Research project Body, Space, and Time in Japanese Visual Cultures During the New Digital Age

Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg arose during a time of digital change. First published in 1985, her “A Cyborg Manifesto” reached widespread recognition in 1991 after the publication of the book Simians, Cyborg, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. This was a time of the revolution of the internet; changing our society into a digital one. This new digital age also had an impact on film and art scenes around the world, where new and improved technologies and digitalization changed the prerequisites needed for visualizing new imaginary futures and for raising questions about human embodiments and gender norms in a highly technological society.

Since then, over thirty years later, the growth of social media platforms, robots, and AI has connected the human species and our bodies to the digital world more than ever – a theme that has often been visualized in Japanese visual cultures during these three decades. This project takes its point of departure from this era of the new digital age, from the 1990s until today, intending to analyze the visual work (film, photography, and digital art) of one of the most prominent Japanese female artists, Mariko Mori. As the main focus of this project, Mori has through her art visualized the concept of the cyborg and has continuously produced art that is in dialogue with technology, spirituality, and nature. Through a feminist- and posthumanist theoretical framework, this project aims to contribute to a broader and deepened understanding of cyborg knowledge in an era of digitality, through the key concepts of body, space, and time. This could open up new conversations about our contemporary digital society and its inhabitants (humans, non-humans, and all in between).