News

Saturday morning 11/19 I will participate in a workshop on The Immersive Enclosure as part of the Fall conference of the Japan Association for Media, Journalism, and Communication Studies (JAMS, 日本メディア学会), the largest professional organization of media scholars in Japan. Professor Yoshitaka Mouri from Tokyo University of the Arts will serve as chair. The abstract from the…

I spoke with Recall This Book about The Immersive Enclosure, virtuality in Japan, and why people should read more early VR criticism & fiction. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts:

A piece on the new VR book in the MIT News today.

My new book The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan is now shipping (though the official release date is not for a few weeks). I also have a pair of book talks at Harvard this month: Placing Virtual Reality: Japan’s Alternative VR History as part of the Harvard Discovery Series (4/13/22) — recording here Japanese Virtual Reality and…

I was interviewed for this new documentary for BBC Radio 3 on Japanese environmental music (環境音楽) in the bubble-era 1980s: “Tranquility, Inc.“

I wrote about the development of YouTube “ambience videos” for Real Life magazine, drawing from my research on ambient media and VR to think about what it happens when ambience becomes positioned as a kind of substance available through on-demand streaming platforms. Along the way I touch on lofi hip hop radio, videos of evacuated fantasy…

New essay from me on the work of solitary animation production, looking at how the labor animators put into their work shows up in the aesthetics and affects onscreen. The essay is part of an ongoing side project where I work towards a non-auteurist approach to so-called “art” animation, approaching it instead as a space…

Our special issue on VR empathy & immersion co-edited by Brooke Belisle & me is out now in the Journal of Visual Culture. Featuring: —- Janet Murray on what has and has not changed from 90s VR to the recent revival Grant Bollmer & Katherine Guinness on Wolfson’s ‘Real Violence’ and the nauseous limits of…

I’m in London on 2019/10/25 to give a talk to the Animate Assembly (Goldsmiths/Birkbeck) on “The Animation Enclosure: VR Visual Novels and the Space Around the Face.” The following day I will be introducing a screening at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image of Goshima Kazuhiro’s 2006 film Different Cities, along with a session by Joon Yang…

My essay from the latest LOGIC magazine is now online – why “the selectively transmitted embodiment of telerobotics risks the further erasure of already marginalized bodies”