A Japanese Cinema Blogathon in June? @ Wildgrounds

Fans of Japanese Cinema are everywhere: what if, during one week we unite our forces to promote Japanese Cinema? To write, share ideas about it? It could be fun!

It’s open to everyone willing to share or discover things about J-cinema. Whoever you are, whatever language you speak, you are welcome to participate!

For more information on this opportunity to share your passion for Japanese cinema with the rest of the world, visit Wildgrounds Blog!

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Tomorrow’s Professor Blog: 900. How to Write Anything

Tomorrow’s Professor Blog: 900. How to Write Anything

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Otaku: beyond the word and the prejudices

Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals

For those of you out there who have had issues with the concept of “otaku” and wish to go deeper into its implication for (post-)modern mass media consumption, this new book is for you! Hiroki Azuma, one of the most prominent young Japanese literary critic and philosopher, has been writing about Otakus for some years now.  However, as with many academic essays on the sociocultural significance of the Japanese audiovisual industry, they often never jump over the language barrier.  Now, a translation by Jonathan E. Abel finally makes his 2001 book on otakus, Otaku Kara Mita Nihonshakai, available to all of us who can read English. Entitled Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, it will definitely change your way of thinking about this subculture. As Takayuki Tatsumi, author of  Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America,  states it:

Abandon every preconception, all ye who enter! In this mind-boggling book on Japan’s postmodernity, Hiroki Azuma conjures the ghost of the famous post-Hegelian Kojève, whose theory gets revived and even ‘animated’ here to reinterpret the anime-saturated realism that dominates our global Japanized reality studio. No one has more tactfully intertwined post-Derridean philosophy with Otaku-centric subculture studies than Azuma.

This should make a really interesting reading!

Village Manga – Salon du livre et de la presse de Genève

Du 22 au 26 avril 2009, le Salon du livre et de la presse de Genève accueille pour la première fois un Village Manga, organisé par les associations Yume et Omusubi.

Il y avait certes eu le Japan Manga Festival, en 2007, mais celui-ci avait été organisé en annexe de l’événement principal et il fallait payer une entrée supplémentaire pour y avoir accès. Par ailleurs, le JMF constituait plus une convention typique pour fans avertis qu’un festival ouvert au grand public, constitué en grande partie de néophytes complets.  Cette année, il a été décidé de s’y prendre autrement et de mettre en oeuvre une approche un peu plus didactique, afin d’éviter d’effrayer les parents des amateurs des univers mangas et de faciliter l’entrée dans cette forme spécifique de culture populaire japonaise. Ainsi, le Village Manga proposera diverses activités et animations, destinées aussi bien aux connaisseurs qu’au non-initiés.  Pour les premiers, les organisateurs proposent l’incontournable cosplay, une exposition de figurines,  des goodies importés directement du Japon et naturellement des stands de vente de mangas. Pour les seconds, une petite exposition sur l’histoire du manga aidera à comprendre d’où vient cette industrie et où elle va.  Celle-ci incluera des panneaux illustrés ainsi que des objets rares, notamment des magazines mangas des années 30. Pour tous,  une discussion avec des dessinateurs-illustrateurs amateurs ainsi que des professionnels de l’édition et de la vente se tiendra dimanche après-midi.

Naturellement, les membres des association Yume et Omusubi se tiendront à la disposition des visiteurs pour les informer et les orienter dans le Village Manga.

Otaku2 – Doujinshi and Law

Otaku2 – Doujinshi and Law

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This is something I have been thinking about recently. The manga industry has everything to gain from the dojinshi circles, for two reasons.

First, dojinshi has been fostered by the practice of the manga  editors as far back as the 1930’s, when the first prepublication magazines encouraged readers to send them their drawings, the best of which would then get published.  This trend has then continued after the WWII, during the reconstruction of Japan and the booming of manga as a sort of metamedia (in the word of Frederik Schodt). The dojinshi movement itself began to take shape in the 1960’s and came out in plain light in 1975 with the first Comic Market or Comiket.  This means that is has been created by and has grown within the context of the manga industry.

