Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self

253 Pages·2016·2.8 MB·English

by  Paul Roquet

AMBIENT MEDIA
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AMBIENT MEDIA
/ JAPANESE ATMOSPHERES OF SELF /
PAUL ROQUET
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Ambient Landscapes from
Brian Eno to Tetsu Inoue,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21, no. 4 (2009):
364– 83. Portions of chapters 5 and 6 were previously published as “Ambient
Literature and the Aesthetics of Calm: Mood Regulation in Contemporary
Japanese Fiction,” Journal of Japanese Studies 35, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 87–1 11.
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roquet, Paul.
Ambient media : Japanese atmospheres of self / Paul Roquet.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9244-6 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-9246-0 (pb)
1. Mass media—Japan. 2. Mass media—Philosophy. 3. Space and time in mass
media. I. Title.
P92.J3R67 2015
302.23'0952—dc23 2014046943
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Reading the Air
1 Background Music of the Avant- Garde 23
The Quiet Boom of Erik Satie
2 The Sound of Embodied Security 49
Imaginary Landscapes of Ambient Music
3 Moving with the Rhythms of the City 77
Ambient Video Attunements
4 Soft Fascinations in Shallow Depth 103
Compositing Ambient Space
5 Subtractivism 125
Low- Affect Living with Ambient Cinema
6 Healing Style 151
Ambient Literature and the Aesthetics of Calm
Conclusion 177
Acknowledgments 185
Notes 187
Bibliography 219
Film and Videography 235
Discography 237
Index 239
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INTRODUCTION
READING THE AIR
Jellyfish drift through Tokyo. I had been spending the summer evening
watching hundreds of them float down the Sumida River on their way
back out to sea. Returning home to my apartment on the other side of
the city, I put on an ambient jellyfish DVD I discovered recently in the
background video section of a nearby record store. The screen glows
blue, and slowly the semitransparent creatures drift into view. They are
all breath, floating like disembodied lungs as they quietly push back-
ward across the television.
The jellies’ translucent skins begin to glow. Some appear in close- up,
some from a distance. Sometimes, multiple jellyfish float by together,
a syncopated rhythm emerging between them. At moments a jellyfish
will shine with the burst of an electrical charge. Postproduction visual
effects add ripples of color across their translucent skin.
Downtempo electronic music emanates from the television speak-
ers, matching the visual shimmer and drift with a pulsing aural flow.
The soft textures and gentle throb of the soundtrack provide a rhythmic
context for the jellies’ periodic contractions. The video is programmed
to loop endlessly, so the jellies will drift as long as the DVD continues
to spin (Figure 1).
Exhausted from the summer heat, I lie down on the tatami and let
the mood continue to grow. I glance over once in a while at the cool
shades and transparent forms sliding past. Even without turning to
face the screen directly, I feel the blue light as it spreads throughout the
room. I absorb the sounds seeping quietly from the television speakers.
I get up, work on other things, leave the room, and come back. All the
while, I sense the jellies’ presence. Without conscious effort my own
physical rhythms slowly but steadily attune to their pulse and flow. I
am not attending to the video, but it is attending to me.
The DVD is Jellyfish: Healing Kurage, a Victor Entertainment re-
lease from 2006 (kurage is Japanese for jellyfish).1 These digital jellies
may not summon the awe I felt watching hundreds of live jellyfish head
down the Sumida, but they can be brought home with no damp, no
river stink, and no risk of being stung. What Jellyfish presents is not the
objective documentation of jellies in the wild but a distillation of the
/ 1 /
/ 2 / INTRODUCTION
FIGURE 1. Drifting along. Still from Jellyfish: Healing Kurage.
subjective drift they afford to the humans who encounter them. The
DVD edits the jellyfish experience down to a more portable format and
a more specific mood.
Being with the jellies sends my thoughts drifting. The scene at the
river had reminded me of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s 2003 film Bright Future
(Akarui mirai), where poisonous jellyfish begin to spread throughout
Tokyo’s waterways after the main character releases one into the sewer
system. I think of a recent news item about a giant jellyfish overturning
a Japanese fishing boat in the Pacific and reports of rising numbers
of stinging jellyfish lurking in the San Francisco Bay. I wonder about
the metaphoric relevance of jellyfish in the twenty- first century: is
there something about their transparency, amorphousness, drift, and
latent danger that makes them a fitting monster for an age of atmo-
spheric threats like radiation, global warming, and cyberwarfare? My
thoughts continue to wander, influenced by the contemplative atmo-
sphere now spread throughout the apartment. I am relaxed, despite
these potentially discomforting thoughts. I am not responding to the
DVD so much as resonating with it.
My time with Jellyfish is an experience of being together with a work
of ambient media, of tuning myself through the ambience it provides.
The DVD sets a mood, and those within its orbit begin to attune. This
focus on mood allows a work of ambient media to afford emotional
attunement even when perceived largely through indirect attention,
INTRODUCTION / 3 /
as in the case of ambient music and video. Encountered in isolation,
the relaxing stimuli provided by Jellyfish— flowing music, soft lighting
and colors, gentle movement, slow-p aced editing, etc.— may not be
sufficient to effectively and dependably produce the promised mood
of “healing.” Through the repetition and overdetermination of similar
affective cues in different aesthetic and sensory registers, however, a
strong mood can be established even if audiences are only partially
attentive to the on- screen drift. Once cultivated, a mood helps to steer
future perceptual orientations, priming the brain to favor sensory cues
reinforcing already established feelings.2 Attuning to ambient media
like Jellyfish orients the self toward a mix of uncertain calm and drifting
reflections, relaxation and wandering thoughts.
AMBIENT SUBJECTIVATION
The idea of ambient media goes back to Isaac Newton, who in his 1704
Opticks describes an amorphous and omnipresent “ambient medium”
surrounding the human body, coming between it and other objects
and serving as a “conveyor of attractive forces” between them. Newton
is talking about the air.3 Air is what makes up the atmosphere, in its
original meaning of the band of oxygen and nitrogen surrounding the
surface of the earth. But air is also the medium through which waves
of sound and light travel in order to pass from a perceptible object to
a sensing body.4
Over the next three centuries, the meaning of these words would
transform. In an English- language context, the definition of atmo-
sphere expanded to refer not just to a pocket of air but to the subjectively
felt feeling and tone of a place. The Japanese term for atmosphere, fu-
niki, underwent a similar transformation.5 Meanwhile, medium came
to refer less to omnipresent substances like air and water and more
to “conveyors of attractive forces” invented by humans, from oil on
canvas to magnetic discs. While their origins lie close together, atmo-
sphere and media gradually drifted apart. Only in the past half century
have they once again come together as the newer media of human in-
vention began to merge with the air itself, filling it with light, sound,
and waves of many other frequencies.
In everyday English, ambience is a synonym for atmosphere, the
dispersed and overall tone or feeling of a place. But unlike its more
objective sibling, ambience always implies a more subjective element
of mediation at work: some kind of agency behind the production of
mood and a focus on the human body attuning to it. The Latin prefix