Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia: New Representations of Art, History and Culture [1st ed.] 9789811546419, 9789811546426

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Digital Culture and Humanities 2

Kaby Wing-Sze Kung   Editor

Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia New Representations of Art, History and Culture

Digital Culture and Humanities Challenges and Developments in a Globalized Asia Volume 2

Editor-in-Chief Kwok-kan Tam, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Associate Editors David Barton, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom Joanne Tompkins, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia Anthony Ying-him Fung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Lang Kao, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Sunny Sui-kwong Lam, The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong Anna Wing-bo Tso, The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong

This book series on digital culture and humanities examines how digitization changes current cultural practices as well as the modes of thought in humanities subjects, such as art, literature, drama, music and popular culture (which includes comics, films, pop songs, television, animation, games, and mobile apps). It also addresses the opportunities and challenges for scholarly research, industrial practices and education arising from the wide application of digital technologies in cultural production and consumption. The series publishes books that seek to explore how knowledge is (re/)produced and disseminated, as well as how research in humanities is expanded in the digital age. It encourages publication projects that align scholars, artists and industrial practitioners in collaborative research that has international implications. With this as an aim, the book series fills a gap in research that is needed between theory and practice, between Asian and the global, and between production and consumption. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of the book series enhances understanding of the rising Asian digital culture, particularly in entertainment production and consumption, cultural/artistic revisioning, and educational use. For instance, a study of digital animated Chinese paintings will elucidate the reinterpreted Chineseness in artistic representation.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15727

Kaby Wing-Sze Kung Editor

Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia New Representations of Art, History and Culture

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Editor Kaby Wing-Sze Kung The Open University of Hong Kong Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong

ISSN 2520-8640 ISSN 2520-8659 (electronic) Digital Culture and Humanities ISBN 978-981-15-4641-9 ISBN 978-981-15-4642-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Series Preface

“Traditional” humanities disciplines have undergone significant transformations in the twenty-first century, particularly the process of digitization. New perspectives and methods are essential to comprehending these changes. This book series explores how digital culture has revolutionized the humanities in terms of production, presentation, interpretation, and research. By addressing questions about knowledge, scholarship, and practices, this book series aims to revitalize the humanities disciplines and explore new possible modes of critical thinking. This book series also seeks to address the rapid changes of contemporary culture. The rise of digital media is constantly changing our perception of the world in terms of politics, economies, social lives, and culture. In the realm of culture, traditional cultural texts, forms, and scholarly works are transformed even as new cultural practices are created. The emergence of virtual/augmented reality and digital communities has generated new cultural forms and interactions, which in turn intervene and reshape the non-virtual reality. By examining digital technology, this book series explores the social aspects of the emergence of digital culture, especially how changes in the form of cultural production affect expressions in art and communication. It seeks to provide a wide array of new thoughts, particularly from Asian perspectives, on various facets of digital culture in the globalizing world. With the development of new media forms, our personal and social lives have come under the mediation of digital representation. The advent of digital technologies has greatly influenced how society functions, and how culture is (re-) mediated, (re-)produced, consumed, interpreted, and manipulated. This series features books that seek to explore how knowledge is (re-)produced and disseminated, as well as how research in humanities has been expanded in the digital age. With all of this in mind, this book series will make connections between theory and practice,

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between Asian and the global, and between production and consumption. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of this book series will enhance understanding of the rising Asian digital culture, particularly in entertainment production and consumption, cultural/artistic revisioning, and educational use. Shatin, Hong Kong April 2018

Kwok-kan Tam Series Editor

Acknowledgements

This volume would not have been possible without the guidance and the help of several individuals who in one way or another contributed and extended their valuable assistance in the preparation and completion of this volume. First and foremost, my heartfelt gratitude goes to the chief editor, Prof. Kwok-kan Tam, for offering me this precious opportunity to be the editor of this volume. Professor Tam also provided helpful and constructive comments on the structure of the book and the choice of chapters. I also wish to extend my sincere thanks to Dr. Cindy Chopoidalo for helping with the copyediting. My earnest appreciation also extends to the peer reviewers of the volume, the associate editors of the series, and the book chapter contributors for their valuable contributions. I am also indebted to my colleagues Anna Tso, Sunny Lam, Agnes Lam and Chase Ma. Without their help, the publication process would not have gone as smoothly. Kaby Wing-Sze Kung

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David Berry states that researchers in the digital humanities try to “take account of the plasticity of digital forms and the way in which they point towards a new way of working with representation and mediation, what might be called digital ‘folding’ of memory and archives, whereby one is able to approach in a radically new way” (2). As technology advances, the digital humanities provide a new perspective that allows for the reinvestigation and mediation of issues in the traditional humanities. This volume, Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia: New Representations of Art, History and Culture, is the second volume of the Book Series Digital Culture and Humanities: Challenges and Developments in a Globalized Asia. It intends to shed light on how new forms of representation change the perceptions and interpretations of the humanities as well as how digitization changes cultural practices. It describes how various modes of thought are applied to humanities subjects such as art and literature, and to aspects of popular culture such as film, pop music, music videos, television, animation, games, and Internet culture. This volume also addresses both the opportunities and challenges present in scholarly research, industrial practices, and education as a result of the wide application of digital technologies in cultural production and consumption. This volume is a sequel to Anna W. B. Tso’s Digital Humanities and New Ways of Teaching. Continuing the discussion from the first volume, this volume addresses new forms of digital humanities in the Asia-Pacific region with a specific focus on the notions of space and time. According to Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto, “Materials now are seen to have their own agency that transforms our understandings about their particular existence in time and space about the larger ground of reality that lies beyond them,” and “space and time take on new active agency in humanities scholarship as digital tools both offer new forms for their presentation and inform the researcher and audience on the autonomy of these dimensions” (43). Under this framework, this volume focuses on the redefinition of literature, history, and culture in terms of the spatialized relations that result from the trend of digitization. The book is divided into three main parts to investigate the impact of digital humanities on different fields of research, including art, the Internet, classroom ix

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learning, and games. Part I is titled “Art and Film in the Digital Age.” In Chap. 1, Yaxi Liu discusses how social media provides a new experience to museum visitors, using Tsinghua University Art Museum 清華大學藝術博物館 as an example. Liu argues the significance of the “phygital” (physical plus digital) and how it blends “physical exhibitions and displays with digital, online technology-driven experiences” (6). Liu also demonstrates how WeChat 微信 provides visitors with a personalized experience through functions such as group chats and blog mining. She argues that this new form of interaction between the museum and its visitors “reduces the need for and cost of a museum membership service, and enhances interactions and communications between the museum and visitors” (9). In Chap. 2, Dorothy Wai Sim Lau discusses how the rise of digital imaging technology in the late twentieth century has transformed the representation of the wuxia 武俠 body in martial arts cinema based on an analysis of Peter Chan’s 陳可辛 Wu Xia 武 俠 (2011). Lau argues that “Wu Xia reinvents the representation of martial arts on film and its pertinent spectatorship by showing the delicate interplay between corporeality, visibility and technology” (28). In Chap. 3, Jose Gutierrez III uses digital film-making to explore the notion of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) through the lens of Siegfried Kracauer’s realist film theory. Gutierrez filmed ten short films in Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, mainland China, and the United States to elucidate how digital visual images can project the notion of the lifeworld. In Chap. 4, David Kei-Man Yip re-examines the notion of surrealism in a 4D setting by considering how Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis strongly influenced the surrealism movement, as reflected in the works of the famous Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. Using 4D technology, Yip argues that “Surrealism in 4D offered users a new immersive experience in a surreal dream through digital animation and interactivity” (54). Apart from offering a new perspective on art and film, digital technology provides a new outlook for various forms of gender representation. In Part II of this volume, “Gender in the Digital Age,” three contributors examine the representation of women in the digital world. In Chap. 5, Ana Oliveira Garner discusses how selfies help women create new selves through social media. Based on Warfield’s argument about how selfie practices allow girls to create new images on social media, a practice in which selfies can act as “a tactic to resist the media’s power to dictate beauty patterns” (89), Garner argues that selfies can be a therapeutic means for women “to express, understand and redefine [themselves] within a visual culture that makes so much money off of making [all women] believe that [they] are never good enough” (89). In Chap. 6, Kaby Wing-Sze Kung discusses how blogging in China offers a new platform through which women can share feminist thoughts. Kung uses the Sina.com blog of Hong Ying 虹影, a famous mainland Chinese writer, as an example of how people can promote feminist ideologies through the concept of cyberfeminism. In Chap. 7, Chun-Lung Ma illustrates how YouTube music videos reinforce Asian female stereotypes. Ma shows that American pop singers such as Madonna, Katie Perry, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj have employed mute Asian female characters in their music videos. These women’s

