Current Research Project:

"East-West Interactions: Hybridity in Digital Media Arts in Japan".

I am interested to interrelate approaches from Cultural Studies and from Media Studies that discuss cultural and aesthetic forms of convergence under the rubric of hybridization. When viewed together, it becomes clear that the concept of hybridization involves two divergent poles. The first is connected to the tendencies of homogeneity of cultural artifacts and products on a global scale and reflects the power of globally networked enterprises in consumer industries. The second can be identified in in-between spaces where multiple, diverse, and plural forms and elements of different cultural identity correlate and interplay in ways that characterize a "creative intervention". From the point of view of cultural studies, these spaces for creative intervention are attached to radical aesthetic practices.

From the point of view of media studies those impure and heterogeneous forms of interplay in the digital are identified as hybrid because they no longer refer to distinct media but to already mediated elements that can be seamlessly combined in simulation - with the resulting effect that the process of mediation appears veiled and disguised. Both discourses agree that artists are the promoters of radical and critical hybridity that unfolds its processes of intervention and reflects cultural-aesthetic multiplicity and difference in the digital arts. In my upcoming book, I wish in exemplary ways discuss approaches toward aesthetics of the hybrid with a focus on Japanese media arts that reflect Eastern and Western cultural traditions, the modern and the tradition in Japan and the creative use of new technologies. Theses examples shall, however, be related to the larger frame of hybridity in other Asian media cultures that are relevant for the scrutiny of analogue and digital.

© 2008 Yvonne Spielmann