Research
I specialize in Japanese cinema and visual culture. My research focuses on the visual forms associated with Japanese modernity, avant-garde art practices in the 1960s, contemporary image culture, and popular art and media. My interests include film theory and aesthetics, screen technologies and intermedia, issues in global contemporary art, and animation and new media history and theory. My work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship.
My first book, Japanese Cinema Between Frames (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), reframes Japan’s cinema history through a study of film aesthetics, illuminating processes that have both contributed to the unique texture of Japanese films and yoked the nation’s cinema to the global sphere of film history. Focusing on techniques that draw attention to the interval between frames on the filmstrip, I trace how the medium has capitalized on its materiality to instantiate its contemporaneity, continually reshaping itself through its dynamic engagement within a shifting media ecology. In so doing, cinema has bound itself tightly with adjacent visual forms such as anime and manga to redefine itself across its history of interaction with new media, including television, video and digital formats.
My second book, Worlds Unbound: the Art of teamLab (Intellect Books, 2022), examines the artistic production of Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, which has garnered global attention for its immersive, interactive large-scale exhibitions. I contextualize the creative group’s artistic production since its inception in 2001 and analyze how teamLab’s artworks interrelate the natural world, social and institutional systems, the participatory culture of contemporary media and information networks, and the digital art experience. In addition to deepening the understanding of teamLab’s art, the book explores how digital technologies have transformed the parameters of artistic practice and are engaging an expanded public.
My first book, Japanese Cinema Between Frames (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), reframes Japan’s cinema history through a study of film aesthetics, illuminating processes that have both contributed to the unique texture of Japanese films and yoked the nation’s cinema to the global sphere of film history. Focusing on techniques that draw attention to the interval between frames on the filmstrip, I trace how the medium has capitalized on its materiality to instantiate its contemporaneity, continually reshaping itself through its dynamic engagement within a shifting media ecology. In so doing, cinema has bound itself tightly with adjacent visual forms such as anime and manga to redefine itself across its history of interaction with new media, including television, video and digital formats.
My second book, Worlds Unbound: the Art of teamLab (Intellect Books, 2022), examines the artistic production of Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, which has garnered global attention for its immersive, interactive large-scale exhibitions. I contextualize the creative group’s artistic production since its inception in 2001 and analyze how teamLab’s artworks interrelate the natural world, social and institutional systems, the participatory culture of contemporary media and information networks, and the digital art experience. In addition to deepening the understanding of teamLab’s art, the book explores how digital technologies have transformed the parameters of artistic practice and are engaging an expanded public.
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