Abstract

In Media & Ethics symposium, Helsinki, and ISEA96, Rotterdam, Toshiya Ueno gave a talk on Techno Orientalism. In DEAF ’96 and Digital Dreams ’96 Tapio Makela worked on the topic Orientalist Aesthetics. In Ars Electronica 97 we had a dialogue in Net.Sauna on how to converge these two topics. We will have prepared this topic in advance, have parts prewritten (dialogue as theatre), parts visualised (imaginary dialogue) and parts generated on location (performative dialogue).

Technical recipe:
-1 part pre recorded CuSeMe + audio
-1 part live IRC outspoken through text-to-speech synthetic voices
-1 part live voice + CuSeMe projected 1 part selected video clips from new media commercials
-1 part selected web sites
-1 part examples from the current exhibition at ISEA98 (optional)

Toshiya Ueno is from Tokyo. Tapio Makela is from Helsinki. We speak from a culturally and medially diasporic position of five topics that negotiate media technology and its others.

1. Orientalism in virtual geography Commodification of differences in information societies is based on a very hybrid conception of capital as economical, cultural and virtual. In such an environment, ethnicities have parallel existences: the national (industrial maps), the virtual (postindustrial layers; imaginaries, marketing, media), and the corporeal (subjects). In virtual geogra-phy, orientalism borrows from industrial and colonial archives of narratives and images to reposition East as either the technological other (crude) or the mystical techno sublime (supreme intellect).
2. Orientalism, art and digital aesthetics The history of Western aesthetics parallels that of mathematics, not only in their relation to sublimation of form, but in their negation of Eastern origins and presences. “Being digital” is perhaps a well marketed prostheses of 1960s pop culture influenced by “Eastern philoso-phy”, and implanted into cyber culture. “Looking digital” is a much more complex question. How do European and Japanese modernisms inform the contemporary formalist aesthetics in machine arts? If orientalism in painting was centred around female bodies on canvas, what kind of body politics are at play in digital orientalism?
3. Software Empires – conditions for technological imperialism
4. Content Colonies – media art and theory as subcultures.

These intertwined topics look at the cultural impacts of software empires and their ethnic masks, as well as the “content providers” as commodifiable subcultures. Especially Japanese subcultures have fed the cyber culture with orientalist imagery, eagerly utilized by game and software industries. Is the role of theory or art practices far different?

Virtual diaspora as a revolution Working translocally deals with changing positions in virtual and national geographies. A critical position would be a virtual diaspora, a denial of origin, a refusal of a single original home. As a strategy it avoids orientalism, which, after all, is based on geographical binaries. In relation to advancements or revolutions in technology, a diasporic position decentres the eye/hand from the position that utilises all impacts of the new. Instead, new media revolutions are seen as paradigms on national, virtual and corporeal levels.

• Tapio Makela, Finland, works with new media art and theory both as a writer and a maker. He started an artist media lab in Helsinki called MuuMediaBase, chaired a conference on Media and Ethics, started an international media art workshop, began net. art education in Helsinki, co-edits a net magazine, hosts a dialogues session theory.sauna and realised a project at Ars Electronica. Networking: Nettime; Syndicate, V2_East and ISEA Board participation. Over the past years he has lectured widely on media art and theory (ISEA94, ISEA95, ISEA97, DEAF96, Digital Dreams96, LEAF97…)
• Toshiya Ueno,Japan, has lectured widely in cultural theory and new media, including ISEA96. He is a lecture with a media department at a major University in Tokyo. Most recently he has toured Japanese Universities with Geert Lovink lecturing on net.art. Born in 1962. Critic, Sociologist, Media theoretician and activist. Associate Professor of Chubu University (the department of International Studies).
  “Though my original background was Philosophy and Sociology, I didn’t satisfy and was very frustrated with the “academism” in general. So during the mid 80’s I was involved in the free radio movement and I participated in the free radio station “Radio Homerun” at Shimikitazawa Tokyo , which was founded by media thoretician and activist Testuo Kogawa and his students. Ivan Ilich, Felix Guattari … also visited to our station and joined with us for our radio program. From this station some media artists, media and art activists, punks, DJs, critics, etc have come out. Also in Japanese society, the 80’s was a strongly conservative situation, but the members of “Homerun” have always developed the critical way of thinking and actions. “Now I’m working as associate professor in the department of International Studies of Chubu university at Nagoya. Since late 80’s, I have been writing many of articles, essay, reviews about media, rock and pop music, film, contemporary art, architecture, urban-design etc And I published several books. Since 1992 I’ve very often been in Amsterdam almost each every three months. Firstly I came there in order to research on the history and theory of Situationist movements. Then in Amsterdam I encountered the tactical media (activism), the squat movement and the pirate media movement. So far I have had very strong relationship with them. But I don’t wish to become an introducer of them into Japan. I just only want to take a role of mediator between the net criticism in Europe and that in Japan and Asia. On the one hand, I sometimes paricipated in the projects of Inter Communication center (NTT) and contributed other somehow “business oriented” projects by organised huge corporations. On the other hand, I have been involved in the “alternative” movements and the activism against censorship in contemporary art and the networks in Japan. Of course in Japan, though there are many theoreticians and critics about media, most of them influenced by “Californian Ideology” are not concerned the social and political aspect of media situation. I’m very different from them. But unfortunately our position is still minor in Japan. Now I’m mainly concerned about the relationship of the net criticism or the media activism to the cultural diaspora in the globalization in the contemporary world.”