful or magical forces, they are also commonly portrayed as victims of brutal violence, thus their power is stripped away. As Napier states in ‘From Akira to Princess Mononoke’, “[f]requently, the female body is indeed an object to viewed, violated, and tortured.”46 As the body was also an object to be viewed and violated in the era of ukiyo-e prints, we are, in effect, witnessing a return to the pensée sauvage of ukiyo-e heterosexual male paradigm in contemporary anime and manga. Žižek goes on to explain how one could enact these sexual or violent fantasies by virtue of the distance offered by virtual cyberspace:

…cyberspace, with its capacity to externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, opens up to artistic practice a unique possibility to stage, to “act out” the fantasmatic support of our existence, up to the fundamental “sadomasochistic” fantasy that can never be subjectivized. We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the encounter with the Other scene that stages the foreclosed hard core of the subject’s Being … it enables us to treat [these fantasies] in a playful way and this adopt towards them a minimum of distance.4

                                                                                                                46 Napier, Susan J. Anime From Akira to Princess Mononoke. Palgrave Macmillian (2001), p. 65.  

 

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The negativity associated with virtuality echoes Dumb Type’s philosophy: namely, that communication technologies generate greater emotional distances within human relationships. However, in terms of the fantasy element, this becomes problematic because, as stated by Haraway, “[t]he machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.”47

Furthermore, Feenberg has discussed how technology is a “two-sided phenomenon,” with the operator one the one hand and the object on the other. However, he continues, that when the operator and object are both human beings, “the technical action is an exercise of power.”48 In this light, since the operator (man) and the object (woman) are both humans, these predominantly male technical actions are an exercise of power over Japanese women. Arguably, this sexual power structure prevails not only in traditional Japanese art, Japanese commercial media art, or other forms of Japanese New Media, but also extends to values in everyday Japanese society. These patriarchal societal and artistic circumstances have received mixed responses by female Japanese New Media artists and it is to a selection of their works that I shall now turn.

                                                                                                                47 Haraway, 313. 48

 

Feenberg, 49.  

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Japanese Female New Media Artists Responding to the Dominant Male Gaze

In 1991, an article from the series “Women Caught in the Wave of Computerization” in Computer and Management (Tokyo, 1991) promoted the idea of women striving towards realization of their independent and financial potential through the occupation of computer graphics designer.49 Not only did this occupation facilitate financial and social independence but, by being successful in computer graphics, one could also reshape the ‘other-wordly’ anime female stereotype. As described by author Akikio Miki in her essay ‘Toward Eternity,’ “manga artists of the 1970s, who established escapist environments and created their own sanctuaries, created networks of salvation to rescue teenage girls from the ‘gravity of social constraints and questions of self-existence.”50 Computer graphics thus provided the opportunity for women to achieve empowerment by reconstructing these alternate realities and thereby reinterpreting the visual medium and stereotype.

Naoko Motoyoshi became a role model for Japanese women after she rose from being a hairdresser to a globally known computer graphics designer, principally for work in Akira. Motoyoshi was introduced to the world of computer graphics by first focusing on                                                                                                                 49 Ippolito, 85. 50

Miki, Akikio. Toward Eternity. Perrotin. Retrieved from:

https://www.perrotin.com/artiste_text.php?id=15&nom_=Aya+TAKANO&dossier=Aya_ Takano&photo_=ayatakano_15.jpg    

 

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virtual corporeality by technically representing the portrayal of the human body. In 1987 and 1988 the National Broadcasting Corporation broadcast a series entitled The Universe Within: The Human Body, which consisted of educational segments detailing the inner workings of the human form. Motoyoshi and Ryoichiro Debuchi contributed by working on several scenes for the series, illustrating inner workings of the human body such as the movement of bacteria, the generation of blood vessels, and the destruction of skin cells. During this time, Motoyoshi was working at High Tech Lab Japan where she had full access to the Digital Dynamation System (DDS) animation software used for in-house 3D modeling that was created by Debuchi, as well as Wavefront and other commercial software. In those years, she also began to work on her own animations.51

Motoyoshi responded to the Japanese female archetype throughout her computer graphics career. One of her first works was entitled Mermaids (1986), which introduced the principal characteristics of her work to follow: girls who were cute, pretty, and “idealistic, fantasy creatures.”52 In 1989 and 1990, she released two animation videos iconic to the establishment of these characteristics in Japanese computer graphics animation, A Moonlit Spring Night and The Robe of an Angel. Ippolito describes the content and technical nature of these two works:

Both of Motoyoshi’s animated works from 1989 and 1990 incorporated symmetry and balance in the compositions, and both has highly idealized figures. A Moonlit                                                                                                                 51 Ippolito, 86. 52

 

Ippolito, 87.    

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Spring Night showed five young girls in kimono standing in a circle, shown from above in a kaleidoscopic affect of mirror-like symmetry. The Robe of an Angel focused on a single female figure in the center facing forward with her multiple arms extending outwards on both sides. All of these figures had finely chiseled features of idealistic beauty.53

Motoyoshi thus embraced the typical ‘virtual female’ in her solo work, but although she illustrated the idealization of woman, she executed works of a “technical virtuoso, and the subject matter that of a young girl’s romantic fantasy.”51 Thus, adding to Ippolito’s description, one could argue Motoyoshi reclaimed the gaze of the fantasy: the fantasy of a young girl as opposed to that of a man. While Motoyoshi felt she found creative freedom in Japan and expanded on the idealistic, other-worldly image of woman, artists such as Saki Satom, Mariko Mori, and Midori Kitagawa have rejected these values and stereotypes.