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voiceless images reinforce the stereotype of Asian women as subaltern through the concepts of Orientalism and techno-Orientalism. The digital humanities provide not only an innovative way to appreciate art and film and re-examine gender issues in the virtual world, but a platform for engagement in a digital setting. The contributors to the Part III, “Media Engagement in the Digital Age,” cover topics such as how digital technology allows for the discovery of a new form of unconscious identity as well as how interactive learning and games, particularly role-playing games, provide people with ways to rethink history and express their political stances. In Chap. 8, Carloalberto Treccani demonstrates a new type of unconscious, the “electromagnetic unconscious,” which “better defines the properties and characteristics of contemporary devices and reveal the new nature of the world that would otherwise remain unknown and invisible” (132). Through the concept of the electromagnetic unconscious, Treccani uses examples such as the Octopus card, a form of e-money used in Hong Kong, and Facebook to illustrate how digital technology has “profoundly altered human perception and subjectivity that the contemporary unconscious lies” (134). In Chap. 9, Natalia Churchill and Caroline Barratt-Pugh suggest that digital literature will be a new trend in classroom teaching. Churchill and BarrattPugh argue that digital storytelling will allow teachers to develop and promote literary learning because it “can provide a strategy for teachers to effectively move beyond print-based texts and engage students in working with digital multimodal texts” (143). In Chap. 10, Stephen Poon uses empirical studies to show how video games influence society, using students in Malaysia as a test case. Poon uses popular games such as Angry Birds and Temple Run as examples and argues that a character-design program can be developed to enhance Malaysian citizens’, particularly children’s, appreciation of game art. Finally, in Chap. 11, Henry Sze Hang Choi discusses the importance of video games in the digital age, using the popular Taiwanese role-playing game Dojin Game San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei Zhuan 三國志姜維傳 to illustrate how video games provide a new platform in which players can reconstruct and reinterpret history through role-playing. This game also allows participants to rethink current issues in the greater China region, as it includes elements from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. As the discipline of digital humanities is still developing—particularly in Asia— the eleven chapters of this volume shed new light on how people can present art, literature, history, and culture in new ways in the digital world. This volume discusses this through different case studies in the area of the arts as well as explorations of the functions of social media, classroom learning, and role-playing games. October 2019

Kaby Wing-Sze Kung Volume Editor

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References Berry, D. (2011). The computational turn: Thinking about the digital humanities. Culture Machine 12. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/49813/ Gardiner, E., & Musto, R.G. (2015). The digital humanities: A primer for students and scholars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contents

Part I 1

2

3

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Art and Film in the Digital Age

Museum Narration: A Memory-Driven Storyscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yaxi Liu

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Gazing of the Wuxia Body: Digital Visual Effects, Looking Relations, and Spectatorship in Peter Chan’s Wu Xia (2011) . . . . . Dorothy Wai Sim Lau

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Cinematic Contemplation Online: The Art and Philosophy of Life-world Series (2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jose Gutierrez III

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Cinematic Surrealism of the Interactive Virtual Space . . . . . . . . . . David Kei-Man Yip

Part II

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Gender in the Digital Age

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Selfies: Putting the “Me” into Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ana Oliveira Garner

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Discussion of Web Literature: Feminist and Post-Feminist Ideas on Hong Ying’s Blog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kaby Wing-Sze Kung

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Visual Manipulation of East Asian Women in American Pop Female Performances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Chun-Lung Ma

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Part III

Media Engagement in the Digital Age

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Towards a New Unconscious: From the Optical to the Electromagnetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Carloalberto Treccani

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The Digital Entanglement of Humanities, Literacy, and Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Natalia Churchill and Caroline Barratt-Pugh

10 A Contagious Thrill: Identifying Experiential Factors for 2D Graphic Art Appeal Through Character Design for Video Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Stephen Poon 11 Reconceptualization of Historical Reality: The Dōjin Game San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei Zhuan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Henry Sze Hang Choi Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

Part I

Art and Film in the Digital Age

Chapter 1

Museum Narration: A Memory-Driven Storyscape Yaxi Liu

Introduction Humans are natural storytellers. Since ancient times, humans have been using stories to represent an event or series of events as a way to learn (Abbott 2002). The narrative environment is the synthesis of singular or multiple stories with spatial experience, made perceptible to an audience through a narrative structure (Duncan and McCauley 2009). Museums are integrated media that deliver stories, and their narratives are not limited to their exhibitions or collections, but include buildings, catalogs, audio tours, educational materials, websites, and social media sites. The new media of the digital age increase the power of museum narration, since the memories they communicate have more channels from which to be disseminated. All media constitute story worlds to gradually inspire visitors to imagine, think, and remember. The digital domain of today has fully penetrated into the physical realm, so that the blurred boundary expands into the new concept of “phygital”, which combines the physical with the digital. Technologies and the Internet are no longer only about media and content, but also encompass real-world assets, such as networked objects, in order to exchange information and interact with each other and with people. In 2016, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of China, the National Development and Reform Commission of China, and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China issued a Three-year action plan for “Internet + Chinese civilization” to enhance communication of cultural heritage and museums. The following year, 68 museums in Shanghai set up 109 accounts on social media sites, released 8672 news items, and curated 58 online exhibitions. These phygital actions extended the institutes’ values, beliefs, and memories to a broader public and enriched the visiting experiences for the museums themselves. Y. Liu (B) National Museum of China, Beijing, China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_1

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In this context, this chapter focuses on phygital-aided museum narration and discusses building memory-driven storyscapes with phygital tools. The research approach extracts knowledge from the field of narrative environments by developing scenography designs and conducting in-the-wild studies at the Tsinghua University Art Museum (TAM) 清華大學藝術博物館. This chapter is guided by an overarching research question of how phygital, the integration of digital technology with physical reality, facilitates communication about museum artifacts and exhibitions. The findings of this study demonstrates several of the qualities of phygital prototypes. The phygital is the blending of the physical exhibition display and the digital, online technology-driven experience. It improves the communication of tacit meanings and the value of artifacts. It enhances visitors’ engagement by mixing visual perceptions with auditory, tactile and even olfactory experiences. It fosters social interaction among visitors who can share their experiences, insights, and critiques online and offline. Additionally, social media platform-based co-creation is a potential approach involving visitors’ opinion in curatorial practices and museum narrations. In order to evaluate phygital prototypes more deeply and for further studies, this chapter summarizes a set of principles, such as the creation rather than communication of memories in museums, the museum as the container of a narrative for the world, and the choreography of museum experiences.

The Museum as an Institute of Collective Memory Families, communities, and nations attach themselves to places, which in turn provide these groups with stability and history, seemingly carrying collective memories for them. Aleida Assmann traces and defines the memory-like phenomenon of spontaneous imagination in historical environments, referring to the ancient Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero’s testimony to the phenomenon in his account of a visit to the Academy in Athens: Where Plato had been active: when we see the places where we are told that the notables of the past spent their time, it is far more moving than when we hear about their achievements or read their writings. Such is the evocative power that places possess.

Though not all museums, libraries, or archives are historical monuments as the Academy in Athens was, they have long been considered closely related to collective memories. Their artifacts, images, stories, and traditions are first-hand material that represents the past. Museums are places of integration, endurance, and reinforcement of collective memories. Their collections can even act as spirits that trigger commemorative happenings and continuously evoke individual remembrances. As vehicles for the transmission of the past and the present, exhibitions, events and derivative products of museums act as the physical celebrations of stories, authors, and audiences, which together create a common and shared experience. Such common experience is also the foundation of common thought and collective memories.

