Transpacific Experiments
Intermedia Art and Music in 1960s Japan
How intermedia art and everyday life in 1960s Japan shaped an unexpected transcultural avant-garde
Description
Intermedia art—an avant-garde multimedia practice that combines sound and moving images—took root in Japan alongside other places in the 1960s. In Transpacific Experiments, Miki Kaneda analyzes intermedia as a practice that gives form to errant possibilities, unfolding in spaces of the everyday, to offer nuanced insights into the global flow of ideas, influence, and discourses of appropriation. The stories of intermedia art throughout the study offer feminist and transnational perspectives on experimental music and art that disorient existing narratives about the experimental and political in unexpected ways.
Transpacific Experiments contends that social, cultural, and political arrangements local to Japan had a greater influence on the transnational experimental music scene than previously acknowledged. Kaneda’s perspective extends, exceeds, and at times unsettles frameworks for experimental practices, revealing the limitations of any single political or aesthetic lens.
Miki Kaneda is Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at New York University.
Reviews
“Using Japanese intermedia art as a case study, Kaneda proposes a new framework for understanding a transnational avant-garde which is not limited to hegemonic Euro-American avant-garde.”
- Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University
“From the ‘epicenter’ of the Japanese avant-garde to its deceptively mundane, everyday-life legacies, Transpacific Experiments offers a meticulously researched account of intermedia and musical practices in 1960s Japan. Effortlessly combining ethnography and history, Miki Kaneda’s study of the global resonances of postwar Japanese culture is at once strikingly incisive and movingly intimate.”
- Hiromu Nagahara, author of Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents
“Chock-full of sensitive historical and aesthetic interpretation, Miki Kaneda’s book is a milestone in the history of experimental music. It provincializes Euroamerican accounts and creates a new approach to ‘being with’ the arts. Its oscillation between mundane and otherworldly experiences in the avant-garde is immensely refreshing. This beautifully written book is a must-read for anyone interested in the experimental arts or transnationalism in media and culture.”
- Brigid Cohen, author of Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes
“Transpacific Experiments marks a new high point in . . .cresting experimental music studies that continues to deconstruct Euro-American centrisms and reveals how much social and cultural complexity surrounds Japanese avant garde intermedia. Kaneda’s direct and powerful writing immerses us in an articulation of Japanese intermedia that precedes and exceeds the Cagean continuum to register in everyday, vernacular and mass mediated contexts.”
- Amy Cimini, author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life