Linked-Stick: Conveying a Physical Experience using a Shape-Shifting Stick

We use sticks as tools for a variety of activities, everything from conducting music to playing sports or even engage in combat. However, these experiences are inherently physical and are poorly conveyed through traditional digital mediums such as video. Linked-Stick is a shape-changing stick that can mirror the movements of another person's stick-shape tool. We explore how this can be used to experience and learn music, sports and fiction in a more authentic manner. Our work attempts to expand the ways in which we interact with and learn to use tools

Remembering the body: Deleuze's recollection-image, and the spectacle of physical memory in Yip Man/Ip Man(2008)

This article explores how Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of the flashback, as‘recollection-image’, can assist our understanding of the rendering spectacular of physical memory in contemporary Chinese martial arts movies. The focus is a prominent flashback in the climactic duel in the kung fu movie, Yip Man/Ip Man (Yip, 2008). This recollection-image demonstrates how trained bodies in Chinese martial art movies suggest a slightly different understanding of time and affect from that which Deleuze formulated, based on his observation of US and European films. On textual, cultural and historical levels this article explores the usefulness of martial arts movies for developing our understanding of physicality in cinema, and for reconsidering Deleuze’s ideas in light of the Eurocentrism of some of his conclusions

Through a Tube, Darkly: Critical Remediation in High and Low (1963)

Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police procedural is, as its title suggests, intensely interested in the socioeconomic valences of spatial relationships, literalized in Yokohama’s affluent hills and its low-lying slums. The central conflict between inhabitants of these two spaces articulates this local topography into a global framework, in which concrete spaces of social interaction and functional production become abstract places that act as conduits for flows of media and capital. Previous analyses have read the film as an historical reflection of and nationalistic reaction to Americanization. Attending to the film’s transnational, transtemporal, and transmedial articulations reframes the film as a critical engagement with globalization rather than a symptomatic reflection thereof. The immediate context of the rapid adoption of television, concomitant with Japan’s emerging consumerism, allows Kurosawa to figure abstract economic patterns through intermedial formal techniques. These textual practices associate the materiality of celluloid with manual labor, and the ephemerality of TV with speculative finance. By further linking the protagonist Gondo with the former pair and the antagonist Takeuchi with the latter, High and Low formally and structurally critiques economic globalization as a form of criminality

Los videojuegos como nuevo modelo de comunicación narrativa a través de las cinco etapas del duelo en 'The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask'.

El presente Trabajo de Fin de Grado aborda al videojuego como objeto cultural y comunicativo, sin centrarse en lo lúdico. Este ambiente se realiza con un énfasis en el aspecto narrativo, la situación del jugador dentro de la obra y, sobre todo, en cómo los videojuegos pueden actuar como un medio de comunicación extremadamente eficaz y multidisciplinar. Tanto de forma directa contando una historia que despierte emociones básicas, como de forma indirecta dejando simbologías y mensajes ocultos más potentes que calen hondo en el espectador: de la misma manera que son capaces de hacerlo el cine o la literatura. El objeto de estudio escogido para refrendar esta declaración es el videojuego 'The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask' (2000), en el que se busca aplicar un modelo de análisis basado en el marco teórico establecido previamente y centrándolo en la representación de las cinco etapas del duelo a través de la propia aventura gráfica.<br /

Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Cosmopolitan Subjectivity and the Transnationalization of the Culture Industry

This thesis investigates the Japanese film industry's interactions with the West and Asia, the development of transnational filmmaking practices, and the transition of discursive regimes through which different types of cosmopolitan subjectivities are produced. It draws upon Ulrich Deck's concept of "banal cosmopolitanization" (2006) - which inextricably enmeshes the everyday lives of individuals across the industrialized societies within the global market economy. As has often been pointed out, modem Japanese national identity since the 19th century has been constructed from a geopolitical condition of being both a "centre" and a "periphery", in the sense that it has always seen itself as the centre of East Asia, while being peripheral to the flow of Western global processes. Contrary to the common belief that defeat in the war sixty years ago radically changed the Japanese social structure and value system, this sense of national identity and of Japan being "different from the West but above Asia" was left intact if not ideologically encouraged by the American Occupation policy through the preservation of many pre-war institutions (cf., Dower 1999; Sakai 2006). In a world that was to become dominated by a hierarchical logic of "the West and the rest" established against the backdrop of the Cold War, Japan and its culture effectively found itself in a privileged but ambiguous position as part of but not part of the `West', something which was solidified by the international success of Japanese national cinema in the 1950s. But all this was to change with the process of globalization in the late 1980s and 1990s. The main goal of this thesis is to analyse the ways in which globalization brought about a historic rupture in a national filmmaking community and discover the significance of this process. It shows how economic globalization undermined the material and discursive conditions that had sustained the form of national identity that had resulted from the process described above and gave rise to forms of cosmopolitan subjectivity which reveal a very different way of thinking about both Japan's position in the world and the sense of identification that younger filmmakers have towards it. This is illustrated through extensive interviews conducted with many filmmakers and producers in the Japanese filmmaking community

