This book grew out of Yvonne Spielmann's 2005--2006 and 2009 visits to Japan, whereshe explored the technological and aesthetic origins of Japanese new-media art--which was known forpioneering interactive and virtual media applications in the 1990s. Spielmann discovered anessential hybridity in Japan's media culture: an internal hybridity, a mixture of digital-analogconnections together with a non-Western development of modernity separate from but not immune toWestern media aesthetics; and external hybridity, produced by the international, transculturaltravel of aesthetic concepts. Spielmann describes the innovative technology context in Japan, inwhich developers, engineers, and artists collaborate, and traces the Japanese fondness for precisionand functionality to the poetics of unobtrusiveness and detail. She examines work by artistsincluding Masaki Fujihata, whose art is both formally and thematically hybrid; Seiko Mikami and SotaIchikawa, who build special devices for a new sense of human-machine interaction; Toshio Iwai, whoconnects traditional media forms with computing; and Tatsuo Miyajima, who anchors his LED artwork inBuddhist philosophy. Spielmann views hybridity as a positive aesthetic value--perhaps the definingaesthetic of a global culture. Hybridity offers a conceptual approach for considering the ambivalentlinkages of contradictory elements; its dynamic and fluid characteristics are neither conclusive norcategorical but are meant to stimulate fusions.
