Japanese Pop Culture and Its Impacts

Singapore.
After a quick refreshment break with some tasty Singaporean food, we're now in a plenary panel session at ISEA 2008, on culture, technology, and Asian (or as it turns out, mainly Japanese) pop culture. Blogging panels is always difficult, but we'll see how it goes.

Adrian Cheok begins by noting the shift in policy in Asia towards a greater focus on cultural development in addition to science and technology (linked in part to the embrace of the idea of creative industries in Asia, of course). In particular, though, it's the interlinkage of culture and technology that's particularly productive here.

The first panellist to speak now is Michael Cohen - he notes the combination of science and culture in architecture in many leading Asian cities (a yin-yang dynamics, perhaps), the integration of scientific knowledge into Asian fashion design, and the use of technology in the exploration of new cultural experiences (both in the context of new media art, and in the context of mainstream consumer use).

Michael now compares Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) 360 degree imaging and the Esper imaging device famously featured in the movie Blade Runner. A further extension of this QTVR technology developed in Michael's lab comes closer to the Esper by also allowing some limited movement within the 3D space, enabling perspectives to change. This could be further combined with positional sensing devices, spatial sound, and other existing technologies.

However, what is also possible here is to move beyond what would be possible in an accurate three-dimensional representation - for example, directing or preventing the transmission of media streams (audio, video) to specific others. Some of this transcending of conventional reality is also represented in cubist painting, for example (which combines diverse normally mutually exclusive perspectives) - and Michael runs through a number of other examples now, too.

Masa Inakage follows on, and connects back to Ken Mogi's keynote on creativity and brain activity. He notes the rise of ideas surrounding the concepts of creative and cultural industries, especially also in the context of economic development in Asian countries. At the same time, time pressures in modern societies are significant, so there is a need to develop new, very brief creative and cultural experiences - experiences which deliver "five seconds of fun", as he puts it.

Such experiences could be embedded into everyday household artefacts, for example - Masa shows examples of furry, bulbous lamps which have a kind of breathing cycle and respond to external stimuli; umbrellas which give of sword-like sounds if they are being swung in closed state; Japanese paper blinds which have animations projected onto them. A further idea is a brainstorm room that listens to conversations, changes its lighting accordingly, picks up on keywords, and displays related information from the Web. (Masa's Keio University in Japan has just launched a Graduate School of Media Design to explore such possibilities.)

Finally we're on to Marc Tuters from Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab, which has been doing some signficant amount of research into neoteny, or cuteness: the retention of juvenile attributes in adult animals or humans. This focus on cuteness is driven especially by Japanese culture, which places significant emphasis on such attributes - there are also substantial differences between what's considered cute between Japanese and other cultures, however. In Japanese culture, this is linked to the idea of amae - "to depend on and presume another's benevolence". This is also prominent in Kawaii comic art, and was exported to the West in the form of Pokemon.

Marc now notes Henry Jenkins's work on convergence culture, highlighting the transnational and multidirectional flow of images, facilitated by both corporate strategies and grassroots tactics - a pop cosmopolitanism which transcends parochial cultures. Images function as contact zones for semiotic solidarity, leading to a shift towards identities of participants as global citizens. Unpredictable meanings arise in the process.

But another description of this is a kind of psychological neoteny, in which child-like adaptability confers an evolutional advantage or in which adulthood is systematically rejected. For some commentators, such an approach represents an embodiment of social impotence and escapism - that is of an inability to effect real social change. Such escapism is also a political action, of course - a rejection of the adult public face by hanging on to the neotenous public face.

A further panellist (I can't see the name) now notes a number of other interesting questions - how do we embed the human touch into digital media in the same way that we've done so for pre-digital media (the writing on th back of a photo, for example); how do we introduce the sense of risk - or perhaps, of potential loss? - into new media (which, being digital, may conceivably continue to exist unchanged forever)?

Ken Mogi picks up on this in relation to how art is valued - on the one hand, digital media artworks rarely fetch the prices that non-digital media works do, because of their implicitly infinite duplicability; on the other, digital media art often arises from grassroots, alternative, even anarchist cultures, and commercial valuation may lead to a loss of their edge (as has happened with other now commercially successful arts genres).

Sam Furukawa adds to this by pointing to the difference between production quality and salience - these exist in a complex relationship which is further complicated by differences between analogue and digital media forms with their own specific affordances. This also links back to the question of the presence of the human touch in media, of course. (Sam notes that there is a new Japanese videosharing site called Nikodo [?] which enables users to embed comments into videos, in fact - a site which amounts to some 45% of all Internet traffic in Japan!)

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