ASIAN 4455 - [Digital Media in Japan]

(GB) (ALC-AS, CA-AS)

Spring. Not offered: 2022-2023. Next offered: 2024-2025. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with ASIAN 6655.

A. Campana.

This course will critically examine digital media in Japan, a site that has historically been a major center of development of digital technologies and cultures. We will explore the cultural importance of a wide variety of digital media practices—including electronic literature, the internet, video games, augmented and virtual reality, computer graphics, and digital art—with a focus on phenomena that aimed to rethink digital media at crucial points in its development and ever-increasing dominance. Drawing on a wide variety of theories of digitality inside and outside of Japan, we will analyze a range of digital works, as well as use several kinds of digital tools and platforms as a form of critical creative practice in order to ask what digital media has meant historically and what it might become. (SC)