Soulful bodies and superflat temporalities: a nomadology of the otaku database of world history at the ends of history

This thesis is a philosophical engagement with the popular, low, and vernacular theories of History performed and expressed within contemporary Japanese manga (‘comics’) and anime (‘limited animation’), and most importantly, in the global production and consumption of otaku (‘manga and anime fan’) cultural and media ecologies. My project is rooted in a reading of the post-structural theoretical inquiries of Gilles Deleuze in parallel with what media theorist McKenzie Wark calls ‘otaku philosophy’ to examine how both high and low theories articulate anxieties and fascinations with the global theoretical discourses on ‘the ends of History’ and the imminent demise of industrial modernity. The first portion of the thesis is dedicated to a reading of the Japanese counter-cultural manga movement called gekiga (‘dramatic pictures’). In traversing gekiga’s post-war lineages to its revival in the medievalism of otaku artists Miura Kentarō and Yukimura Makoto, the first part postulates on what an anti-modern, anti-historical approach – or what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadology – might look and feel like as it is mediated in the manga form. The second portion of the thesis examines the way in which Japanese anime mobilises the philosophies of nomadology in its filmic form and transmedial properties. In a critical assessment of the anime works of the otaku-founded media corporation Type-Moon, this section explores the Fate series alongside Deleuzian film and media philosophies to explore the infinite potentialities and recursive limitations of otaku nomadologies as they materialise beyond the screen. By reassessing the rise of otaku culture as a vernacular, global, and cosmopolitan rise in the critique of modernity and History, this thesis hopes to explore how transcultural and transmedial fan philosophies of historicity, memory, and temporality can be recontextualised within current academic debates about the efficacy of post-national historiographic pedagogies explored in the fields of postcolonial studies, comparative studies, global studies, and media studies

Animating Heritage: Affective Experiences, Institutional Networks, And Themed Consumption In the Japanese Cultural Industries

This dissertation ethnographically examines a Japanese historical themed park to illuminate the cultural industries’ role in shaping Japanese identity through creative labor, consumption, and institutional relationships. It argues that cultural heritage is animated through embodied experiences (taiken) with performative elements and contingent contexts that take place around a central organization’s selective interpretation and staging of the past. This dissertation is based on 15 months of fieldwork in 2015-2017 at and around “Edo Town,” the pseudonym for a historical themed park in Japan that evokes the Edo or Tokugawa period (1603-1867) in Japan’s history. I explore the creative labor, institutional networks, and consumption practices around embodied experiences staged by its operating company to communicate an Edo-like Japanese identity. Such an identity recovers an alternate mode of sociality and being that aims to rehabilitate contemporary social anxieties about economic stagnation and the loss of collective Japanese identity. I demonstrate that cultural industry venues exist beyond their representations, as Edo Town is not only a historical themed park but also an employer of local residents, an actor training institution, a touristic destination, a provider of cultural knowledge expertise, as well as an alternate social space that sustain relationships outside of work and home. More broadly, I analyze how human agency is modified through theming and animation frameworks when people develop social senses that are alternate to their everyday lives. In this case, both themed park workers and visitor-consumers merge with Edo-like characters that enable them to encounter each other differently from their usual selves. In the process, they are socialized with the meaning of Edo-like Japaneseness as a corrective to what they have taken for granted in real life. I also highlight how history-themed parks and spaces like Edo Town challenge conventional modes of cultural transmission through creative re-enactments of cultural knowledge as intangible heritage, including the use of theater, characters, and fictional social encounters as the media of communication

Noin seitsemännen taiteen poika : Kirjoituksia elokuvasta ja muista taiteista. Onnittelukirja Henry Baconille

Non peer reviewe