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Memory-Driven Storyscapes in Museums Architectural Narratives For anthropologist Jakob Johann Bachofen, there are two ways to attain knowledge. One is the longer, slower, more arduous road of rational acquisition, and the other is the shorter path of imagination, traversed with the force and swiftness of electricity. Aroused by direct contact with ancient remains, the imagination grasps the truth at one stroke, without intermediary links. The knowledge acquired in this second manner is infinitely more alive and colorful than the products of mere understanding. Architect Jerome Bruner states that humans employ two modes of thought: logicoscientific and narrative. Stories inspire wonder and awe, and allow the viewer to imagine another time and place, to find the universal in the particular, and to feel empathy for others. They preserve individual and collective memories, and speak to both the adult and the child. Leslie Bedford has argued that stories aided humans in defining their values and beliefs, and that museums allow viewers to project their own thoughts, feelings and memories into the story and make connections between the artifacts and their own memories. From personal to social contexts, the built environment appears to be central to our memory. Museum buildings are always directly connected to the community and urban memory. Architectural narratives of museums do not just indicate institutional identities and deliver plot relations to their collections, but also aid the immersive experience and inspire memory and imagination in individuals. With the help of the spatial narratives in a museum, individuals can structure knowledge, historical events, and lived experiences in their minds. For an individual visitor, the architectural narration of the museum is first delivered in a dialogue with its surroundings. The “relationship” between built spaces and visitors affects the architectural narratives in a more direct and specific way. The identity and memory of the museum building form a storied layout carried in its spatial scale, syntax, and volume, and the constituted interior environment is more relevant to human perception. The messages and stories inscribed in walls, floors, staircases, lighting, and other features of the museum are more tangible and engaging for visitors.

Exhibition Narratives Exhibitions constitute various stories. Since the 1990s, museums have increasingly experimented with organizing exhibitions around a linear story. Through the arrangement of objects, design and labeling, exhibition venues can be transformed into narrative environments. However, the ontology of curation suggests a structure that is represented as a set of narrative components, each of which specifies the location of that component within the narrative in terms of its underlying story and plot characteristics (Wolff et al. 2013). A narrative contains more components, which

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can be a story of an individual object, an event, or a reference material. A narrative component can also contain sub-components, thereby creating a narrative hierarchy. Within the field of visitor research, an increasing number of studies have explored how visitors’ pre-existing narratives about museums and their subject matter influence their experiences in exhibitions. It has been hypothesized that museum visitors seek out objects and displays that reinforce their existing narratives. Therefore, understanding how visitors interpret their surroundings is also a facet of creating exhibition storylines. The visitor’s journey through the exhibition has been described in terms of “Channeling” (Roppola 2012): spatial channels guide the physical journey, narrative channels guide the conceptual journey, and semiotic channels guide visitors in their sense-making of different interpretive media. Seating slows visitors down, whereas long corridors tend to speed them up. Doorways, or even a narrowing caused by the positioning of display cases, tend to separate spaces both spatially and conceptually. All of this in turn influences visitor behavior. In all, the museum as an integrated medium delivers stories, and its narrations are not limited to the architecture or exhibition, but include collections, catalogs, audio tours, educational materials, web sites and social media. All of these change with the times, evolve with memories, and constitute story worlds that gradually inspire visitors to imagine, think, and remember.

“Phygital” Aided Museum Narration It is undeniable that the digital domain has fully penetrated into the physical realm. The digital action can trigger a physical reaction, or vice versa, a physical action can result in a digital reaction. This blurred boundary is expanding into a new field, “Phygital”, the combination of the physical and the digital. Technology varies in terms of its modality, immersion, and integration into the physical manifestation of space, including websites, smart phone applications, or virtual and augmented reality worlds. In addition, recent developments such as the Internet of Things (Vongsingthong and Smanchat 2014) demonstrate that digital technology is becoming more deeply integrated within the fabric of our physical reality. As such, it has been claimed that computers and the Internet will no longer only be about media and content, but also become invisible (Norman 1998) and in tandem with real-world physical assets as networked objects able to exchange information and interact with each other as well as with people. In order to create a comprehensive and narrative journey for visitors who have already become accustomed to supplementing normal life experiences with digital content, the “phygital” aids museum narration by blending physical exhibitions and displays with digital, online technology-driven experiences. The tacit meanings and values of artifacts, such as the ideas and experiences that they represent, have implicit and abstract characters, creating challenges when these artifacts are presented to the public. Yet following the rapid advancements offered by emerging technologies, the

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tacit meanings and values of artifacts are increasingly delivered via more dynamic and interactive formats (King et al. 2016). Immersive technology, such as virtual and augmented reality, facilitates the communication of heritage information, offering meaningful relationships between artifacts, visitors, and contexts (Reffat and Nofal 2013). Augmented Reality (AR) technology allows the superimposition of information or virtual objects as if they exist in the real world (Azuma et al. 2001). Moreover, AR is used for educational purposes in museums not only to enhance engagement and motivation, but also to create an informal and novel learning environment by coupling digital content and physical reality, and by incorporating game strategies to enhance the communication and interpretation of historical contents in engaging ways(Angelopoulou et al. 2012; Chang et al. 2014; Yilmaz 2016). The emerging field of “tangible interaction” holds promise for the enhancement of communication and narration about artifacts. Tangible Interaction spans a variety of perspectives, such as Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design, but specializes in interfaces or systems that are in some way physically embodied. Broadly, Tangible Interaction encompasses user interfaces and interactive approaches that emphasize the tangibility and materiality of the interface and the physical embodiment of data in real spaces and contexts (Hornecker 2004). Graphical narratives are encouraged by the rise of visual social media and embedded into the museum storyscape. Sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have supported visual marketing as a global trend in recent years. Showing instead of telling, therefore, becomes the essential business of their products. Our desire for beautiful photography and sensational design is fueled by these visualcontent sites. In addition, the shifting habits of technology users influence trends toward the visual. As more and more people are engaging with social media via smart-phones, they discover that taking a picture “on the move” using a phone is much more intriguing than typing out a status update. Also in museums, graphical narratives have become a default mode of comprehending the stories told in the sites, especially the design of chronological tables and the graphical abstract of exhibition narratives. “Dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci,” The 4th Art & Science International Exhibition at TAM used both such graphical narratives to shape a conceptual spatial journey. A chronological table of Leonardo da Vinci initiated the journey for visitors with five plots: “Natural Science”, “Mathematics”, “Architecture”, “Prophecy and Fable”, and “Military”, each of which was designed with an abstracted and augmented graph extracted from Da Vinci’s manuscripts in the space. Accompanied by vivid color schemes and spatial mapping, the exhibition provided visitors with immersive and intuitive narrative journeys. The exhibition pictures posted on social media sites drew more visitors to the exhibition, and these images taken and shared by visitors were more influential and powerful than TAM’s own follow up media and public relations strategies. These cases inspired TAM staff to ask about the possibility of incorporating visitors’ pictures or comments into the exhibition as supplementary narratives. Observations and interviews revealed certain common requests from visitors:

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– – – –

Exhibits that audiences could share with others should be highlighted; Selfie backgrounds could produce exceptional visual effects; Exhibitions’ thematic walls could certify the presence of audiences; Interactive agents could help visitors experience the site in unexpected and memorable ways.

What if we considered these scenes in advance during our design strategy? The curator of the exhibit Design Life——Art Retrospective of Lei Kueiyuan 雷圭元, Founder of Modern Design Education in China amplified one of Lei’s design sketches and inscribed it into the space. The scene had drawn a large number of visitors, who took selfies and posted them on social media sites in order to share the experience with their social circles. Therefore, the designated scenes to incorporate visitors’ pictures into the exhibition narratives could help provide a direction from which to develop visual languages. The storyscape of a museum could be more inclusive with the virtual world represented by social media, more engaging and approachable for visitors, more effective in evoking memories, and more effective at co-creating a collective memory with the public.