While Kitagawa parallels Motoyoshi in two ways: (a) the meticulous planning of their animation sequences, and (b) the empowerment offered by a career in computer graphics, the content in their work and views on Japanese society are markedly different. Kitagawa was born and raised in Japan but chose to move to the United States. She attended the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACAD) at O.S.U, during which she received a master’s degree in computer graphics and a Phd from Texas A & M University. Kitagawa made the decision to leave Japan in order to receive her education                                                                                                                 53  Ippolito, 89-90.    

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because she felt an immense amount of social pressure and creative restrictions when living as a woman within Japanese society. In 1990, she described her reasons for moving to United States:

I find it difficult to tolerate some things, which Japanese society has accepted, such as collectivism, sexual inequality, and seniority. Here in the United States, I have been studying what I want to study, saying frank opinions to my boss, and sharing housework with my husband. I do not have to look like others. I do not have to share the same ideas with others. I do not have to pretend to be anything other than myself. I can be what I am. I am more of what I am here than when I was in Japan.53

Kitagawa undermines the Japanese female stereotype in her art. Her works include subjects such as animals, robots, or Western-looking adults created in a similar visualstyle to Pixar. One exemption to her commonly portrayed style, but not an exception to her exclusion of the Japanese female stereotype, is her work about my name. The animation sequence explains the origin of her name and the desolate feelings her name invokes in her mother, feelings arising from the memories of her mother’s deceased sister. The visual portrayal of the young girls in the animation resembles that of a children’s book. Idealization and sexualization of a divine other-wordly being has no place in this animation sequence.

 

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54

Fig. 11. Kitagawa, Midori. about my name [Animation]. (2015)

55

Fig. 12. Satom, Saki. A Space of One’s Own [Mixed Media Installation]. (2011)

                                                                                                                54  about my name [Animation]. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOgSOwj-Ors   55  A

Space of One’s Own [Mixed Media Installaton]. (2011). Retrieved from

http://www.43inverness-street.com/exhibitions/saki-satom/  

 

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Resonating to Kitagawa with regards to the suffocation of creative freedom felt by Japanese women is Saki Satom’s A Space of One’s Own 2011. The work consists of a video of a woman kicking, struggling, and turning within a stainless steel tub, while played through an inaudible single video monitor. This use of medium creates the illusion that the women is embedded inside the monitor itself, struggling to escape.56 Gregory Burke, Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, describes the work as, “[a] tension between extremely tight physical space and the seemingly unlimited virtual space offered by the digital screen.”57 A Space of One’s Own symbolizes that however limitless virtual space might be, women are still restricted by cultural norms and traditions.

The practical and virtual empowerment exemplified by Motoyoshi’s and Kitigawa’s computer graphic careers and their methods of opposing the restrictions of embodied gender stereotype can be understood as an extension of Donna Haraway’s notions of the Cyborg. Both of their methods and reactions respond to the predominantly heterosexual male perspective of Japanese mainstream media and social values. Yet, these female

                                                                                                                56 “Saki Satom.” Past Exhibitions. (2015). Retrieved from: http://www.43invernessstreet.com/exhibitions/saki-satom/ 57

Burke, Gregory. “Inside Mediarena: contemporary art from Japan in context.” New

Zealand Journal of Media Studies Vol. 9:1: ‘Asian’ Media Arts Practice In/And Aotearoa New Zealand. Victoria University of Wellington (2015).  Retrieved from: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Sch091JMS-t1-g1-t9.html    

 

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artists look towards science and technology as a means of producing “fresh sources of power.”58 Haraway has explained why this is relevant for women:

One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring out imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.59

In contrast to the fantasy of the divine, ‘other-worldly’ young woman, the cyborg symbolizes women’s creation of new personal and collective selves. While Japanese society and (commercial) New Media art can be said to have perpetuated sexualized, stereotypical portrayals of Japanese women, simply placing the blame on Japanese values would be unfair and naïve. Many of these commercial characteristics in art and mainstream media have been fashioned out of Japan’s desire to exploit markets in the West. Murakami has even stated, that he crafted the Superflat image because the West craved a “soy sauce” culture of Japan.60 He stated that this was “knowing your own identity”: about recognizing the Western gaze at Japan and playing it for all its worth.”61 Therefore, the corporeal values exercised within New Media incorporate both Western                                                                                                                 58 Haraway, 304. 59

Haraway, 202.  

60

Favell, 43.

61

Favell, 51.    

 

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and Japanese perspectives, and the work of many female artists has been to examine and challenge such myths and meanings in Japan and beyond.

The Cyborg Retelling the Stories of Naturalized Identities   In the growing of urbanization and information society within Japan, Mariko Mori aims to utilize New Media art in an attempt to balance Western and Eastern aesthetic, social, and philosophical values. Mori worked as a fashion model in London and New York. She applied her knowledge of clothing, modeling, and the West in her successive self-images, which were combined with digital collage, interactivity, and video. While she analyzed Western culture, she was also forced to look upon her own. She has argued that this has led her to appreciate her culture for what it is, but also to recognize the prevalent embodied, naturalized Japanese identities. In turn, Mori utilizes New Media in order to reshape stigmas and biases, while at the same time, to find appreciation for the ‘other’ in the midst of Western values.

Mori analyses modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ identity through her Japanese identity and values, and in doing so she brings up issues of gender through the notion of the Cyborg in Tea Ceremony III (1994). In Tea Ceremony III, Mori hands out tea to Japanese businessmen on the streets of Tokyo while dressed as a futuristic Cyborg.