Second, the dojinshi art comes from the appropriation of pre-existing works, which all put together constitute a world of graphical and narrative references that shape the publics targeted by dojinshi and feeds the movement itself.  In a way, they extend the lives of the narrative universes created by professional mangas into another realm, that of hard-core fans, while the larger public moves from one series to ther other, as they come out, without looking back. They also intensify the process of reception by reworking the narrative meanings and reinterpret graphic languages. This means that they contribute in making part of the publics targeted by the industry particularly aware of the work that goes on behind a finished product. The dojinshi can be tought of as filters, which contribute to mediate between the public and the industry, by maintaining a sort of grass root base, which is connected to the larger public.  This connection is important and I think that dojinshi and their specific public are very much aware of it, as is testified by their understanding of the need to keep the industry alive and healthy.

Social and technical aspects of the uses of technology

Twitter can indeed be a very useful source of information, as the following article entitled Why social search won’t topple Google (anytime soon) illustrates it.  Actually, I found it following a citation in an article on the Slow Erosion of Google Search, which had been previously cited by one of my contact on Twitter. What I particularly appreciate in Brynn Evans‘ article is her emphasis on the user and its appropriation of en electronic tool like Google. It clearly shows the process by which individuals decide of what use a proposed tool can be to them with respect to their initial expectations towards and their technical command of it. It also shows how powerful social factors can be in influencing the direction of technological innovation. As both article observe, the displacement of Google as one of the leading tool of the Internet might not be happening on the level of always more powerful algorithms that can answer more questions, more precisely, but on the capacity of the search engines to be inscribed themselves in the social setting of the user. In my opinion, their observations advocate for a future where higly individualized technologies will answer to specific needs, while still being compatible with one another and thus, connectable.

Home – EuroITV2009 – European Interactive TV Conference, Leuven, Belgium, June 3-5, 2009

Home – EuroITV2009 – European Interactive TV Conference, Leuven, Belgium, June 3-5, 2009

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The “mie” pose in Animes

Danjuro Ichikawa II, in a mie pose in Shibaraku. Woodblock print by Torii Kiyomasu. Wikipedia English

Recently, I went to an amazing Surimono exhibit, at the Museum Rietberg, in Zürich. One of them represented the famous Kabuki actor Ishikawa Danjuro in a “mie” pose. Our guide, Mrs. Helen Loveday, an expert in the field of Chinese/Japanese art and an excellent lecturer (as well as the Curator of the Baur Foundation in Geneva), explained that he introduced this technic of acting as a way to convey a particularly vibrant moment of emotional tension.  The mie pose involves taking an impressing posture and holding it completely still for a few seconds. This frozen movement signals the intensity of the action and its possibly dramatic outcome. This immediately rang a bell to me. Indeed, this kind of “frozen position” is one of the most used trick in Japanese animation to emphasize the emotional intensity of a specific scene, whether it is a fight, where the two opponents are shown completely immobilized after they both landed their hit, as if the time had stopped, or a personnal interaction between two protagonists, where one or both are literally frozen by an overwhelming feeling, usually despair.  It came to me as a real surprise that this kind of cinematographic strategy was coming from such an old theater role, because I had read everywhere that it was simply a trick devised by financially-strained animators who had to account for every cent they were given to make the animated product.  I’m not saying here that this is wrong, but it is interesting to understand that this idea didn’t come straight out of the blue, but rather from a long tradition of a very popular theater form.  Pretty much anyone in Japan has at least once in their lives attended a Kabuki show and probably more than once, meaning that it isn’t so surprising that animators would rely on this kind of widely understood tradition to draw inspiration for animation. After all, cinema, in its early days also relied heavily on theatrical language and staging. One just has to look at the first cinematographic ficitions to realize this. Not only were theater plays one of the first source of narrative inspiration (along with popular novels), but the first cinema actors were often coming from the world of theater, and the way they acted showed this heritage as well.

And the clip below  offers a sort of explicit and a bit ironic hommage to the Kabuki mie pose.

Studentships

Studentships

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Transforming Audiences 2 – International Conference 2009 – Call for Papers

Transforming Audiences 2 – International Conference 2009 – Call for Papers

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Useful syllabi on virtual worlds and technology

Useful syllabi on virtual worlds and technology

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Media practices – March 2009

Here are some announcements that are all related to the issues of media practices.

Conference

The Media in Transition institute will be holding its 6th conference 24-26 April 2009 at MIT. It is entitled stone and papyrus, storage and transmission.

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Call for Paper

Digital Media Technologies Revisited: Theorising social relations, interactions and communication

University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany
Nov. 20-21, 2009

Digital Culture and Comunication ECREA section

You can find the details for the conference themes and abstract submission on the Digital Culture and Communication blog.