The Co-creation of Museum Narration In addition to enabling the broader public to appreciate artifacts and heritage in more experiential ways, the phygital fosters social interaction among visitors who can share their experiences, insights, and critiques online and offline. The new media bring in new opportunities for the pluralization of memory channels; they strengthen counter-memories and allow voices for the subordinate and the suppressed. With the rapid development of online social media sites such as WeChat 微信 and Weibo 微博, individuals are empowered with information, knowledge, and broader social circles. As individuals’ consciousness of equality and liberty gradually develop, these individuals demand the right to speak in both the digital and physical worlds. Supervision of and by public opinion creates graver challenges for museum authorities, and the monologue of museum narration is questioned. Commercial entities have used social media sites to support customer co-creation for several years, but social media-based audience co-creation is rarely found in the majority of curricula in Museum Studies; the authority mindset may also be an obstacle in implementing co-creation, either in reality or in cyberspace. In the exhibition From Monet to Soulages: Paths of Modern Western Painting (1800–1980), TAM provides narration for 51 paintings from collections of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Saint-Etienne Métropole. The broad genres and time frames can create difficulties for audiences who associate the paintings with their eras and their relationships to the present day, especially Pierre Soulages’s Outrenoir (Beyond Black). The endless black depth of the paintings are created by playing with the light reflecting off the texture of the paint. An on-site interpreter narrates these features of Outrenoir to visitors. TAM’s plan was to combine an audio guide, wall text,

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Fig. 1.1 Audiences take Pierre Soulages’s Outrenoir as selfie backgrounds. Photograph by Chenya Wang

and interpretation more synergetically in order to deliver a vivid storytelling experience. Visitors, however, were unexpectedly active in their interpretations of the artwork as they used Outrenoiras background for selfies and group photos, which they then shared, with their own commentaries, on social media sites. Coincidentally, Soulages’s official portraits also use Outrenoiras the background (Fig. 1.1). Compared to the infectious expression of the artist’s work, and visitors’ art narrating abilities, conventional exhibition narration can seem tedious; thus, TAM becomes inspired to use social media tools to involve visitors. In addition to a WeChat subscription for the general public, TAM has built contacts with member visitors through WeChat, using the “Group Chat” and “Blog Mining” to deliver a “co-creation” that offers visitors a personalized experience. TAM staff has gained useful insights from online social research, such as analyzing feedback from exhibitions, lecture series, and workshops. The phenomenon of “Social Co-creation” reduces the need for and cost of a museum membership service, and enhances interactions and communications between the museum and visitors (Fig. 1.2). Also, with the use of social co-creation, the role of the museum could gradually shift from author to facilitator, who invites and instructs audiences to create stories for museums online and offline; these voices could also become essential components of the museum storyscape. The evolution of museum audio guides has been greatly influenced by technological development, from the hand-held model of the 1960s to the more recent GPS tour. However, curators and domain experts have been narrating audio tours for a long time, and the specific content they provide is the same as the exhibition narration on the audio guide. This raises questions of whether such repetition, especially at an extra cost, is necessary, and whether visitors could potentially create audio tours for other visitors. TAM implemented an experiment inviting 24 students (potential visitors) to develop 9 storylines for the permanent exhibitions’ audio tours, and asked another 246 students to provide feedback for each of these. Most of the students were willing to contribute their stories, specialization, knowledge and studies for the project. The broader selections of audio narration not only engage with audiences more extensively and expansively, but also inspire more and different groups to contribute their voices to the audio narration. Therefore, such an audio tour program could be a

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Fig. 1.2 The results of “Social Co-creation” of TAM. Illustration by Yaxi Liu

cycle in which audiences would share their stories and thus become authors, and the narratives of the exhibition would constantly change. TAM’s lecture series and handicraft workshop are other methods to enhance the relevance of museum exhibitions. Through face-to-face dialogue with curators, artists, and humanities scholars, audiences would receive not only a greater context of the exhibition, but also a different perspective on the narrative content. Hands-on experiences also allow visitors to decode museum collections, especially the craftship of historical porcelain, more closely and intimately. At the ceramic workshops hosted by an invited expert, participants were fully engaged in decoding, appreciating, and criticizing the collection, discussing open resources, and hands-on crafting. However, both the feedback report and social research shows that the monopoly of experts are constantly being challenged. Like the experiment of an audio tour program, some participators are even more specialized in subject matter; they come to the museum to share or reinforce their pre-existing narratives.

The Multi-media Fusion in the Memory-Driven Storyscape The memory institution concept is itself underpinned by assumptions about the materiality of memory and its association with physical construction (Stainforth 2016).

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Yet the term’s origin in information science at once supports and destabilizes these associations; while the places it designates do have a concrete existence, it is itself constituted in the relations between sites, which can be mapped onto the networked structure of the Internet. The construction of the Internet lends itself to the integration of digitized material from across cultural heritage collections, and is significant insofar as it facilitates a collective view of past events that is mediated digitally. Van Dijck makes the stakes for memory clear: The collective memory is generally grounded in the presumption that the individual and the collective are separate entities. They are associated through technological mechanisms, such as media, and through social institutions, such as archives. The formation of memory is increasingly structured by digital networks, hence memory’s constituting agency is both technological and human.

The memory institution is symptomatic of the parallel development and coexistence of analogue and digital technologies. It allows for a degree of conceptual flexibility and is not immediately incongruous with either of the media-memory models outlined by van Dijck. In museum practice, though, the distributive logic of the digital network is different from that of the physical repository. However, assuming that museums are institutes of collective memory, and individual artworks are part of our collective biography, it is far-fetched to imagine a museum concentrating solely on the artistic use of digital media. Today, all media, from the conventional to the most cutting-edge, are equally available and have equal rights. They are blended due to the world we live in, where the material and the mental, the experiences, memories, and imaginations fuse with one another. To affect us emotionally, museum storyscapes must speak to us through our intuitive experience. Curators and designers would illustrate the synthesis of museum space, exhibits, material and multi-media within a storytelling structure, and question how the synthesis can create a narrative environment and establish emotional contact between visitors and the museum storyscapes. For most art exhibitions at TAM, digital media are used as narrative extensions that trigger more association and inspiration for audiences (Fig. 1.3). These media cannot take the place of the authentic artwork, but they can facilitate more vivid and inclusive storyscapes for broader audience groups.

Fig. 1.3 From left to right: spatial mappings of exhibitions, “Dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci”, “From Dithyrambe to Arcadia”. Photography by Chenya Wang

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The Qualities of Phygital-Aided Museum Narration Creating Memories in the Museum In addition to representing and experiencing the past, museums are places where new memories are created. They aim at and initiate various forms of encounters. Museum narratives draw us into the experience, letting us learn from the past, and providing stimuli for present issues and future developments. Thus, museums are like quarries from which each of us can dig out the concepts that serve our particular orientations and ourselves (Ammann 2004). The explanatory needs of art connect to each individual’s obligation to dig ideas out of the quarry of art. Going far beyond the narrow cultural context and social stratum, the museum as analogous to a quarry opens up a whole range of fields. In order to bring this about, particular and varied forms of transmission are needed. “The age-old art of the storyteller is called for” (Ammann 2004), as is that of the motivator, the facilitator, who lets all kinds of interests and concerns be heard in encounters with works in the museum. Hence, museums can be used in many and various ways. The artworks shown in the museum demonstrate that museums are indeed places in which our collective memories are stored, and that our means of approaching them are considerably more varied and wider in perspective than have generally been thought.

The Holdings of a Whole Story World To establish an emotional contact between the audience and the museum, an understanding of the audience’s subjective perception of space and its associative qualities is the basis for museum exploration into the narrative potential that space embodies (Duncan and McCauley 2009). Thus, targeted audience studies have become the key to organizing multidisciplinary approaches to museum narration. For museums, target-audience-oriented storytelling is a converse to the traditional model that focuses on collection studies. Museum resources would be reconstructed according to feedback from specific audience groups. Staff time, expertise, museum spaces, multi-media, and information would maximize the possibility of effectively serving those who would mostly use and benefit from those services. Therefore, planning for specific groups is more effective than planning for one large undifferentiated audience group. Jeanne Vergeront states that museum audiences can be regarded as customers, learners, citizens, and many other things. Engaging the audience in museums’ programmatic offerings means considering specific attributes and qualities that are salient to the visitors’ involvement with exhibits, programs, and events. The following three attributes are relevant and interact with each other, and are also worthy of considering separately.

