Lecture: ‘The City, Post-media and the Body’, ‘Animation, the Body and Affect: Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies’
Mike Featherstone and Tomoko Tamari were invited by Tokyo University of the Arts and Post Media Research Group to speak at this special lecture on Thursday 12 December, 2019.
Mike and Tomoko spoke about social implications of advanced digital media in the contemporary political and cultural context. Mike focused on a new relationship between invisibilities of big data, the city and subjectivity. Tomoko discussed human perception and moving images in algorithmic computer systems.
Chair: Yoshitaka Mouri (Professor Graduate School of Global Art, Tokyo University of the Arts)
Image courtesy of Lianhao Qu via Unsplash
‘Post-media, Data and the City’
Mike Featherstone
Abstract
It is hard to think without media…
What is post-media -the term post points beyond existing forms of media. This could mean the return to the vivid intensity of co-present interaction, the immediacy of direct embodied communication with no concern for capture and storage or any intent to communicate over distance. To live after media, could also mean to live after the mass media, with its characteristic uniform one-way communication. This could point to the advent of new media forms – integrated media, multi-media, virtual reality etc., with the goal of simulating and replicating full-sensory engagement via different interfaces beyond screens. Yet there is a darker underside: the emergence of surveillance platform capitalism (Zuboff, Srnicek), with the focus on profitable data extraction. In effect, the digital media interfaces become not just means of communication with others, or search engines to vast databases, rather all our moves are unknowingly recorded, analysed, processed, profiled and behaviourised; then bought and sold in real time: we do the searching, but are searched in return.
The city is a key site where these concerns are played out. Not just because of the information city, media city, creative city, smart city hype over the last 30 years or so. But because of the ways in which the city is seen as the home of certain types of social diversity, creativity, freedom of speech and association. It is the place where the public came into being and its future could be decided. Will the city become the data city in which people’s physical movements and media usage are constantly tracked by a range of computers, face-recognition cameras and other digital devices that can instantly deny access to particular locations depending on the validity of one’s profile? Or, can it become the base for forms of subjectivity and open association that work across direct face-to-face and collective interaction coupled with new media ecologies? Guattari (1990) speaks of the hope to transform mass media power in a post-media era of collective-individual reappropriation. He did not live to see the development of digital surveillance capitalism and the incredible corporate wealth generated. At the same time, the struggle to develop alternative public digital infrastructures and related media ecologies continues in a number of cities around the world.
‘Animation, the Body and Affect: Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies’
Tomoko Tamari
Abstract
Image: Hayao Miyazaki. Source: The Film Stage.
The paper attempts to explore the human perception of moving images by scrutinizing ‘the affective sensory complex’ which people simply feel, but find difficult to articulate in language. Whereas it is apparent that the rapid development of computer graphics technology provides spectators with new type of visuality and sensations, hand-drawing animation using traditional analogue methods remains attractive to a range of audiences. Both are, however, different ways to create representations of reality. The paper discusses the differences between digital aesthetics created by computer animation and analogical aesthetics in hand-drawing animation. While computer generated imagery (CGI) refers to the process that involves mathematical calculations within computers to create verisimilar naturalistic images, traditional hand-drawing animation method involves symbolic expressive form created by animator’s spatiotemporal sensitivities. Focusing on the Japanese animator, Hayao Miyazaki, the paper seeks to unpack the complex dynamism of affective effects in the power of hand-drawing moving images.