 

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62

Fig. 13. Mori, Mariko. Tea Ceremony III [Interactive Performance]. (1994)

Through the symbolic nature of the Japanese tradition of the tea ceremony, Mori attempts to retell the story of Japanese woman in their cultural identity and amidst ‘Westernbased’ technological advancement. Mori’s costume of Cyborg and use of mixed media symbolizes connecting with “the genesis of traditional matters.”63 Mori’s perspective regarding the use of new technologies and gender coincides with Haraway’s in her Cyborg Manifesto:

Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked                                                                                                                 62  Tea Ceremony III [Interactive Performance]. (1994). Retrieved from http://museemagazine.com/art-2/features/interview-with-mariko-mori-space-is-the-place/   63

 

Ippolito, 128.

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them as the other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchal dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin in Western culture.64

Barbara Lynne Rowland researched and discussed the tea ceremony’s role in the lives of Japanese women. By concluding that most tea ceremony practitioners are wives and mothers without a full-time profession, she infers a link between the practice of the tea ceremony and the subordinate role of women in Japanese society. Furthermore, Rowland has stated that:

Most of my informants are women who do not question the values of society in which they live. They accept their society’s hierarchal order and the idea that there is a proper place for everyone and everything. These women seek to fulfill as best they can the roles assigned to them in Japanese society, while finding personal enjoyment and meaning within those roles. 65

As such, Haraway’s theory regarding male hegemony prevails in regards to the history of the Japanese tea ceremony.

                                                                                                                64 Haraway, 311.     65

Kato, Etsuko. The Tea Ceremony and Woman’s Empowerment in Modern Japan:

Bodies Re-presenting the Past. Routledge (2004), p.9.

 

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Rowland also found that many of these women do not know much about the traditional meanings of the tea ceremony and its long symbolic history within Japan. Calza describes these traditional characteristics:

It is as if [tea] has the intrinsic natural characteristics of inducing a state of its own, creating a break in the routine in which we are submerged, causing us to distance ourselves from our actions and allowing us to contemplate them from a more rarefied dimension where we can grasp the general significance of an act and its true place in our life.66

Based on Calza’s description, the act of Mori handing out tea symbolizes a break from routine in practical terms (i.e. a break from the recipient’s work) as well as a break in the routine of gender roles. Yet, more importantly, the significance of the act in Tea Ceremony III may be an indication of the gendered values promoted in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. During this time of economic development, specific jobs were set aside for women, such as ‘elevator girls’ or ‘mannequin girls,’ Successively, “Japanese used the English word ‘girl’ (“gāru”) to describe women working in these new service sector jobs and, as indicated by the word, they tended to be young and unmarried and often wore uniforms in Western style as a sign of their, and their country’s, ‘modernization.”67 Mori in a Cyborg uniform may be symbolic to Japan’s ‘genesis’ or                                                                                                                 66  Calza, 14.   67  Skov,

Lise & Moeran, Brian. Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan. Routledge

(2013), p. 16.      

 

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historical use of gārus in promoting a ‘Western’ modernized image. Thus, Mori uses New Media in order to connect tradition and past narratives, whether the tea ceremony or gārus, to the contemporary and technological world.

Moreover, Calza has stated, “[t]he tea ceremony is the symbol, and at the same time, the vehicle for the man,” or in this case, woman, “who rises above the frenetic struggle for survival to an awareness that every action is an expression of himself,” or herself, “evidence that he is approaching his ideal world, or conversely, regressing to the brute state.”66 Mori is then attempting to rise above the frenetic cosmopolitan struggle by placing herself outside of it as a Cyborg tea server. In doing so, she asks those she serves to contemplate woman as Cyborg and to reflect on the routine replacement of woman by machine or Cyborg (i.e. ‘elevator girl,’ virtual pornography, sex robots). She does so in order to raise awareness of the action as an expression of herself either as approaching her ideal world as Cyborg, or regressing to Cyborg as her brute state. As I have explained, women’s past role as Cyborg in Japanese media has often entailed violence, and brutality. Yet, within the context of Haraway, the sexless Cyborg also has the prospect of overcoming this violence and hegemony, thus approaching an ideal world.

As such, Mori’s use of the tea ceremony in her work refers to a) the women’s hierarchal placement and past narratives within this tradition and economic history and b) her philosophy of woman as Cyborg: her transformation from human to machine within ceremonial tradition and economic history. Mori thus uses New Media to comment on women’s placement within male hegemony, to question embodied gender roles, and to

 

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examine the future of corporeality. In examining corporeal values, she uses the haptic nature of the tea ceremony and the costume of Cyborg to address the possible future of woman as a technical-machine, and asks her audience to further question whether this is a regression to a brute state or a progression to ideal world.

The Virtual Nature of Technology and New Media vs. The Female Body as Flesh

In Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway claims that the opportunities given by technology and the Cyborg derive from the fact that Cyborgs are genderless and sexless. Two years before Haraway published these ideas, the tech-artist Naoko Tosa began her career by collaborating with other artists and scientists to create highly technological works of art. Ironically, by 1995, she created the genderless and sexless technological installation Neuro Baby II. The installation was innovative in its blurring of the line between human and machine.