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– Age-related development drives other important considerations, especially for children and elderly people. For example, children of different ages explore, play with, and learn from objects, activities, and spaces; while elderly people interact with space and peers in different ways and have different expectations for museum narrations. – Hobbies and interests may be personal, such as sports, engineering, music, nature, or art. These interests may also be related to careers and occupations. According to the results of TAM’s “Social Co-Creation” project, the interests of students are mostly dependent on their studies. – Available visiting time depends on various options and time commitments, such as school and jobs for most people between the ages of 5 and 65 years. For example, summer vacation is often the peak time for museums, and parent-child activities are always the most demanded programs.

Choreographed Museum Experiences To execute a set of authentic and consistent experiences in the museum, the narration should be finely choreographed in order to hold audiences’ attention throughout the journey, create associations, and stimulate imaginations. Studies by psychologists working in museum settings have demonstrated that visitor behavior and movement are neither completely predictable nor totally chaotic, but exhibit distinctive patterns (Bitgood 2013). To some extent at least, these patterns in visitor behavior can be influenced through design choices. Design can be used to make certain routes through an exhibition space appear inherently more inviting or logical than others. Enticing views of what lies beyond can help propel visitors along. On the other hand, visitors can be stopped by dark, narrow corridors or stairways that do not obviously lead anywhere. To conclude this section, the following points are useful suggestions for designer-choreographers’ toolkits: – Consider exhibition environments in terms of space syntax properties, such as a sufficient number of choice points, or integrated routes to aid navigation within narration. – Pay attention to the attractive power of sight lines and juxtaposition of exhibits so that spaces appear coherent and organized, even if visitor flow need not be regimented. – As design can be a tool for communication, it can also be a tool for miscommunication. Certain visual motifs might have unintended connotations in particular social, cultural or age segments. Mitigating this possibility may require formative evaluation. There is no perfect dance, nor a perfect prescription for choreographing the visitor experience, as the visitor-exhibit interplay is very complex; however, this very complexity rewards detailed research and discussion.

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Conclusion The memory-driven storyscapes of museums have been inscribed in this digital era. Phygital aid is not just a tool for interpreting museum narration, but a channel for communication, for co-working with visitors, and for evolving with collective memories. This chapter discusses the four main contributions of the phygital to the museum experience: phygital mediated communication and narration of museum exhibitions, social media-aided co-creation for curatorial practices, the proposal of multi-media fusion for memory-driven storyscapes, and a summary of the qualities of memorydriven storyscapes in museums. Additionally, this chapter recognizes that the evaluation of phygital prototypes or tools is a potential limitation. Therefore, future studies should evaluate in-depth and question phygital prototypes in the storyscapes of museums.

References Abbott, H. (2002). The Cambridge introduction to narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ammann, J. C. (2004). Museums and art galleries as collective memory. Retrieved Dec 5, 2016, from http://engage.org/downloads/152E20A06_ee-1.4-Jean-Christophe.pdf. Angelopoulou, A., Economou, D., Bouki, V., Psarrou, A., Jin, L., Pritchard, C., & Kolyda, F. (2012). Mobile augmented reality for cultural heritage. In Venkatasubramanian, N., Getov, V., & Steglich, S. (Eds.), Mobile wireless middleware, operating systems, and applications (MOBILWARE 2011), Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (Vol. 93, pp. 15–22). Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-642-30607-5_2. Azuma, R., Baillot, Y., Behringer, R., Feiner, S., Julier, S., & MacIntyre, B. (2001). Recent advances in augmented reality. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 21(6), 34–47. https://doi.org/ 10.1109/38.963459. Bitgood, S. (2013). Attention and value: Keys to understanding museum visitors. New York: Routledge. Chang, K., Chang, C., Hou, H., Sung, Y., Chao, H., & Lee, C. (2014). Development and behavioral pattern analysis of a mobile guide system with augmented reality for painting appreciation instruction in an art museum. Computers & Education, 71, 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. compedu.2013.09.022. Duncan, T., & McCauley, N. (2009). Narrative space architecture and digital media. In The Conference of Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London, 6–8 July, 2009. Hornecker, E. (2004). A design framework for designing tangible interaction for collaborative use. Retrieved January 20, 2018 from http://www.ehornecker.de/Papers/DanishHCI.pdf. King, L., Stark, J. F., & Cooke, P. (2016). Experiencing the digital world: The cultural value of digital engagement with heritage. Heritage & Society Journal, 9(1), 76–101. https://doi.org/10. 1080/2159032X.2016.1246156. Norman, D. A. (1998). The invisible computer: Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution. Cambridge: MIT Press. Roppola, T. (2012). Designing for the museum visitor experience. New York: Routledge. Stainforth, E. (2016). From museum to memory institution: The politics of European culture online. Museum & Society, 14(2), 323–337.

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Tsinghua University Art Museum. Retrieved Sep 5, 2016, from http://www.artmuseum.tsinghua. edu.cn/en/. Vongsingthong, S., & Smanchat, S. (2014). Internet of things: A review of applications and technologies. Suranaree Journal of Science and Technology, 21(4), 359–374. https://doi.org/10.14456/sjst. 2014.38. Wolff, A., Mulholland, P., & Collins, T. (2013). Modeling the meaning of museum stories. The Annual Conference of Museums and the Web, Portland, USA. Yilmaz, R. M. (2016). Educational magic toys developed with augmented reality technology for early childhood education. Computers in Human Behavior, 54, 240–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.chb.2015.07.040.

Chapter 2

Gazing of the Wuxia Body: Digital Visual Effects, Looking Relations, and Spectatorship in Peter Chan’s Wu Xia (2011) Dorothy Wai Sim Lau

Introduction: The (in)Visible Wuxia Body The prevalent use of digital visual technology in filmmaking in the late twentieth century expands the frontiers of how we see and know the heroic body in martial arts cinema. Digital effects such as two- and three-dimensional computer graphics, digital morphing, and animated images not only aggrandize the power of the acrobatics, but also allow the depiction of bodily movements that are not physically feasible. Referring to the martial arts films of the 1970s, the narratives concentrate on the physical skills and the choreographed spectacle that are centered on the masculine body (Wang and Rawnsley 2010, p. 95).1 The physical body of the performers takes a crucial part in representing choreography in that cinematic martial arts are an amalgam of real-time fighting, stylistic camera work, and choreographic design. The 1990s have witnessed a shift in the prominence of the martial arts representation in that the actors’ corporeal bodies are not the sole focus as digitized imagery moves to the forefront. In particular, the year 1997 marks the beginning of the prosperous era of digital media in local filmmaking, spawning the genre of CGI-centred film (H2O 2007). Film companies hire digital graphics specialists and computer effects experts who work to develop their craftsmanship to create attractive new visuals in films. Films such as Stormriders (1998), Purple Storm (1999), The Duel (2000), Shaolin Soccer (2001), The Twins Effects I and II (2003 and 2004), and Kung Fu 1 According to Wang and Rawnsley (2010), the martial arts genre can be divided into two sub-genres: films of swordplay (wuxia pian 武俠片) and kung-fu movies (gongfu pian 功夫片), the former featuring characters in ancient Chinese dress and the latter in modern times (p. 95). Both categories share a general emphasis on the physical vigor of the performers’ bodies and their choreographic dexterity.