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Blog post

Futures of Learning proposes a very interesting introduction to new media practices in Japan, which points out the way Japanese negociate their identity as a techno-geek society at home and abroad.

An idea to recycle a VHS player

Here is a very interesting way to recycle an 0ld technology like the VHS player, which has been displaced by the DVD players for several years now.

Entitled How to make a VHS video toaster, it leads you step by step into the transformation of a VHS player into a toaster, which will imprint the word “VHS” onto your toasted bread. Actually, it is a step-by-step set of instruction to show you how to trick people into believing that you’ve really turned your VHS player into a toaster. Still,  needless to say that I wouldn’t recommend anyone else but a confirmed engineer to try this out!

Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human

I should have blogged this a while ago, but I have been quite busy and it got lost in my “to blog” box.  Anyway, the latest issue of the academic magazine on Japanese popular entertainment from the University of Minesota, Mechademia, has been published two months ago, and I’m sure it isn’t too late to get your copy if you are interested in the topics addressed here: The Limits of the Human, edited by Frenchy Lumning.  Here is the first clip of the synopsis:

Exploring the possibilities and perils of a posthuman future through visionary works of Japanese anime and manga.

Dramatic advances in genetics, cloning, robotics, and nanotechnology have given rise to both hopes and fears about how technology might transform humanity. As the possibility of a posthuman future becomes increasingly likely, debates about how to interpret or shape this future abound. In Japan, anime and manga artists have for decades been imagining the contours of posthumanity, creating dazzling and sometimes disturbing works of art that envision a variety of human/nonhuman hybrids: biological/mechanical, human/animal, and human/monster. Anime and manga offer a constellation of posthuman prototypes whose hybrid natures require a shift in our perception of what it means to be human.

Contributors include such well-known scholars in the world of Japanese entertainment studies as Antonia Levi (Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation, 1998), Susan Napier (From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West, 2007), Tatsumi Takayuki (Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America, 2006), Thomas LaMarre (Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics, 2005), etc.

Detailed information:

$19.95 paper

ISBN: 978-0-8166-5482-6

296 pages | 83 b&w photos | 7 x 10 | 2008

Also available at Amazon.com.

The paradoxe of Web 2.0

One of the great promises of the Internet and mobile technologie in the 1990’s was that it would bring about the ideal of the “global village” by leveling down all the physical, geopolitical and cultural bariers, so that all human beings would finally be able to share a common space of expression and exchange. Such institutions as the supranational organisations (UN, WTO, IMF, etc.), industrial multinationals (Coca-Cola, Walt Disney, Sony, etc.), international social or humanitarian movements (ATTAC, ICFTU, Greenpeace, ICRC, etc.) have been considered as the concrete manifestation of political, economic and social globalization and their innovative use of the NICT’s (New Information and Communication Technologies) as the basis of the construction of a new world of communication and information.  All of this supported by an unfettered innovating industry that churns out revolutionary tools every 6 months, making it nearly impossible for individuals to actually keep pace with the dazzling increase in number of hardwares and softwares. However, as pointed out by the article I’m copying below, it seems that the now well-installed Web 2.0 is bringing people back home. Many observers of the online life have noticed that social platforms, such as Facebook or MySpace have  contributed to favorise what some call “clans”, that is homogeneous groups, gathered around a common set of specific interests, practices or values. Although they also allow for communications beyond geographical barriers, the underlying tendency is to associate with one’s kind, thus reproducing the old social, political, religious and artistic class distinctions.   By offering interfaces on which mobile peripheral platforms and Internet content can merge together, the focus has  even more  shifted from an all-embracing perspective (the world at the tip of your fingers), that was the motto of the first version of the Web, before the 2000 Internet bubble burst,   to a narrow-beamed spotlight on the individual as a red dot on Google Map.  The idea isn’t anymore to gather all information, knowledge and know-how in one place and make it accessible to all through one portal, but rather to multiply their copies in various forms and the points of access, shaped according to the identified needs of individuals.  Although portals still exist, they are now becoming Internet-based and individually parametered equivalent of the local computer desktop, accessible with any mobile peripheral technologies, such as cellphones, PDA’s, portable game consoles, etc.  The combination of Web-based map tagging, portable devices and physical electronic relays connected to what the author of the article calls the geobrowser means not only an increase in the trackability of individuals, but also the extreme localization of information and communication.