Tosa’s artistic interests began in Surrealism and video. From 1985 to 1988, she worked in Tokyo at the Gakken Computer Graphics Study Research Center during which she learned about basic programming and computers. In 1988, she began lecturing on computer graphics techniques at Universal Electronic Media Institute in Machida and at Musashino Fine Arts University’s Image Department. At that time, she began to give her interests in Surrealism room to grow by attending philosophy and psychology classes at Keio University in Tokyo. Tosa was particularly interested in creating work that could  

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stimulate unexpected sensory responses in viewers, and Surrealism provided her with the inspiration to pursue “visualizing things our eyes cannot see.”68 After Tosa had acquired both the technical skills and the conceptual depth needed for her art, she began experimenting with performance art, computer graphics effects for the performances, experimental film, photographic animation and video. After she exhibited her final video work Gush! (1989), she decided to explore interactive media. By so doing, Tosa aimed to materialize the ideas of mind and thus redefine the Cartesian-based ‘facts’ or ‘truths’ concerning the relationship of mind and body.

69

Fig. 14. Tosa, Naoko. Gush! [Mixed Media]. (1989)

                                                                                                                68  Ippolito, 70.     69  Gush!

[Mixed Media]. (1989). Retrieved from

http://www.naokotosa.com/1989/02/343/  

 

52  

Tosa aimed to create an interface uniting emotional output and sensory input and in order to do so she began working with Koichi Murakami, a researcher of human interfaces. This collaboration gave rise to Neuro Baby (1993). Tosa summarizes, “[t]he name Neuro Baby implies the ‘birth’ of a virtual creature made possible by the recent developments of neutrally based computer architecture.”70 The unprecedented developments of computer architecture were due to the neural network’s relationship with computer processing system. The lowest level of the established computer programming system previously had four rudimentary functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. However, after founding a computer-processing network patterned on the functionality of the human brain’s neurons, the established basic functions now became unpredictable and far less limited.

Through sound input, various nodes filter and measure the length and size of the sound waves. The nodes then assign variables to it and designate a location on the “emotional mapping plane,”71 which has already been plotted with various possible outputs. Neuro Baby can then respond visually with either a happy, angry, sad, or cheerful face, as well as respond audibly by cooing, laughing, yawning, hiccupping, and crying. “If the baby is ignored, it passes time by whistling, and responds with a cheerful ‘Hi’ once spoken to.”70 The images appeared to be suspended in space by first coloring them on a black background and then exhibiting them on a black monitor, the monitors were then wrapped in white sheets in place in baby cribs.                                                                                                                 70  Ippolito,  72.     71  Ippolito,  71.    

 

53  

72

Fig. 15. Tosa, Naoko. Neuro

Baby [Emotional Recognition Software]. (1993/2011)

73

Fig. 16. Tosa, Naoko. Neuro Baby

[Mixed Media Installation]. (1993/201

                                                                                                                72  Neuro Baby [Emotional Recognition Software]. (1993/2011). Retrieved from https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/general/work/neuro-baby.html   73  Neuro

Baby [Mixed Media Installation]. (1993/2011). Retrieved from

https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/general/work/neuro-baby.html  

 

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In Neuro Baby 2, the monitor was now set inside a plastic sculptural form of a woman’s torso. Neuro Baby 2 also responded to sound output, but instead it “responded by twisting, rotating, expanding and contracting, while it continued to float buoyantly as though suspended in amniotic fluid.”74 Ippolito states, “Tosa said that the form she chose for Neuro Baby 2 is conceptual. It is almost adult like, but it is neither male nor female. It is a symbol with a surrealistic quality.”74 She has stated that the conscious intention for Neuro Baby 2 was to be the birth of a new life form, but she has acknowledged that subconsciously it may represent her mixed feelings about abortion due to a Catholic upbringing.74 Tosa’s Neuro Baby 2 poses corporeal questions concerning the nature of human life in its relationship with virtual, technological life.

Haraway’s rejection of the boundaries separating human from machine and human from animal coincides with the ‘birth’ of a technological creature in Tosa’s art. Furthermore, Haraway has stated that “[c]ommunications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools in recrafting our bodies,”75 and that “[l]iberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.”76 Through years of dissecting the notion of the consciousness and the maternal body, Tosa physically and symbolically reconstructed the notion of the consciousness of technology through both biotechnology and communicative technology. In doing so, she created a

                                                                                                                74 Ippolito, 73. 75

Haraway, 302.

76

Haraway, 291.    

 

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genderless and sexless life form and gave voice to universal feminist questions regarding liberation, oppression, and ownership of one’s body.

In conclusion, embodied gender roles are based on the corporeal values shaped by the culture, physical or virtual environment, and power structure. Past forms of Japanese art have exemplified and exercised male hegemony, both in artistic content and technological, economic career prospects. This artistic, political, and economic male hegemony has further shaped Japanese gendered corporeal values. In the case of contemporary Japanese New Media, this is a double-sided coin: sexualization and violence towards women and/or female characters becomes easier to enact, yet the inherent genderlessness of New Media and the Cyborg provide Japanese women the opportunity to redefine cultural corporeal values and embodied gender roles. In their New Media art, Kitigawa, Motoyoshi, Mori, and Tosa have exploited both the potentialities and contradictions of these debates.

     

 

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CHAPTER 3: NATURE AND THE ECOLOGY OF NEW MEDIA As has been discussed, cultural values shape the thoughts, anxieties, and fears associated with corporeality and embodiment. I have examined many of the anxieties explored by Japanese New Media artists within the context of an ‘information society.’ Still, there is one other approach within Japanese New Media art that provides relief from such anxieties, particularly in regards to the distinction between the organic and the artificial: this takes the form of a Shintō-animistic and techno-scientific universalist approach.

