Decoding the Dividual and Ephemeral: toward the coupling of Human Nature and Computed Media
Lecturer: Dominique Chen (JP)

We need to reconsider the nature of our global Internet and the way it is processing artificial data to embrace the latent opportunities it is fulfilled of. With the permeation of net-based media, we are today experiencing a critical epistemological shift that affects the media culture in a way to provoke a new generation of identity and creativity from within the mass culture of the Web, that became our a priori condition of life. With the multiple-authorship becoming the de facto standard of our media landscape, our perception of our own selves is shifting towards dividual entities, interacting simultaneously in multiple layers. The shift also affects our cognition of the data as ‘objects of expression’, nurturing an alternative philosophy of creativity simultaneously: beyond the contemporary development of lifelog media, and emanating from bionomical fluctuations of the real world environment and the physical human bodies linked through the Web, data are not to be seen anymore as end products controllable by its author(s), but rather somewhat autopoietic entities containing its own vitalism, and thus bringing in the ephemeral phenomena into discussion.
Turning from objects into subjects, data could acquire their own motives to propagate cross-modally. Eventually, this shift opens the perspective of an agrarian model for creativity, where artificiality and probability condition the ecologies of creative expression. In this talk, we will see how these arguments can be deployed pro tempore, so as to shed light in how we can ‘recapitulate’ (in the evolutional sense) the evolution of how we perceive ourselves and our own cultural productions, and possibly the basic raisons d’être of contemporary research of ‘media art’ and ‘media culture’ as well.

J-Culture Decoded ( as a hypothesis )
Lecturer: Masaki Fujihata (JP)

It is still in the process of making, but I am trying to build up a hypothesis for analysing the oddity of Japanese contemporary culture, which were observed by the eyes from outside.

― Japanese writing is a mixture of ideogram and phonogram.
This occasion gives us easy to make a joke “Da-ja-re,” a sentence contains polysemic meanings.
― Image is used and made as a polysemic structure.
Somehow an ambiguity is one of the sense of beauty.
Our hand writing culture gives us an impression, which is words are readable images, not like a code like an alphabet.
― Unnecessity of “Communication.”
Lack of translation of the word “communication” made an alternate understanding of its meaning in Japan. “Kominyuke-shon” is an act of checking pre-shared senses with the others.
― Beauty is important, rather than art creation.
Edo was a period when essencial Japanese culture had been emerged. Commonly understood, object of the art is a container of beauty. Learning art is knowing beauty by copying art object.