D. W. S. Lau (B) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_2

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Hustle (2004) add digital effects to the actors’ bodies to create striking images and legitimize those images as part of wuxia 武俠 visuals. The use of CGI deconstructs the audience’s imaginary of the wuxia body that alters the spectatorial experience which is mediated technologically. In this sense, digital effects serve as supplements to, or even replacements for, the importance of physical vigor and martial arts techniques, propelling the wuxia body into a new light. The body-as-spectacle hypothesis has been a long-standing concern in the Western intellectual tradition since the 1950s and this concern is revitalized in scholarship on 1990s martial arts/action cinema, particularly in terms of visuality, visibility, and (dis)appearance. Recent literature has identified an emergent interest in studying digital imagery as means of providing an alternative choreographed and bodily appeal of wuxia films for cinephiles and fans. In her discussion of the “frenzy of the visible,” Ndalianis (2000) explains that the 1990s action cinema operates based on the notion of “making the impossible … appear possible, and of transforming the invisible into the visible”. She focuses on the hyperkinetic motion of the body in The Matrix (1999), so that the movement of “imperceptible speed” can be made visible to the audience with the aid of special effects. Along a similar logical thread, Siu-leung Li 李小良 (2001) analyzes the phenomenon of how physique is changed into spectacle. He discusses the “body-in-motion” with the conception of the ‘disappearance of “kung fu 功夫”, which is characterized by historical and cultural essence, alongside the emergence of relatively more universal action choreography. This refers to a transition of the martial arts aesthetics from stress on the representation of “real kung fu” to the so-called “wire fu” that displaces the authentic heroic body as spectacle into spectacle-as-special-effect (pp. 45–47). Such “disappearance” continues and accelerates with the use of CGI in the appropriations of digital aesthetics. Lee (2007) argues that “what is beginning to disappear is the authenticity of the action hero(ine) as real-life marital arts experts, and the cultural/nationalistic messages this authentic person embodies” (p. 12). She further elaborates that the authenticity the hero embodies is evaded by “a tacit agreement between filmmakers and viewers on the suspension of disbelief,” displaying the film’s capacity for “magically making a reality out of an illusion” (Lee 2007, p. 12). In other words, the viewers’ experience is authenticated by the special effect—as spectacle—produced by the simulationist image-making apparatus that transforms the illusion of the hero into “our vision of cinematic reality” (ibid.). Whereas the computer-driven spectacle in wuxia films assumes a monolithic quality to the cinema marked by its capacity of vision, resonant to and extending from the 1970 s’ classical film theory, they problematize martial arts visuals by making them increasingly capricious, erroneous, and illusory. Peter Chan’s 陳可辛 (2011) Chinese martial arts epic Wu Xia 武俠 is an example the ability to make the invisible visible on screen. Wu Xia’s wide circulation affirmed its marketability to both local and global distributors and audiences. According to the Hollywood Reporter (Landreth 2010), the movie enjoyed successful pre-sales in Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Outside the Greater China region, it also earned interest from buyers in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. The movie’s success is partly due to the longstanding appeal of the martial arts genre, the fame of director Peter Chan, and

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the star power of its major cast including Donnie Yen 甄子丹 and Takeshi Kaneshiro 金城武. Well known for its ground-breaking use of digital effects in local martial arts features, Wu Xia exploits the ocularcentric capacity of its images. By simulating bodily tissues and internal organs, it allows viewers to “look through” the body, pointing to a new sort of wuxia aesthetics and spectatorial experience. The narrative builds chiefly around the notion of the scientific gaze, an axis of many detective stories. The movie’s perspective is in accordance with pathological anatomy, borrowing the visual rhetoric of the television crime series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as part of its use of imagery. The digital effects emulate the representation of blood cells, blood nerves, bodily fluids, and internal body parts and the degree of damage a well-aimed blow casts onto the heart as part of the film’s diegetic visuals (Fig. 2.1). Such pictures of anatomy allow us to imag(in)e the body as an organic, material entity, organizing our ways of seeing the body in terms of a system that is basically in motion and of a multiplicity of minuscule units that play off one another in a network. As a consequence, the film’s use of digital visuals opens up a new horizon of cinematic wuxia representation that suggests a penetrative gaze and enables one to see beyond what the human eye perceives. It explores and advances as, in the words of Michel Foucault (1973), “the tangible space of the body… and the very mystery of origins lie hidden” (122). Where traditional wuxia films generally emphasize the overt choreographic performance, Wu Xia “modernizes” the genre by exposing the interiority of the body and flaunting an abundance of digitally-driven spectacles. This chapter attempts to delineate an extra dimension of martial arts cinematic representation in the digital era as suggested by Wu Xia by using Michel Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze as a discursive lens from which to examine the wuxia body. The medical gaze refers to a new way of seeing that emerged in the nineteenth century following the revolutionary health reforms that inspired the contemporary practice of the clinic. It relies on the observation of physical phenomena to develop

Fig. 2.1 CGI bodily organs as cinematic visual images in Wu Xia [Source of image: Wu Xia DVD (Distributor: We Distributions, Lark Films Distribution)]

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general principles of how the human body works. Under the medical gaze, the human body, previously unattainable and unchallenged, is now open to discussion, examination, and even suspicion. The invisible forces of physiology and pathology become perceptible and fecund. The gaze draws on the repertoire of medical experience, on which physicians can build the foundation of their medical knowledge and judgment. Considering Wu Xia is a martial arts movie with a focus on the idea of gaze, this chapter relates the concepts of the body in the framework of the digital in terms of novel ways of seeing. An array of questions arise here: In what ways is CGI innovatively employed in the fighting and investigating scenes that demand physical and observational vigor? What kind of “looks” are evoked by the heroic physique that is partly computerized? How does the digitized bodily construction reshape the spectatorial experience and knowledge of cinematic wuxia? By using and extending the medical gaze as its conceptual framework of analysis, this chapter explores a new bodily schema to understand the wuxia body and the structure of looks in martial arts cinema. The chapter argues that by making the body transparent and available to the scrutinizing eyes of spectators, Wu Xia works to demystify wuxia (both the genre and its concept of heroism), regulate the excess of the hyperkinetic body, and generate engaging-yet-distant interplays between stars and spectators that all show reliance on digital visuals. Thus, this chapter explores fresh threads of the dynamics between technology, physicality, and visibility by demonstrating a decisive shift in the structure of “seeing” and “knowing” in the epoch of digital wuxia cinematic representation.

The Observing Eye The narrative of Wu Xia largely operates around Enlightenment idea of empiricism that “seeing is truth.” In the film, Liu Jinxi 劉金喜 (Donnie Yen), a former member of the 72 Demons clan, seeks refuge in a remote small town in Yunnan 雲南 province in southwestern China. His seemingly accidental murder of two bandits who have disturbed the town provokes the suspicion of the investigator Xu Baijiu 徐百九 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who epitomizes a synthesis of Western sciences such as forensics, physics and psychology with traditions of Chinese medicine such as meridians (jingluo 經絡) and herbal medicine. The very presence of myriad medical concepts and practices throughout the plot drives its dramatic intensity, as Liu Jinxi’s killing of the two bandits, Xu’s inquiry of the murder case and Liu’s real identity, Liu’s faked death as a tactic to escape the arrest of the 72 Demons, and the final duel between Liu and his father all demonstrate. Xu, as the observing agent, engages in careful and thorough “looks” throughout his investigation (Fig. 2.2). The “look” here designates a gaze, which is something more than a quick, spontaneous visual foray resulting in a moment of exhilaration or delight, but implies an open field, allowing “the successive order of reading” (121) as opposed to the glance that “strikes at one point” and “goes straight to its object” (ibid.). Gazing at the body reveals and resolves the mystery, both the murder and Liu’s identity.