Japanese cultural tradition sees the universe’s beginnings based “on a state of unity between the material and the spiritual, making it almost impossible to distinguish between them.”77 This close connection is rooted in Shintō religious beliefs, which pose no great divide between ‘the natural’ and ‘the artificial.’ These views have influenced Japan’s relationship to technology: like nature, technology can be understood as simply another influential entity with its own autonomous meaning. This extension of Shintō animism encompasses all material practices, “whether oriented towards ritual, towards features surrounding ecology, or towards modern-day technologies.”78 In other words, Shintō-animistic values may be seen as part of a technologically based ecology, which rejects Cartesian dualism in such a way that all material is thought to have a soul of its own: thus there is no distinction between the human and the nonhuman or between the organic and the artificial.                                                                                                                 77 Calza, 137. 78

 

Jensen & Blok, 97.    

57  

Within this Shintō-animistic worldview is a background notion of techno-scientific universalism. Techno-scientific universalism “may be seen as inculcating a ‘deep’ ecological sense of the immanent vitality of human and non-human cohabitation.”5 This subject-subject perspective extends to human-human as well as human-nonhuman: nonhuman being technology, animals, plants, ecosystems, etc. Within this discussion of Shintō-animism and techno-scientific universalism, matter, space and the environment are of equal importance: co-habitation takes place within shared space and a shared environment.

Japan’s animistic and ecological approach towards technology has significantly influenced some New Media artists, primarily in the field of evolutionary computation, a subfield of artificial intelligence that applies the theory of evolution to computer programming. In this chapter, I will discuss evolutionary computation within Japanese New Media art and examine the way in which artworks use this form of programming to challenge dominant corporeal values and notions of embodiment through a Shintōanimistic lens. Then, I will explain the prevalence and significance of techno-scientific universalism within Japanese New Media artworks. I contend that techno-scientific universalism could hold major potential in shaping a harmonious relationship between science and technology. “This research becomes even more important as the world becomes increasingly mediated by the virtual and as biotechnology attempts to intervene more in the organic world.”79 Japan’s approach towards technology can provide a                                                                                                                 79  Wilson, Steven. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. MIT Press (2002) p. 126.

 

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perspective that has the potential to ease anxieties associated with the body’s place in a virtual, media-influenced and (bio)-technological world.

Artificial Corporeality: Genetic Algorithms and The Organic Randomness of the Virtually Artificial

Evolutionary computation is a subfield of artificial intelligence that applies the theory of evolution to computer programming. This includes the use of evolutionary or genetic algorithms, which are defined as adaptive heuristic searches “based on the evolutionary ideas of natural selection and genetics. As such, they represent an intelligent exploitation of random search.”80 The artificial computer is looked upon as possessing the inherent random and evolutionary characteristics of human corporeality and ‘natural’ forms of life. It comes as no surprise Japanese New Media artists make use of genetic algorithms since, as Favell explains:

…pure abstraction is always broken by an element taken from nature: an insect or a small plant. This aspect – geometry within naturalism – is one of the keys to discovering and interpreting avant-garde art in Japan, and the roots that bind it

                                                                                                                80 Genetic Algorithms. Retrieved from: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/journal/vol1/hmw/article1.html#introduction

 

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(and will continue to do so to the cultural and aesthetic values of the country’s won tradition.”81

Yoishiro Kawaguchi, a computer graphics artist, does in fact continue to do so. It was the algorithms found within nature that first inspired him and, furthering Favell’s claim,

Kawaguchi admits that he might be influenced by the Eastern concept of the evolution of nature, and that his way of seeing the relationships of things in nature may be influenced by Asian philosophy which conceives of everything as part of an interconnected whole.82

In turn, through the inspiration of geometry in nature, evolution, and Asian philosophy Kawaguchi formed his own growth algorithm and his own organic universes.83 In using this approach, Kawaguchi comprised research and presented it within a collection entitled “The Growth Model” at SIGGRAPH ’82. During this year, 1982, he also attended a computer graphics symposium in Tokyo where he met Koichi Omura, a professor at Osaka University’s Faculty of Engineering. Along with his group engineers at Osaka Univeristy, Omura created LINKS-I, a computer graphics system composed of “65 sixteen-bit microprocessors and custom developed software for parallel processing,” and

                                                                                                                81 Favell, 111. 82

Ippolito, 56.    

83

Ippolito, 53-54.

 

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Meta-ball, “a modeling and ray-tracing software based on curved surface algorithms”84 used with LINKS-1. Kawaguchi and Omura began to collaborate after they met in ’82 and, through combining “The Growth Model” and Meta-ball, the software required to produce Growth: Mysterious Galaxy was created.

This work consists of imaginary planetary surfaces pulsating with life, while complex structures evolve out of bubbling masses.85 Kawaguchi explains the method behind this creation:

[I] utilize some formative principle in order to create an ambiguous direction for the organism to take to develop its own formation. These methods along a timeaxis can be implemented by understanding the underlying picture of motion represented by the dynamic structure.83

Elements of the film, such as an enormous foetus floating in space, parodied Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, Kawaguchi chose to show the foetus “from the beginning of mitosis, a single computer generated egg dividing one cell at a time to become a fetus with arms, legs, and a beating heart.”85 Including these additional steps of corporeal evolution symbolizes analogies between human and nonhuman life forms, specifically expressing “the idea that all things near and far are subject to principles of natural evolutionary growth.”85 Furthermore, Ippolito states, “[w]hen we look beyond the                                                                                                                 84  Ippolito, 51.   85

 

Ippolito, 52.

