Article: ‘Proper Wakki Pop 09.10.2009′

Whoa! Thank you Camilla Pia for writing this article about Sputniko!

“Weirdos making music in leftfield genres – so predictable. Now what if those same eccentrics had a bash at subverting mainstream stuff? And they did it successfully? Well it would be amazing, and it might sound something like Sputniko!”

…oh yes.

It’s cute!
It doesn’t hurt!
It makes your blood taste good!
Yeeeeeeeeeeee <3

Speaker. スピーカー。
Driver. ドライバー。
Put on head. 頭にのせる。
Call things. これで何か呼ぶ。

Just had a great gig at the JPopGo Event at the London Stone,
I’ve met some really nice people… please invite Sputniko! again! : )
SpuNEWS
I’m starting a short video blog series from tomorrow,
I think I’m about to give birth to a new character…watch this space..

ロンドンJPOPイベントでライブしてきました！会場が王道系インリッシュ・パブなのに、晴レ晴レユカイ系アニソンがガンガンかかっててお客さんも負けじとガンガン踊ってて超シュール。
☆☆☆☆プチ告知☆☆☆☆☆明日からスプツニ子、期間限定でビデオブログ始めます。なんかちょっと今、産まれそうなんだよね．．．いや、もうまさに想像妊娠状態なんだけど．．．出産プロセスみんなにお届けってかんじで

Photos from Paul Browne & Chi Lai, JPopGo!

[hiromi]

‘Moru’ is a new phrase which emerged in between 2008 and 2009, popularly used by Japanese teenagers and hostesses to indicate that something looks better, cuter or cooler. An example use of the word would be “Kyou no atashi, Motteru! (I think I’m really cute today!)” The phrase literally means to ‘add’, indicating that the cuteness is ‘added’ or the hair is ‘added’.

Huge and expansive “Mori” hairstyles have become popular especially among young hostesses. The girls’ thirst for bigger and more specular hair has lead to creations of some very innovative hairstyles, such as the “Pegasus Shouten Mix Mori” (The Rising Pegasus Mix) which the magazine below claims to be “as high as 7 boxes of cigarettes”.

The amusing style of “Shouten Pegasus Mix” also inspired users at the online artist community pixiv to generate many illustrated versions of the hair (See below)

If the genre ’subculture’ is often associated with a minority against or critiquing the main culture, there seems to be another form of minority and avant-garde who celebrate, embrace and ‘Moru’ (add on) the main culture, pushing its boundaries further. After some discussions, Cesar Harada and I decided to call this ’surculture’. Surculture is never a culture restricted to Japan, it can easily be observed in countries such as America where extreme cultures of ‘Highschool’ and ‘Celebrity’ also proliferate via the media feedback loop of film, television and magazines.
[/hiromi]

[cesar]

In recent conversations with Hiromi Ozaki ( Sputniko! ) about japanese contemporary art we kept on using the word “subculture“. The term subculture always has this kind of heavy, negative, pejorative tone, depicting a rather oppressed minority creating subversive, resistant (counterculture), rebellious messages.

The more we were describing the works we liked, the more it seemed the word “subculture” was not adapted. The works we like are really fun, even if they are very critical of japanese contemporary society they are really happy, playful, a positive celebration of japanese contemporary life : we call that “surculture“.

In our conversations, the word “surculture” became a very useful word to describe this constructive, critical way of feeding popular culture. But dont misunderstand : it is not “high culture” feeding “popular culture”, it is a “cultural feedback” control system, they are both feeding and regulating each other.

In that sense we came to think that popular culture – in particular surculture – is potentially more advanced and exciting than high culture or popular culture, because it is aware of both sides of social and cultural realities. Saying this we do not make a qualitative judgment : O TRUE | X FALSE diagram !

I never mean { surculture encompasses { culture {subculture} } }. I just mean it is useful to name this cultural vector.

Scion Space, Culver city, CA. October 4th 2008. Gabriel Ritter, Curator of “Tokyo Nonsense” says :

What brings all these artists together is the theme of nonsense and the city of Tokyo. These artists are young, they don’t have a lot of options open to them, and what they see around them compounds that, and in reaction to that, maybe non-sense is the only thing left that they can use to react to what is surrounding them. Is what you are surrounded by is meaningless, or does not make sense, or seems absurd, to critique that also requires an equal amount of none-sense or absurdity or meaninglessness to somehow make sense of none-sense, if that’s even possible.

