MEMBERSMEMBERS
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Osamu Maekawa | Associate Professor, Graduated School of Humanities, Kobe University |
Subject of research
I have studied focusing on the visual culture theory especially photograph, and movie theory after the 19th century.
Firstly, I am developing the archaeology of the sense/memory identified widely with an image as a photograph theory by considering a photograph and a relation with various visual equipment related with a photograph from many sides, such as an ambivalence of sense experience of a stereoscope and a panorama, slide projection and its motion, and production and currency of vernacular photograph, and by examining various ways of using of photographs, such as a picture of the late him, ghost photography and a commemorative photo, and a certificate photo. Secondly, at the same time, I try to arrange the descent of the photograph after the World War II from a viewpoint of the branching to the art as a photograph, the photograph as the art, and the photograph as the mass media, and I am working to foreground the factor of inter-media in photograph media. Furthermore, I am also examining the present digital photograph on the basis of the concept of "the thing like a photograph. "The thing like a photograph" is located among media like video, TV, and movie. It is a picture characterized to the cross-index dynamics which carries out self-differentiation and branching on the screen of a PC or a mobile phone. It is a main subject of my study to redefine the vernacular photographic image filled to transversality, liquidity, and border-transgression from a framework of post media studies.
Point of contact with a subculture
I participated in the international congress on the today's relation between subculture and media art in the media art convention (The regionality and universality of "media art" :beyond "Cool Japan," at 2011/2/12), and made a presentation "The photograph as media/art?" focusing on photograph media. I argued in this presentation that in a post media situation, production and acceptance of image including photograph is not limited practice like high class art, and should be understood as communication fluid and across boundaries between media with other genres which went via the thing like a photograph. And I also revealed the today's characteristic phenomenon such as the ambivalence of the "user generation contents" which uses all the images originating in both high-class culture and popular culture as materials for secondary work, and the visual work as accumulation of the fragmentary icon which induces a emotional response. Of course, these phenomena are not limited to a photograph. Other media of a subculture, movie video comics are also following the similar process. These visual works are also inter-media work things, and one of tools of emotional communication as I already clarified partially in my published paper on the ghost photography theory and J horror theory. I am writing the paper about propagation and a change of J horror and horror comics as a subculture, from such a viewpoint.