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images, or within the algorithms space, we can find a conceptual exploration of the characteristics of the computer’s ability to simulate natural evolution and change through artificial processing.”86 Or, to simulate ‘autopoiesis,’ a term Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have coined “to similarly describe cells as self-generating feedback systems.”32 It is this symbolic approach that Kawaguchi applies to his evolutionary computation method and to the subject matter in Growth: Mysterious Galaxy.

In using his growth algorithms and 3-D animation, Kawaguchi created another evolutioninspired work entitled Mutation (1992). Mutation consists of organic and liquid-like forms, which “visualize the fluidity of changing, artificial, biomorphic shapes and creatures that exist at the interstices of microbiology and computer code.”87 As such, Mutation provides an aesthetic rendering of the “biocosmic” ideas that Kawaguchi applies to the computer algorithm, such as the organic randomness and repetition inherent in growth algorithms.

                                                                                                                86 Ippolito, 121. 87  Kafala,

Ted. “Yoshiro Kawaguchi’s Mutation and Cell: A Study of Form in 3D

Computer Animation.” Enculturation: Vol. 3: No. 1. (2000). Retrieved from: http://enculturation.net/3_1/kafala/    

 

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88

Fig. 17. Kawaguchi, Yoichiro. Mutation [Animation]. (1992)

Kawaguchi’s computer processing approach is similar to Tosa’s in Neuro Baby: specifics of human corporeality are appropriated to the organic nature of nonhuman lifeforms. However, rather than being based solely on the nature of the human brain, Kawaguchi adheres to that which every animal, plant, body part, cell, etc. is subject to: the overarching theory of evolution. Nonetheless, both exemplify Harway’s aspiration: rethinking the rigid distinctions demarcating “human” from “machine.” In turn, Kawaguchi’s use of computer algorithms and software make comparisons between the inherent randomness, fluidity, and evolutionary character of cells and other living beings and the computer processing system. By perceiving the distinction between the artificial and the organic flexibly, similarities between the two can be found and developed. Through this approach, the nature of corporeality goes through the process of redefinition and the

                                                                                                                88  Mutation [Animation]. (1992). Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/3_1/kafala/  

 

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Cartesian-based question of man vs. machine resurfaces: what is the difference between man and machine if they both have similarly organic and evolutionary characteristics?

Both Kawaguchi’s genetic algorithm approach and the Surrealist movement inspired computer graphics artist Ryoichiro Debuchi. These inspirations were based on his interest in gunzensei, which translates to accidental nature, ‘accidentalism,’ or the element of natural randomness.89 Debuchi felt that Kawaguchi’s genetic algorithm approach provided the ideal way of bringing forth the inherent gunzensei within in nature, considering they both depend on the intelligent exploitation of randomness. Like Tosa, Debuchi is inspired by Surrealism, randomness in nature, and the desire to create a virtual organic universe. Co-worker Motoyoshi describes Debuchi’s universes in the following terms:

Debuchi’s work has the element of chance (randomness). There are battles with things attacking one another, bullets fly and some things pursue them and some flee from them. That sort of drive is, of course, similar to the randomness of Kawaguchi’s algorithm. The images are not created by the artist himself, but produced by the computer. Since there is movement involved, it is very unique.90

One example of this style of work produced by Debuchi is VioMechaWars. The oneminute film consists of fanciful creatures interacting with one another in destructive and                                                                                                                 89 Ippolito, 93. 90

 

Ippolito, 87.

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violent ways. This interaction was created by Debuchi programming a “will” in each of the characters through a Dynamic Environment Particle System. This system enabled Debuchi to program in each the individual characters to hunt other objects and assault them. “His means of expression through the algorithm gave his creatures a will to attack and a will to defend.”91

92

Fig. 18. Debuchi, Ryoichiro. VioMechaWars [Animation]. (1989)

                                                                                                                91 Ippolito, 95. 92  VioMechaWars

[Animation]. (1989). Retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtF49FI3RIQ  

 

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In VioMechaWars, sequential artificial intelligence and groups in motion, such as a flock of birds, inspired Debuchi. He saw machines as the connection between human beings and nature, and regarded the random character of the computer as able to access nature’s forces, which he describes as:

…the super powers that are hidden behind nature essentially, and that are above human power. An airplane is an artificial thing, but it is merely a machine, which is successful in pulling out natural power than can make objects float in the air, and it uses this power. Electricity is also the power essentially inherent in nature.93

Debuchi’s explanation of the ‘hidden’ powers in the forces of nature parallel Kawaguchi’s understanding of genetic algorithms in the aesthetics of nature. Kawaguchi explains, “when I began research on shells, however, I came to understand the principles that are part of the rules hidden within forms of the natural world.”94 The two accounts are important for the development of New Media philosophy. In New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansan argues that the digital is the epitome of Henri Bergson’s account of bodily interdetermination: the body is the ‘image-interface- or the ‘image-instrument’ of individual perception.95 He then references Duchamp and develops the thought by arguing that there is “no such thing as a pure, punctual visuality,” and “if there was such                                                                                                                 93 Ippolito, 99. 94

Ippolito, 50,

95

Hansan, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. The MIT Press (2004).