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Fig. 2.2 Xu’s observing gaze, which is the central motif of the movie, in the course of his investigation [Source of image: Wu Xia DVD (Distributor: We Distributions, Lark Films Distribution)]

Under the operational principles of the medical gaze, pathology is a notional axis of reconfiguring Wu Xia’s generic clues and character portrayals. The movie pathologizes the genre through the role of Liu Jinxi. As Hunt (2014) notes in accordance to and extension from Vivian Lee (2009), Wu Xia follows the theme of “pathology of heroism” (Hunt 2014, p. 153), which is evident from “the obsession with memory and the failure of memory to access or understand the real” (Lee 2009, p. 138). Liu tries to forget, and thus erase, his “pathological past” (Hunt 2014, p. 153) via a sort of “self-delusion,” a redefinition of the hero-prototype in Hong Kong action movies (Lee 2009, p. 139). Suggesting the idea that every organism has its own pathological modalities, the narrative also follows Xu’s struggle to attain a sense of existence. Xu is an ailing figure in the middle of the plot, as symbolized in a series of montages wrapped by his confessional voiceover, revealing his past experience of having been poisoned. He maps his body mentally and uses acupuncture and reflexology on himself to treat his “disease.” He asserts his clinical gaze to Liu (though against the latter’s will) and himself to seek and inquire about the “patients’” history in order to determine the potential causes of their current conditions. This resonates with the effort of the medical gaze to seek scientific terminology to classify, compare, describe, and discuss the “diseases,” offering solidity to the obscure aspects of the body (Foucault 1979, pp. 149–173). The seeking of this language is vitally important for Xu because not only does it support his investigation, but also helps him to survive and to wrestle with the inherent mysteries of the living and the dead. In his meditation in a local tavern, he points out, “One cannot trust humanity. Only physiology and law do not lie.” The character of Xu functions as a figure of diagnostic medicine who believes the human body is a powerful yet vulnerable object that needs to be tamed, discerning people’s destiny as an outcome of their physiological composition. The observing gaze, hence, becomes the source of existentialist discourse in the midst of the deceit of the human world.

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The totality of the observable in Wu Xia is made feasible with the structure of the acoustic, underlining the scientific knowledge about the body. As Foucault (1979) hypothesizes, “In clinical medicine, to be seen and to be spoken immediately communicate in the manifest truth of the disease of which it is precisely the whole being. There is disease only in the element of the visible and therefore statable” (95). Xu’s observations are accompanied by his voiceover as he attempts to uncover the mystery. As Foucault argues, the clinical gaze has the paradoxical capacity to “hear a language as soon as it perceives a spectacle” (1979, p. 108; emphasis in original). Discourse comes with, but does not precede, vision. The operation of the gaze enters into and is distributed in the wuxia world, which is “already the world of language” (narrative), with the privileged aspects of “telling,” through the propelling of the structure of seeing (spectacle). Xu personifies “a speaking eye” as the vision, with increasing lucidity, is switched into speech that professes and instructs: “the truth … would outline under its gaze” (114). Xu’s verbal analysis of the corporeal bodies (including the dead bandits’, Liu’s, and his own) he examines is predisposed toward fidelity, exhaustiveness, and precision, and underscores the duality of “the visible” and “the expressible” (Foucault 1979, p. 113), establishing the cross-sensory configuration of wuxia bodily aesthetics. Certain investigative sequences pertinent to the murder case illustrate the two levels of Xu’s sight: he sees in diegetic reality and in a constructed or reimagined reality. With his privileged position as an erudite detective, he reimagines the scenes of violence and killing. As these scenes unfold, the fights are rewound, replayed, and paused, so that the motion of images simulates the mechanical operation of a DVD commentary with the presence of voiceover as a sort of prescriptive narration (Foucault 1979, p. 108). The self-reflexive Xu inhabits the reimagined setting, his assumed conscious presence blurring the boundaries of his realities. Reimagination posits a sort of vision. In this sense, he sees himself in the world he has constructed, giving rise to his potentially ambivalent position: he is the one who sees and he is also ‘being seen.’ What links the dual realities is his intense look; the observing gaze delineates the specific looking relationship between or within the parameters designated by Xu’s visuality. Xu’s vision begets prudence or skepticism for the cultural imaginary of wuxia heroes. According to Foucault (1979), the clinical gaze separates the patient’s body from his/her identity (soul/interiority), which can be considered a dehumanizing act. In a parallel logical vein, digital effects de-essentialize the wuxia body by hollowing it with the xia mentality and morality. Xia, which literally means “chivalry,” is the essence of the martial arts genre. Xia 俠 is embodied in the chivalrous knightly figure whose mission is to help the weak and to uphold morality and justice. It recapitulates traditional ethics and values through a good-versus-evil or loyalty-versus-betrayal theme. Wu Xia deconstructs a xia story by depicting Liu Jinxi as a mythical figure who possesses supreme martial arts dexterity but, at the same time, lacks the chivalrous spirit. At the beginning of the film, Liu appears to be a hapless, peaceful villager who, under his pacifist exterior, is later revealed as Tang Long 唐龍, the son of the Master of the 72 Demons, a notorious killer who has tried to hide his past. In its storyline, Wu Xia displays a form of “historical dislocation to the mythical

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jianghu underworld,” epitomized by the 72 Demons clan (Hunt 2003, p. 152). The conceptual world of “jianghu 江湖,” in which the wuxia narrative is typically set, is linked to an “imagined China” that is a virtual entity in itself. The movie further makes the fictional construct of wuxia a vague entity by blending it with the Western clinical gaze enabled by CGI. In this sense, the scientific gaze suggests a rift in the mystification of wuxia narratives, which can be read symptomatically as part of the deconstructive approach to the masculine xia while providing new knowledge of the heroic body.

Control of the Bodily Excess: Digital Visuals as the Disciplinary Logic of the Wuxia Body Based on the rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible, the use of digital effects can be considered an emerging disciplinary practice to regulate the wuxia body. One such means of dealing with the potential excess of the hero’s hyperkinetic body is to make it immediately visible. In her seminal essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Linda Williams (1995) has delineated the system of excess in pornography, horror, and melodrama, three genres whose respective basic components are sex, violence, and emotions. In these genres, the body is constructed as the spectacle which is “caught in the grips of intense sensation or emotions” (Williams 1995, p. 142). Expanding on Williams’ theory, Leon Hunt (2003) calls martial arts cinema a “body genre” that offers a “display of sensations that are on the edge of respectable [as] the body of the spectator caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of emotion or sensation of the body on screen” (2). Hence, it indicates the capacity of the body to provide kinetic aesthetics and visual pleasures that may not conform to the hegemonic paradigms of “looks.” To further the looking structures that dualistically produce man as the subject of the look and woman as its object, as many psychoanalyticallyinspired theories have suggested, martial arts films can incite the audience by creating a spectacle of excess that operates around the heroic body. This corpus of spectacles in Wu Xia is chiefly shown in the mode of cannibalism, which elicits close ties to the body. It is proof of an excess of flesh and blood, facilitating the film’s entry into a “realm of the gross” (Williams 1995, p. 2). Iconography associated with themes of morbidity and mortality, such as tooth-pulling, ear-cutting, corpses, lumps of flies, meat worms, butcher’s stalls, and burial chambers, is mainly conveyed through cinematographic devices such as close-ups. The film also depicts human flesh in parallel to animal meat, as, for instance, the array of horrid images of the three fugitive killers’ acts of mass slaughter, accompanied by Xu’s monologue. Near the end of the monologue, in introducing the psychopath Bu Yuan 卜元, the camera shows a montage of close-ups of a full pot of boiling soup followed by an image of poultry, foregrounding the idea of excess and the cannibalistic connotation. On top of the gruesome, violent imagery, Wu Xia further suggests a domestication of the hero’s bodily excess by means of digital visual technology. Foucault asserts

