Registration Requested

In Feeling Media (Duke, 2022), Miryam Sas (Comparative Literature and Film & Media) explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan. Opening up media studies and affect theory 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 earlier work to reframe ideas about collectivity, community, and connectivity in the space between the individual and the system.

Sas is joined by Mario Telò (Rhetoric, Ancient Greek & Roman Studies, and Comparative Literature). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.