 

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a thing, it would be available only as a nonhuman form of perception.”96 Here, we see New Media providing the pure visuality on the ‘hidden’ forms or power of nature. Or as Patti Smith says, “nature has patterns even if they seem random,”97 and New Media allows us to find those patterns purely and punctually. The computer and nonhuman natural objects thus provide a ‘pure’ perspective on the ‘hidden’ forms or powers of the natural universe. Another New Media artist, Masaki Fujihata, similarly describes the computer as allowing us to “see things that were not visible to the naked eye,” and deems it as the “Telescope of Concept.”98

Corporeality of The Materialized Digital Organism: The Computer as ‘The Garden of Mathematics’

In response to Kawaguchi’s work, Fujihata has claimed, “it was natural to create organic invertebrate-like objects in a computer’s 3-D space, because there is no gravity, and this is similar to the weightless world of undersea life…a natural outcome of computer experimentation.”99 Yet, Fujihata took this inspiration to create actual liquid-based objects directly from computer data in Forbidden Fruits. Fujihata entitled his work                                                                                                                 96 Hansan, 26.     97  q

on cbc. (2015, October 15). Patti Smith Says “M Train” Is The Roadmap To Her

Life. [Video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFHTWuLRLzY     98  Ippolito, 99

 

65.    

Ippolito, 62-3.

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Forbidden Fruits due to the fact that these “new forms were once ‘forbidden’ from being removed from the computer’s virtual space due to limitations of earlier technology. They were previously untouchable forms, only existing within the intangible computer environment.”99 The choice of the word ‘fruit’ stems from the Japanese folk tale Saiyuki, in which Fujihata compared his “voyage into the computer” to the journey of Priest Sanzo who came upon a baby fruit tree.100 He further describes the computer as “the garden of mathematics.”101

102

Fig. 19. Fujihata, Masaki. Forbidden Fruits [Sculpture]. (1990)

                                                                                                                100 Ippolito, 64. 101

Ippolito, 60.    

102  Forbidden

Fruits [Sculpture]. (1990). Retrieved from

http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Archive/2005/PossibleFutures/Works/  

 

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In Forbidden Fruits, there is a surface with a collection of photosensitive liquid resin that the computer directs laser beams upon from the data it receives. The resin then hardens and rises to form a three-dimensional object. The inspiration of Kawaguchi derives from the notion that the Forbidden Fruits “were the abstract products of a weightless environment,” appearing to “defy gravity,” and “had the look and feel of biological organisms or invertebrate life forms.”99

Haraway’s rejection of the boundaries separating human from machine and human from animal and Tosa’s creation of a virtual creature resonate in Forbidden Fruits. Fujihata created organic life forms from artificial computer systems for us physically to co-habit with in order to “give birth to a new reality.”98 More specifically, he explicitly parodied Kawaguchi by photographing these plastic three-dimensional objects in an actual undersea environment, as opposed to a virtual one.99 Effectively, Fujihata further revolutionized corporeality of the materialized digital organism by providing the software to give physical birth to it.

In this context, if the computer algorithm can bring forth the organic growth of virtual life forms, and technology can then enable the physical “birth” of those life forms, what becomes of the Cartesian-based distinction between man and machine? Fujihata and Kawaguchi exemplify the lowering of the threshold of this distinction and, in doing so, learn to co-habit harmoniously and provide relief to fears and anxieties associated with the thought of ‘man as machine.’ This egalitarian, harmonious approach towards cohabitation can be termed as techno-scientific universalism.

 

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Yasushi Matoba and Hiroshi Matoba materialize their own digital organism in order to enable a better understanding of insects and techno-scientific universalism. They consider it regrettable that we have either a negative relationship with insects, other than viewing them as pests, or simply no relationship at all. In order to generate a better relationship to these nonhuman beings, the two brothers created an installation entitled Micro Friendship (1999).

Micro Friendship is composed of microscopic video camera, a 2-dimensionally movable stage with small insects upon the stage, a table, a flat display monitor, and a rod fixed between the table and the monitor. “Movements on the large rod are mechanically converted into micro-sized movement on the small rod.”103 The size of the large rod is scaled to be the same as the movements of the insect projected on the display screen. This allows the participant to be immersed within the virtual environment visually and haptically as an insect. There is also a joystick available which allows the participant to move the insect around the virtual world, creating the opportunity to meet other insects within this virtual world.

Hansan discusses the past phenomenological theories and empirical research done in terms of embodiment and perception. He explains that based on these past critical theories and studies, neuroscientist Francisco Varela came to conclude that:

                                                                                                                103 Micro Friendship: Interactive Installation. Siggraph: 2000 Art Gallery. Retrieved from: https://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/gallery/S00/interactive/thumbnail14.html

 

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the capacity of the “embodied mind” to adapt quickly to the new virtual realities demonstrates the plasticity of the nervous system and the operative role of bodily motility in the production of perception.104

In terms of the haptic element of virtual reality as opposed to the immobile nature of cinema for the participant, he then concludes that:

Together, these sources stress the importance of an ergodic dimension to perceptual processes and the experience of visual images: putting the body to work (even in quite minimal ways) has the effect of conferring reality of an experience, of catalyzing the creation of a singular affective experience.104

Applying this theory to Micro Friendship, the physical movements enable the viewer to confer reality of the experience as an insect. Furthermore, the scaling of the rods to the image on the screen develops this in terms of realistic affective transposition of humanembodied perception to insect-embodied perception. Or, as Hansan puts it, “yielding an exhilarating indifferentiation between your “subjective” embodied movement and the “objective” mechanical movement of the image.”105

                                                                                                                104 Hansan, 39.     105

 

Hansan, 37.