Sputniko! comments :

Living and growing up in tokyo, there aren’t many things you learn about or get concerned about, the world is very closed. Lots of consumer emptiness around, theres nothing to really rebel, maybe the emptiness, but your language is really poor because you’ve grown up in it, kinda feeling. It’s like either turn ChimPom or become a Kyoto artisan.

Google also Sputniko!’s “Doradical design”.

Sputniko says in Japan the art scene has been flooded by this kind of art for at least 2 decades, and somehow doesn’t seem to make that great progress as many artist don’t back their work with a constructed explanation, hiding behing the “this is my feeling” explanation… The artist group Chin↑Pom in that sense, is/was refreshing because undercover of nonsense they really brought a toughtfull funny critique.

In the discussion I also realized there really is a difference between “Popular culture” and “Pop culture!”: the Popular Culture is population mainstream culture, whereas Pop Culture! is either a subversive (subculture / counterculture) manifestation, or a surculture manifestation.

Let’s take 3 examples : Happy Pop (A. Warhol) – Neutral Pop (R. Lichtenstein) – Bitter Pop (C. Oldenburg)

This piece by Andy Warhol is a celebration of the feminine beauty figure. In many ways we can consider it critical (serial, monstruous, made under the effect of drugs…) but it is still very positive and happy. To me this is surculture Pop Art!

This piece of Roy Lichtenstein is more commentary, the tone chosen is quite sad, we don’t exactly know what it is adressing, but there is a sense of critique. To me this is mainstream Pop Art.

In this work of Claes Oldenburg, there is even more agressivity, a sense of absurd and vulgarity. For me this is subculture Pop Art, or counterculture Pop Art.

In the book “Laughing in a foreign Language” Mami Kataoka and Simon Critchley suggest many example of surcultural artists, that celebrate contemporary life in a fun creative way, while being subversive in a constructive and critical way.

BUY NOW !

[/cesar]
[/collection]
#collection [id:33, creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-29T06.14.54.0Z", tag:"Surculture, Shouten Pegasus Mix, Gal, Subculture"]
#hiromi [creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-29T06.14.56.0Z", tag:"Surculture, Shouten Pegasus Mix, Gal, Subculture"]
#cesar [creator:"Cesar Harada", time:"2009-09-29T06.14.56.0Z", tag:"Surculture, Subculture, Pop Art, Japanese Art"]
[/academixml]

[academixml]
[collection]
[hiromi]

When Kyoto University of the Arts (Kyoto Zokei Geijutsu Daigaku) first approached me to give a lecture on ‘Critical Design’ to their 100 young students in summer 2009, I was terrified.  I was exposed to Critical Design through my tutors Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, but I had no clue how I could possibly communicate its idea of ‘using designed artifacts as an embodied critique on existing values and practices in a culture’ to a group of generally completely uncritical and happy-go-lucky Japanese 20-year olds.  I knew (as an attention-deficit 24 year old J-pop musician) that if I explained the concept of Critical Design in a straight manner, they would fall asleep. They would just not get it.  I knew the students had all the amazingly sophisticated animes, mangas and computer games to worry about before starting to think about critiquing anything.

Since examples of Critical Design by Dunne & Raby and others are more generally founded on western issues and humor, I had to first discover something which the students can easily relate to in their own culture, to make them aware of what this ‘critical’ thinking might be for them.  I thought hard… very hard… and after some struggling, I realized there was a critical designer the students all loved and knew about: Doraemon!!

Doraemon as a Critical Designer

Doraemon is an anime series about a blue robotic cat from the future, who brings out many ‘future inventions’ from his pocket to save the forever unlucky and untalented Nobita from his troubles. Each episode features a designed object from the future which Nobita somewhat misuses to cheat in his tests, take revenge or peek into his crush Shizuka’s shower room, etc. The design objects are almost always critical as well as being playful about the future – most episodes end with a conclusion that lets viewers learn from Nobita’s mistakes and reflect on existing social values.  For example, ‘Dokodemo Door’ is a future invention which allows you to go to any space you wish by going through the door.  This sounds like a great idea to Nobita, but he soon realizes the product’s immense privacy problems when he finds himself warped inside Shizuka’s bathroom (See illustration below).  Environmental issues such as deforestation, pollution and endangered animals are also featured in many Doraemon episodes.

