Technology and spirituality in Etsuko Ichihara's ludic media art

ABSTRACT

Etsuko Ichihara is a media artist who utilises digital media and robotic technologies, exploring Japanese traditional beliefs of the spirit and the supernatural in her recent works. Ichihara repurposes paranormal and folk religious ideas concerning the figure of the shaman, an ogre-like demon that features in some Japanese festivals, and ritual offerings, but reinvents these traditional elements through technological mediation. I discuss Ichihara's distinctive engagement with a contemporised notion of spirituality in Japan. In particular, this essay argues that Ichihara's media art aims to connect Japanese people in order to create sociality and community. Ichihara appropriates Japanese animistic beliefs and tailors them for a mediated and technologised Japan, utilising what might be called a ‘techno-spiritual Japanese-ness’, that is, self-orientalising tropes that paradoxically generate the means for social relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Media art
• spirituality
• animism
• playfulness
• Japan

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my reviewers for their helpful comments, which have assisted me greatly in shaping this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use Japanese names in this essay in the Western manner: given name first, followed by family name. Long vowel sounds are indicated by macrons, unless the word is in common usage in Romanised form.

2 The original members of the Device Art group included scientists Hiroo Iwata (mechanical engineering), Masahiko Inami (augmented reality), Hiroaki Yano (virtual reality), Taro Maeda (bioinformatic engineering), and Hideyuki Ando (bioinformatic engineering); artists Ryota Kuwakubo (multimedia art), Sachiko Kodama (kinetic art), Novmichi (also spelled as Nobumich) Tosa (a gadget designer and performer), Kazuhiko Hachiya (new media art); and the media art curator Machiko Kusahara (Iwata 2008).

3 Hiroo Iwata received the Honorary Mention for the interactive art category in 1996 and the Excellence Award under the Digital Art (Interactive Art) Division in 2001 for the Prix Ars Electronica (Iwata 2012b). Iwata curated the 10-year and the 15-year anniversary exhibitions of Device Art at Ars Electronica in 2014 and in 2019, respectively.

4 The Itako as a sign was popularised by these two manga works in the 1990s: Hell Teacher Nube by Makura Sho and Shaman King by Takei Hiroyuki. The popular TV variety show, The Spring of Aura, which aired on Japanese television from 2005–2009, can also be added to the list of television shows trading on the popularised representation of Itako. It features Ehara Hiroyuki, a self-proclaimed spiritual healer and psychic, whose advice, supposedly that of spirits, was offered to celebrities on the show (Omichi 2017, 12).

5 I attended this event in November 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuji Sone

Dr Yuji Sone is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Literature, and Language at Macquarie University in Australia. Yuji is a performance researcher, and he initially trained with the experimental theatre company Banyu-Inryoku in Japan. His research has focused on the cross-disciplinary conditions of technologised performance. He is the author of Japanese Robot culture: Performance, Imagination, and Modernity (2017), which examines the Japanese affinity for the robot through contemporary performing robots.