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Descartes regarded animals and machines the same and Micro Friendship expands on this similarity. However, this similarity does not necessarily imply that both are soulless but rather, as the work was done through a Shintō-animistic lens it implies the opposite. In turn, Micro Friendship exemplifies how the Japanese perspective on the nonhuman influences their relationship with New Media and vice versa: the non-human (technology) offers an opportunity for the non-human (insects) to be better understood by the human. Accordingly, the Matoba Brother’s New Media approach furthers technoscientific universalism through an understanding of non-human forms and our cohabitation with them.  

The Technological and Urbanized Ecosystem: Cultural Embodiment of Techno-Scientific Universalism   As described previously, Kawaguchi utilizes genetic algorithms to portray the organic and evolutionary nature of the computer and other nonhuman forms. Kawaguchi explains his philosophy behind this organic and evolutionary nature:

The living organism, which is soft and malleable, continues to grow while linking up in a symbiotic relationship with adjacent physical solids – it responds most sensitively to environment, and even transforms the shape of its existence.83

Hence, sensitivity to the environment is a core requisite for the inherent organic and evolutionary characteristics shared by humans and nonhumans. However, further to  

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Kawaguchi’s statement, the environment is also inherently organic and evolutionary. So naturally, Kawaguchi’s perceptions of the organic artificial as well as his computer-based methods are also applicable to the nature of an urbanized, technological environment.

In Artificial Life Metropolis: Cell (1993), Kawaguchi’s interests in environments and evolutionary growth are explored through the organic movement of an oily, metallic liquid. Ippolito describes the formations of Metropolis as being like “organic buildings in a dark, but futuristic city.”82 The city is envisaged as a living being that goes through processes of evolution, growth, and decay, suggesting that the metropolitan and industrialized city is just as much a part of nature as human beings, hence a Shintōanimistic or non-Cartesian perspective.

In turn, Kawaguchi exemplifies a techno-scientific universalistic approach in regards to co-habiting naturally and harmoniously within the industrialized metropolis, and as such relieves the anxieties associated with high-technology and an ‘information society.’ Moreover, as said by Roy Ascott in Art, Technology, Consciousness:

We can translate our understandings and observations about the physicality of environments into computer-based codes that are presented through various forms of interface, which in turn can potentially facilitate palpable experience.106

                                                                                                                106  Ascott, Roy. Art, Technology, Consciousness. Intellect Books (2000), p. 40.    

 

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As explained with Micro Friendship, this haptic ‘palpable experience’ is what enables viewers to yield differentiations between a subjective and objective perception. As such, understanding the physicality of environments through computer-based codes facilitates the development of techno-scientific universalism.

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Fig. 20. Kawaguchi, Yoichiro. Artificial Life Metropolis: Cell [Animation]. (1993)

Similarly, DoubleNegatives Architecture (dNA) takes an innovative approach of integrating New Media with architecture. In the piece Corpora in Si(gh)te (2007-2008), weather and environmental conditions are detected by sensors. The data is then, “utilized to create a virtual architectural construction that is computer generated and changes as the data is processed. In this way, the architectural construct acts like a living breathing                                                                                                                 107 Artificial Life Metropolis: Cell [Animation]. (1993). Retrieved from http://archive.aec.at/prix/#28981

 

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organism, growing up and out, and contracting over time.”108 Thus, dNA approaches architecture, nature, and technology similarly to Kawaguchi: each has organic and artificial qualities and should be viewed in such a way that the embodiment of technoscientific universalism prevails. Corpora in Si(gh)te also echoes Debuchi’s notions regarding technology being the connection between humans and nature: the technology of the data sensors works as a communicator between the “mood” of the weather and human-appreciated aestheticism.

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Fig. 21. doubleNegatives Architecture. Corpora in Si(gh)te [Media Architecture Installation]. (2007)

                                                                                                                108 Ippolito, 142. 109  Corpora

in Si(gh)te [Media Architecture Installation]. (2007). Retrieved from

http://materializing.org/13_dna/  

 

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The similarities of Kawaguchi and Debuchi to Tosa imply the interconnectivity of corporeality, embodiment, and the (cultural) environment. As such, the exploitation of nature, industrialization, and technological progression does not have to be consumerdriven or necessarily negative. If characteristics of nature, such as randomness, are exploited and examined through technology we may be able to discover nature’s hidden or unknown truths. The discovery of these truths may bring forth a paradigm shift to corporeal values and collective notions regarding embodiment. If done with a technoscientific universalist approach, this paradigm shift suggests the potential of a harmonious relationship between humans, technology, and non-human life forms.

 

 

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CONCLUSION   The foregoing discussion has drawn upon images of Japan’s media-based culture and has examined many of the anxieties associated with the country’s rapid technological advancement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have examined ways in which Japanese New Media artists have expressed concerns about such developments, but have also shown how technology has been used in art as a means of offering alternative and optimistic views of embodiment and the relation of humans to the natural world.

Having regard to the traditions of Shintō belief, I have explored the ways in which contemporary Japanese artists have offered a unique perspective on humankind’s place within an industrialized and virtual realm. This has entailed an examination of works that critique embodied nationalist and gender roles and that blur distinctions between the organic and the artificial. Throughout this discussion, I have explained how notions of embodiment connect these topics and how spatiality, the environment, and social culture provide an important background framework to these debates. Thus, spatiality in terms of the environment as ‘information society,’ primarily within Tokyo, and in terms of the haptic element of New Media have been important. The combination of Japan’s religious, scientific, and economic history and New Media’s inherent characteristics offer a fresh perspective on the power of technology. The artworks I have discussed explore a creative space between “nature” and “culture”, “human” and “artificial” in ways that both illuminate and provide relief from fears attaching to the impact of technology on society.

 

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