The Doraemon series have been loved in Japan and Asia for more than 40 years since its beginning in 1969, raising generations of scientists and artists influenced by “The Doraemon Dream”.  I’m a Doraemon Fan myself, and I’ve personally discovered many influential Japanese media artists including Maywa Denki, Ryota Kuwakubo and Kazuhiko Hachiya to share the same passion. They swear by the book “Doraemon Himitsu Dougu Kanzen Daijiten” (Doraemon Products Complete Encyclopedia – Shougakkan, 1994) as their important source of inspiration.

Doradical and Critical

So for the Kyoto University lecture I decided to put forth “Doradical Design” as a possible mode of thinking in Critical Design. The word “Doradical Design” is a mixture of

1. Radical Design : as a reference to the Italian Radical Design movement in 1960s and 70s which was highly critical of prevailing social values and design ideologies.

2. Doraemon : as a reference to the blue robotic cat which brings out many future inventions that make viewers reflect on existing values, society and environmental issues.

Doradical Design is essentially critical design, but the attitude in which the work originates from is very different. If existing examples categorized in ‘Critical Design’ tend to critique with skepticism or dark humor about existing culture, Doradical Designs rather embrace, exploit, celebrate or extend the existing culture as a medium of critique.  In other words, if many existing critical design objects emerge from countercultural or subcultral energies, Doradical design is a branch of critical design more closely associated with ’surculture’ ([knowledge_object_id:33])

Critical designs make commentaries about the existing culture, but Doradical Designs subvert into the existing culture.  This can be observed from how Doradically Designed products in futuristic animes have been very influential on Japan’s development history of robot and hardware technologies.  For example Sekai Camera, an augmented reality platform recently launched on iPhone, has almost exactly the same feature as the product ‘Dennou Megane’ in anime ‘Dennou Coil’ (and of course, Sekai Camera director Iguchi is a big fan)

In conclusion, even though it’s a young concept I found introducing Doradical Design as a starting point for critical thinking in Kyoto was a huge success.  Doradical ideas encouraged the students to engage with critical thinking using their own youth culture and language, which I feel is crucial when you want to make commentaries about anything at all.

Examples often clarify a definition more than words – so I’ve listed works which I categorize as ‘Doradical’ in [knowledge_object_id:34]

[/hiromi]
[/collection]

#collection [id:32, creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-29T01.39.38.0Z", tag:"Doradical Design, Critical Design, Doraemon, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby"]

#hiromi [creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-29T01.39.38.0Z", tag:"Doradical Design, Critical Design, Doraemon, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby"]
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[hiromi]

Anonymity

In his essay ‘What Is an Author?’, Michel Foucault affirms the writing of a discourse freed of impositions of authorship, stating [foucault] “the author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” [/foucault] indicating how the concept of an author acts to close and fix the meaning of the text.

In [knowledge_object_id:21] and [knowledge_object_id:22] I’d like to show how a certain kind of anonymity may risk the meaning of the texts to proliferate, in a manner potentially unity imposing and (ironically) authoritative – by looking at collaborative writing platforms online. Firstly I believe we’re seeing two types of Anonymity, which can be categorized as:

1. Individual Anonymity : anonymous contributions made by anonymous individuals.

2. Collective Anonymity : contributions made anonymous via collective editing.

[/hiromi]
[/collection]

#collection [id:20, creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-25T01.41.58.0Z", tag:"Anonymity, Individual Anonymity, Collective Anonymity, Foucault"]

#hiromi [creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-25T01.41.58.0Z", tag:"Anonymity, Individual Anonymity, Collective Anonymity, Foucault"]

#foucalt [creator: "Michel Foucault", title:"What Is an Author?" description: "in Paul Rabinow ed., The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984)", time: "1970-01-01T00.00.00.0Z", tag:"Author, Function, Language, Post Structuralist, Post Modern" ]

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[academixml]
[collection]
[hiromi]
[anonymous]
Anonymous @5putniko AcademiXMLってさ、要するに学術論文をwikiっぽくするってこと？ So is using AcademiXML basically like writing the academic paper with a wiki?


