Hybrid culture

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This exploration delves into the tensions between East and West, as well as digital and analog, within Japanese new-media art. Originating from Yvonne Spielmann's visits to Japan in 2005-2006 and 2009, the work investigates the technological and aesthetic roots of this art form, known for its pioneering interactive and virtual media applications in the 1990s. Spielmann identifies a crucial hybridity in Japan's media culture, characterized by internal hybridity—a blend of digital and analog elements alongside a non-Western modernity—and external hybridity, shaped by the international exchange of aesthetic concepts. She highlights Japan's innovative technological landscape, where developers, engineers, and artists collaborate, and traces the nation’s emphasis on precision and functionality back to a poetics of unobtrusiveness and detail. The book examines artists like Masaki Fujihata, whose work embodies formal and thematic hybridity; Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, who create devices for enhanced human-machine interaction; Toshio Iwai, who merges traditional media with computing; and Tatsuo Miyajima, whose LED art is rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Spielmann posits hybridity as a valuable aesthetic, potentially defining global culture, as it encourages the exploration of complex, contradictory elements through dynamic and fluid characteristics.