Embodied Languages: Body-graphs and Flesh Interfaces in Japanese New Media Art

This paper offers a region-specific account of how contemporary Japanese artists practice post-translational modes of communication, programmed, performed, and perceived through new media technologies. The works of a Kyoto-based artist collective dumb type and Manabe Daito serve as compelling models that create the sensory and aesthetic conditions of technologically-mediated belonging not reliant on a shared language and shift the dominance of English in intercultural communication. Departing from dystopian readings of their projects based on man-machine dichotomy, I attend to the sensorial impact of digital technology upon a human body with regard to its formal and functional aspect as a conveyor of meanings and feelings. Affect theory, posthuman studies, and information semiotics construct the conceptual and theoretical framework of this study on how dumb type artists and Manabe attract a hetero-lingual audience through their multimedia-driven live performances, installations, and devices. For the analysis of dumb type’s pieces, I use Sara Ahmed’s argument that one’s bodily alignments with and against others provoke collective feelings or materialize borders, mediated through and impressed on the skin surface. Mark Hansen’s discussion about affective embodiment of digital images enables me to interpret how Manabe’s face instruments not only pull our attention from the ways of picturing digital topological spaces and direct it to those of experiencing but also foregrounds the haptic aesthetics beyond dominantly visual modes. Ultimately, my paper proposes reconfiguring the human body as a graph or an interface that functions as a communicative platform and exercises the agency of enframing information.