Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art

"In Feeling Media, Miryam Sas draws on experimental animation, postwar media theory, photography, and contemporary visual art to explore the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan. The book aims to open media studies and affect theory to deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America by offering a detailed exploration of the critical discourses and artistic practices of both influential as well as lesser-known theorists and artists. Through case studies, Feeling Media proposes an emergent framework of analysis for the humanities that the author terms the "affective scale." The book reads Japanese media theory as working thought, taking into account its complexity and global interconnectedness while resisting reductive linkages to dominant Euro-American theory. The book also performs a historiographic experiment, viewing two key periods of rapid media transformation in relation to one another, while attending to disparities and disjunctures between them"--
Miryam Sas explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan, showing how artists and theorists reframe ideas about collectivity, community, and connectivity.
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.