Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art

by Miryam Sas

Overview

In Feeling Media Miryam Sas explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan. Opening media studies and affect theory up to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America, Sas offers a framework of analysis she calls the affective scale—the space where artists and theorists work between the level of the individual and larger global and historical shifts. She examines intermedia, experimental animation, and Marxist theories of the culture industries of the 1960s and 1970s in the work of artists and thinkers ranging from filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, photographer Nakahira Takuma, and the Three Animators' Group to art critic Hanada Kiyoteru and landscape theorist Matsuda Masao. She also outlines how twenty-first-century Japanese artists—especially those responding to the Fukushima disaster—adopt and adapt this earlier work to reframe ideas about collectivity, community, and connectivity in the space between the individual and the system.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023098
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/22/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	44 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Miryam Sas is Professor of Film and Media and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return and Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
Part I: Intermedia and Its Potentialities
1. The Feeling of Being in the Contemporary Age: The Rise of Intermedia  29
2. Intermedia Moments in Japanese Experimental Animation  71
3. The Culture Industries and Media Theory in Japan: Transformations in Leftist Thought  110
Part II: The Afterlife of Art in Japan
4. A Feminist Phenomenology of Media: Ishiuchi Miyako  141
5. From Postwar to Contemporary Art  174
6. Moves Like Sand: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art  209
Conclusion: Parallax and Afterlives  242
Notes  253
Biblography  279
Index  291

What People are Saying About This

Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema - Daisuke Miyao

“Feeling Media is a must-read for anyone interested in media ecology and eager to explore how to live as a global citizen in a world swamped in new media. By questioning and overcoming the Eurocentric perspective and formation of media theory, it will be a field-defining book in media studies and contemporary Japanese art.”

Thomas Lamarre

“Feeling Media takes up the essential question posed by media artists of the 1960s, which continues to haunt us. Telecommunications, touted to bring us closer together, have instead riddled everyday life with new forms of distance and alienation—what kind of politics is equal to this situation? Miryam Sas’s profound engagement with Japan’s transmedia art advances a practical and orphic response: feel media otherwise.”

Editorial Reviews

"Brief descriptions can’t do justice to the intricately layered and nuanced arguments that Sas produces about each work, each artist, and each thinker. . . . You simply must read the book, as I will again with graduate students in seminar."
-- Kerim Yasar The Journal of Japanese Studies

From the Publisher