About Media Dynamics Research Initiative

 

This research initiative is an intellectual effort of an ensemble of academics engaged in examining questions and issues more or less related to media or mediums. This initiative also has a faith that the joys of intellectual activities consist not only in exploring what one pursue according to protocols that her or his special field demands, but also in trans-versing a variety of disciplines, which it hopes rather boldly.

 

This project, initially conceived and implemented in Japan, is highly aware of the rich traditions of media-related cultures in this country—one can easily refer to cinema, manga, video games, media arts, and other creative practices generated in modern/ postmodern Japan, whose charm, glamor and attractiveness have been appealing to people outside the country. Thus this project would not hide its delight in observing and analyzing them so that it loves to produce thick descriptions and fresh understandings of their achievements. Critical writings and analytical researches dedicated to such media-related cultural practices—sometimes siding with, sometimes colliding with and sometimes intervening into medium-conscious creative practices in Japan, surely constitute a most significant part of intellectual engagement, and this initiative is also seriously concerned with them.

 

Yet, on the hand, with this in mind, participants in this research project wish to communicate with scholars and others working in other countries as well, willingly, for academic cultures as well as creative cultures, this project believes, would prosper only through carving and vivifying communicative channels beyond one’s own existing, narrow circles. And this project is absolutely sure that creative practices in Japan would shine more dynamically through lining them with those created outside the country.

 

It goes without saying that what is at stake in this project is to witness, as energetically as possible, how digital technologies have been expanded in surprising manners and more and more infiltrated into ever corner of our life world, our cultural activities and our ways of thinking and sensing. Therefore, it will be highly significant to measure what changes and transformations have been happening and what will happen to this world and to us with such expansions and infiltrations of digitality, and therefore with transformations and reconfigurations of materiality along with it at the same time.

 

In fact, when one sees that in many, many countries, a growing number of attempts and endeavors in the intellectual world, academically or not, to analyze the meaning of digitality, what one swiftly finds that the word “media” or “medium” is inserted into sentences written on the topic of digital technologies and digital cultures. One may rather easily notice this in a considerable number of writings, ranging from brain sciences, biology and medical sciences to political sciences and economics and managements studies, which had not shown so explicitly their interest the question of media/ mediums before, let’s say, in the previous centuries. One could notice, for instance, the word “ media” and/ or “mediums” are of late written in many essays and reports on the topic of what might be called “post-human,” which attracts many who are keen to a variety of developments in philosophies, medical studies and legal studies and other social studies. Being aware of such situations, this project rather strongly admits that the state of affairs surrounding media and mediums is remarkably in a constant change, in motion, and in flow. In short, the media world is now in dynamic conditions, or in dynamics; technologically and politically, culturally and medically, and economically and anthropologically. This is what we choose the phrase “media dynamics for the title of this research project. 

 

With this in mind, this project is deeply concerned with possibilities that the question of media and mediums would have to be updated and to be versioned-up in every possible direction, in particular in Japan, perhaps in even areas not so directly operating in connection to digital technologies.

 

Of course, as one knows, a mounting amount of considerations and examinations with the same kind of concerns and interests, in Western countries or in non Western countries, have been increasingly activated, in speculative realism and new materialism, anthropology of image and buildwissenshaft, media ecologies and media archeology, new media studies and new cultural studies.  

 

One may say, in Japan, intellectual practices of similar kinds have been lately kicked off, becoming more and more active. Still, one also has to admit that scholars in such new fields in Japan work rather sporadically, rather individual-based or sometimes disconnected, each being in operation in one’s own discipline. This project, finding a considerable number of scholars starting to do their activities in their disciplines in the Kansai area in Japan, challenges to organize and produce some networking practices to initiate conversations between them.

 

 

Yorio Kitamura

Keisuke Kitano