11:52 PM Sep 20th from Echofon in reply to 5putniko
[/anonymous]

They’re both online and collaborative. They’re both open for access, open for contributions. They both make the boundaries between author, editor and reader unclear. Although it’s true AcademiXML and wiki share very similar characteristics my reply to the above tweet is:

5putniko @bunguman No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




11:53 PM Sep 20th from web in reply to bunguman


I’d like to make clear the differences between using a wiki and AcademiXML for academic writing in knowledge objects [knowledge_object_id:17],[knowledge_object_id:18] and [knowledge_object_id:19].
[/hiromi]
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#collection [id:16, creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-24T16.37.10.0Z", tag:"AcademiXML, wiki"]

#hiromi [creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-24T16.37.10.0Z", tag:"AcademiXML, wiki"]

#anonymous [creator:"Anonymous", time:"2009-09-20T23.52.10.0Z", tag:"Twitter, AcademiXML, wiki", url:http://twitter.com"]

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[academixml]
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[hiromi]

Miku Hatsune

Miku Hatsune is a singing synthesizer software developed by Crypton Future Media that enables users to synthesize singing by typing in the lyrics and melody.  Unlike other speech synthesizers, Miku Hatsune is tuned to make J-pop and Anime songs.

Miku Hatsune became extremely popular in video sharing platform Nico Nico Douga ([knowledge_object_id:28]), where users started posting videos with songs created by the software immediately after its release.  Miku Hatsune-related videos in Nico Nico Douga are often collaboratively produced : users post original songs, popular songs generate multiple illustrations, 2d/3d animations, dance moves and remixes.  Her popularity is so significant in Nico Nico Douga that she has basically become the “Icon” of the platform.

Supercell is a 11 person band which formed through such collaboration of Miku Hatsune videos on Nico Nico Douga.  The band is lead by Ryo, the musician and lyricist, and 10 other members who contribute designs, animations and illustrations.  Their first Miku Hatsune featured songs “Melt” and “Koi wa senso” received more than 5 milllion views in total on Nico Nico, which brought them a record deal with Sony Music Entertainment and their first major release album “Supercell” ranked 4th in the Japanese music charts.  Sweet Vacation and Absorb are other examples of major label pop bands who featured Miku’s voice in their releases.  As more hit songs with her voice were released from major labels, her popularity quickly spread outside of the Nico Nico community, and now Miku Hatsune is recognized throughout in Japanese popular culture.

[/hiromi]

#collection [id:29, creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-24T10.42.39.0Z", tag:"Miku Hatsune, Nico Nico Douga, User generated content"]

#hiromi [creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", time:"2009-09-24T10.42.39.0Z", tag:"Miku Hatsune, Nico Nico Douga, User generated content"]

[/collection]

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[academixml]
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[hiromi]

Nico Nico Douga (literal translation: Smiley Videos) is a Japanese video sharing platform which is a mix between 2channel (mentioned in [knowledge_object_id:21] ) and Youtube, that gained massive popularity since the launch in late 2006. Just to describe how quickly it became popular – in two and a half years of launching, Nico Nico Douga is [alexa] the 14th most visited website in Japan[/alexa], with [japaninternetnews] more the 14 million registered users[/japaninternetnews], more than one million uploaded videos, and more than one billion comments.

The most unique innovation of Nico Nico Douga is the way comments are placed on the videos. Users can comment while they watch videos, adding the comments directly on top of the video, and all the following users can see comments of previous users as part of the video (all comments scroll into the frame of the moving image from right to left)

Nico Nico Douga users comment to each other’s comments as well as the videos that are streaming in the background. Sometimes there are only one of two comments scrolling over the video and at other moments the whole screen is full – when this happens it’s called a “Danmaku” (a bullet curtain)

Another interesting characteristic of Nico Nico Douga is the amount of user generated content, mostly related to anime, computer games, pop music and Otaku culture uploaded to the platform. Popular genres include “Odottemita (Tried dancing)” and “Utattemita (Tried Singing)”, where amateurs film themselves dancing or singing to well known Anime tracks, or “MAD movies” which are DIY music videos that remix exiting footage, often combined with songs performed by the vocal synthesiser Miku Hatsune (the singing is created by a software called Vocaloid).
[/hiromi]
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#collection [id:28, creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", tag:"Nico Nico Douga, Miku Hatsune", time:"2009-09-27T23.08.07.0Z" ]
#hiromi [id:28, creator:"Hiromi Ozaki", tag:"Nico Nico Douga, Miku Hatsune", time:"2009-09-27T23.08.07.0Z" ]
#alexa[creator:"Alexa Internet", title:"Alexa Traffic Ranking", url:"http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/JP", time:"2009-09-27T23.07.04.0Z"]
#japaninternetnews [creator:"japan.internet.news", tag:"Nico Nico Douga", title:"Nico Nico Douga's premium membership exceeds 500,000", url:"http://japan.internet.com/wmnews/20090924/4.html", time:"2009-09-24T00.00.00.0Z"]
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