Saturday, February 4, 2012

Keynote Lecture by Eiji Otsuka (Kobe Design University)
The Unholy Alliance of Disney and Eisenstein: The Wartime Origins of Manga, Animation and Otaku Culture
Time: 5 p.m.
Location: Auditorium of the Grande Bibliothèque,
475 De Maisonneuve Blvd. East

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Symposium
Time: 9:30 a.m. to 5:10 p.m.
Location: J.A. DeSève Cinema, J.W. McConnell Building, 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. West

Agenda

Mixcade
Time: 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Location: Atrium, Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex, 1515 Ste-Catherine Street West

Concordia’s research centre in Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) is collaborating with the indie gaming group the Mount Royal Game Society to bring Montrealers a roundup of the most original experimental creations that exist purely for the love of making games.

• At A Distance by Terry Cavanagh accommodates two players simultaneously, side-by-side, communicating and sharing screens in order to solve puzzles.
• J.S.Joust by Die Gute Fabrik is a game for up to 7 players using motion controllers. Players move in time to J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and attempt to jostle opponents’ controllers while protecting their own.
• The Arcade Royale machine is a custom-built large-scale creation that will support up to four people at once playing one of four games made by Montreal developers in the last year.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Master Class: open to select graduate students.

Lecture abstracts

Marc Steinberg — Media Mix as Experience

What is the media mix? Where does the word come from? And what does it mean now? Exploring the movement of the term from marketing lingo to a popular term for Japanese media franchising, this talk will explore how the current media mix requires us to rethink media experience as an inherently cross-platform, multisensory ensemble.

Ian Condry — Miku: Virtual Idol as Media Platform

Miku Hatsune is Japan's number one virtual idol. Her songs are sold online, she is one of the most requested karaoke downloads, she promotes Toyota in TV commercials, she performs concerts with live bands—and she doesn't exist. Miku is a voice in music synthesizer software called Vocaloid, and her community of users have created something new in the world of popular culture: a crowd-sourced celebrity. Based on fieldwork in Japan and the United States, this talk will explore the dynamics of the social in media through Miku and other examples in the aftermath of the 3/11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

Mia Consalvo — Unintended Travel: ROM Hackers and Fan Translations of Japanese Videogames

This research explores the activities of a group of players who know and love Japanese videogames, and in response have developed and refined the complicated task of translation ROM hacking—or taking older Japanese games never released in the west (or outside Japan), breaking them open, translating them, and then releasing the resulting software patch for a wider audience to enjoy.

Translation hackers see their goal as playing with games in a way different from other players—playing with types of code—the machine code of the game, and the language (Japanese) that players must use to understand that deeper level of code. Their form of game play creates new artifacts and experiences—localized games, hacked games, transformed games—that previously did not exist. Translation hacks show us how players can go beyond even the dynamic act of game play to higher levels of interactivity with games—beyond cheating, beyond level editing. They can expand the history of games, rewrite histories, and transform cultures and expectations.

Thomas Lamarre — Transnational Storytelling

“Media mix” is commonly taken in two ways: as a general rubric for transmedial serialization (or storytelling) and as a specifically Japanese model for multimedia franchising that has proved successful beyond Japan. While such a conceptualization is not inaccurate, it has tended to limit analysis of the transnational to a simple diffusion model, in which a pattern of serialization (or concept) is diffused or exported rather than a product. This talk will move beyond such a diffusion model, exploring the transnational dimension of the media mix by reconsidering the general relation between the transnational and transmedial as well as the specific role of Japan’s media mix in the East Asia region, which will entail some consideration of television infrastructures alongside patterns of serialization and storytelling across nations.

Matthew Penney — Media Mixed Histories: Kyara versus Context

Discussions of the media mix seldom include non-fiction works. This presentation introduces examples of manga adaptations of history texts from rigorous revivals of Marxist protest history of the 1960s to Nazis recast as bikini girls and Japan's most popular salary-man cartoonist's take on the Communist Manifesto. It will then examine ways in which inter-media networks of history products can open up critical perspectives through links with other forms of presentation such as museum displays, archives, and academic historiography, giving audiences a different view on subjects from Japanese imperialism to the dark side of the geisha quarters.

Toshiya Ueno — Between Wolf and Dog: On Oshii Mamoru and Tezuka Osamu

Inspired by Tezuka Osamu's monumental manga, Phoenix (Hi no tori), one of the more influential techno groups, System 7, launched their album with sleeve art featuring the Phoenix as a kind of media mix project in collaboration with Japanese anime and computer graphics artists. My presentation focuses on the unconscious intertextuality of Tezuka's Phoenix and the theory of history developed by Amino Yoshihiko. What is the significance of the prominence of the figure and representation of the dog in both Tezuka's manga and Amino's conception of historiography? What are other significant examples of dogs within Japanese pop-subculture? One other significant example this talk will examine is anime director Oshii Mamoru's preoccupation with the figure of the dog, particularly as seen in his recent manga, Bow wow Meiji Restoration (Wanwan Meiji Ishin).

Margherita Long — Nausicaa Now More Than Ever

How do we read Nausicaa after Fukushima? This talk begins by contrasting two images: Miyazaki Hayao's Nausicaa in the Forest of Decay (Fukai no mori no Nausicaa) and Murakami Takashi's DOB in the Forest of Mystery (Fushigi no mori no DOB-kun). Both Nausicaa and DOB are defined by their relationship to spores, fungus, and nuclear mushrooms. Nausicaa's eco-feminist breakthrough is to understand the "decay" of her nuclear world as an opening to the future. In contrast, as Marilyn Ivy has shown, DOB-kun's shortcoming is to understand the "mystery" of his nuclear world as a compulsion to repeat his militarized past. This talk sketches some weaknesses in Azuma Hiroki's account of Murakami's innovation and asks whether, if we need a new way to think the nuclear, it might not better adopt the feminist way Miyazaki offers. As a feminist contributor to our media mix symposium, Long is interested in thinking about the relation between the materiality of the signifier and the materiality of the nuclear.

Thomas Looser — The Autonomy of Gaming (and the Dark Value of Guns)

Video games are, of course, just games, and this is part of their appeal. Yet, building on formulations seen already in anime, video games also can have their own very specific claims to a real world value system. This is an introductory look at a select trend within gaming, some of the claims now being made about gaming, and some implications of these claims.