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in his lectures at the College de France that “what is essential in all power is that ultimately its point of application is always the body” (2006, p. 14). In the predigital period, the genre’s cinematic appeal stems from the purely physical qualities of the action scenes incorporating choreography, training, and expertise (Teo 2009, p. 11). Physical exercise is a way to discipline the body. In the digital era, technology replaces corporeality, yet in an equivocal fashion, as it is primarily used to augment the physical thrill and simultaneously drains the corporeal verve from the physique (Li 2019, p. 76). Whereas observation and the gaze are key instruments of power (Foucault 1979), Wu Xia regulates the wuxia body by submitting the bodily excess to the virtual-visual logic. The use of simulated technology in martial arts filmmaking displays a power that “regards individuals as objects and as instruments of its exercise” (Foucault 1979, p. 170), valorizing the spectacles of excess while subjecting them to the aloof, disengaged, and deliberate gaze. Thus, we can infer that the use of digital effects is both enabling and limiting. On the one hand, these visuals work to legitimize the spectacle of the body and to reinvent the structure of fantasy. On the other, they confine the expression of bodily excess and the overwhelming pathos by regulating the body through the digital-cinematic apparatus. The control of the bodily excess via CGI intriguingly informs the battle between the one-armed Liu Jinxi/Tang Long and his father, for which digital technology is applied to a lesser extent than in the aforementioned murder scene. Tang’s father complains about the hero’s betrayal of him and the clan while recalling Tang’s childhood days, juxtaposed with their early father-son dynamics. Their confrontation is aligned with the systems of excess, coded in the inarticulate cries of angst and horror (by Tang’s father), and of pain and fear (by Tang), which are all typified in the body genres. These portrayals incorporate imagery of the insanity and bewilderment of both the protagonist and the antagonist. The two characters embody an alternative to the traditional screen masculinity that underscores invulnerability, maturity, and prudence. After a failed attempt at faking death (again, the very evidence of the forensics study of the human body) to depart from the gang, Liu decisively cuts off one of his arms to formally announce the broken ties of him with the fugitives. The cutting off of the arm, an abridged form of human butchering, is immediately associated with castration, evoking sadistic sorrow and anxiety (Fig. 2.3). The image of Liu/Tang as a one-armed swordsman readily recalls the key character of Chang Cheh’s 張徹 1967 martial arts epic The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), whose hero inspired the spectacles of bodily excess traditionally related to female genres. Stephen Teo (2009) describes Chang Cheh as a bodyconscious director whose oeuvre of martial arts features exemplifies a propensity toward a highly visceral and sensationalist style in the 1960 s and 1970s (101). The heroes on his screens are usually marked by violence and spectacles of “bloodletting and physical mutilation” (Yip 2014), either being blinded as in The Assassin (1967) or Vengeance! (1970) or having their limbs severed as in The One-Armed Swordsman series (1967, 1969, 1971) or Crippled Avengers (1978). Tang Long in Wu Xia is an example of the young, brash, and reckless heroes with a high mortality rate (Yip 2014) who are part of the new-school perspective of wuxia heroism advocated by Chang Cheh. In a review, Stine Jacobsen also describes the hero of The One-Armed

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Fig. 2.3 Donnie Yen’s character is a replaying of the heroic image in Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman (1976) [Source of image: Wu Xia DVD (Distributor: We Distributions, Lark Films Distribution)]

Swordsman as a “strong and feminine man under a great deal of suffering” (Jacobsen, n.d.). This persona also echoes the spectacle of “disabled” masculinity suggested by Enns (2009). The dramatic tension in the narrative involved in this kind of spectacle is chiefly set between a disabled person and an able-bodied person, different from the types of relationships between men and women seen in many other films (Enns 2009, p. 138) The disabled characters are empowered by their wounds and their suffering, notwithstanding the argument that disability is often associated with weakness and a need for protection (ibid.). Moreover, the disabled heroes usually experience a merciful death in order to redeem their dignified image. Although the handicapped Tang Long appropriates the persona of the virile martyr, he perseveres to the end of the battle. Acknowledging this does not mean that the narrative rejects the downplaying of the physical prowess and vital competence of the hero. Victory is attained not through bodily clout but through external assistance. Xu later helps Tang by piercing his father’s heel and, later, his neck with acupuncture needles, further demonstrating the effectiveness of medical practices. This allows for the imminent, if perhaps antiheroic, death of the villain via lightning-stroke, which seems more of an act of luck than of ability. The scene celebrates chaos and angst instead of order and tranquility. It can be said to propose that the male body is present in the grips of an “out-ofcontrol” bodily excess, which is hardly monitored and, eventually, is subjected to the notion of destiny, lying at the edge of the regulatory boundary commissioned by the logic of digitized spectacles.

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The Stars’ “Visibility” and Spectatorship The deliberate casting choice gives credit to the persona of the one-armed fighter in Wu Xia, engendering a specific relationship between spectators and performers. Wu Xia is a star vehicle that capitalizes on celebrated martial arts personae. While the megastar Donnie Yen receives plenty of attention, it is interesting to compare and contrast him to the, perhaps, less famous veteran actor Jimmy Wang 王羽, who also plays the lead in One-Armed Swordsman. As the most popular male star of the decade in Hong Kong (Hunt 2011, p. 142), Wang is one of the early wuxia personalities whose star status has been relatively ignored by most Western studies of Chinese cinema (Williams 2015, p. 322). In the 1960s, he supplanted Cheng Peipei 鄭佩佩 as the Shaw Brothers’ top wuxia icon, in the cinematic shift from female-led to male-led diegesis. By associating with key figures in martial arts filmmaking such as Chang Cheh, Wang personifies a kind of machismo, as typified by his one-armed-hero image, shaping the initial paradigm of onscreen xia, predominantly marked by his martial arts physique and prowess. The theorization of action cinema, an umbrella term that encompasses the martial arts film, has already asserted its dominance in visuality and the spectacular (Khoo 2007, p. 84) that are played out through the body (Tasker 1993; Lo 2005). The “displays of the body” (Tasker 1993) become an attribute of Wang’s screen presence, as Tony Rayns (1981) proposes that Wang “looked ‘natural’ with a sword” (p. 156). Likewise, Hunt (2011) asserts that as a martial arts star from an earlier time, Wang “doesn’t have modern wirework or CGI to help him out” (p. 142). Tony Williams (2009), furthermore, notes in his analysis of the star’s early appeal that Wang is the handsome object of the traditional female gaze that is characteristic of pre-Chang Cheh cinema (p. 329). He compares Wang to the superstar Bruce Lee 李小龍, referring to Yvonne Tasker’s (2006) argument that Lee is “a very visible star in that his films tended to emphasize his physicality in a way that some have characterized as narcissistic” (445; emphasis in original). This discursive assessment has categorized Wang as a martial arts actor whose corporeality and agility are his key characteristics, enthralling cinephiles and setting him up for public evaluation and discussion. If the visibility of martial arts stars such as Bruce Lee depends on their physicality, then Wu Xia’s use of digital technology to depict choreographed action makes those such as Jimmy Wang less visible. Revealing concerns not of how the body appears but how it hides, digital technology penetrates the body, not materializing but virtualizing the star’s presence. In this sense, the star’s visibility purports new meaning: it no longer refers to the capacity of the star to demonstrate his physical virility, but to the capacity of the star’s appearance to be mediated by the digital visuals in order to forge a novel representation of wuxia visual imagery. A similar ambivalent “visibility” is evident in the star phenomenon of Donnie Yen. Nicknamed “The Strongest in the Cosmos” (“yuxiu zuiqiang 宇宙最強") by the Chinese-language media, Yen is generally recognized as possessing supreme martial arts dexterity and a solid pedigree. As a child, Yen was taught martial arts by his mother Bow Sim Mak 麥寶嬋, a world-acclaimed Tai Chi master and founder

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of the Chinese Wushu Research Institute 中國武術研究所. After living in Boston for several years in his teens, Yen was sent by his parents to Beijing for two years of formal martial arts training, learning from the same master as the world-famous Chinese martial arts actor, Jet Li. Since the beginning of his acting career, Donnie Yen has impressed audiences and critics with the “real,” stunning action of his films, including Miracle Fighter 2 (1982), Iron Monkey I and II (1993 and 1995), SPL: Sha Po Lang (2007), 14 Blades (2010), and his best-known, Ip Man I and II (2008 and 2010) (Lau 2019, p. 31). Hiring Yen as Wu Xia’s choreographer signals the presence of “real” martial arts techniques in the film. Peter Chan has said of Yen’s action style that “Donnie’s work has always been realistic because his action has always been very grounded, you know, very powerful but yet very realistic. It’s humanly possible. We never see Donnie’s film where…everything defies physics and human possibility” (YouTube 2011). Whereas Peter Chan claims that the choreography is physically feasible, Yen’s fights (whether they are realistic or not is outside the scope of this discussion) do not comprise all the action spectacles of Wu Xia. As the narrative proceeds, we are, albeit intermittently, reminded of the movie’s ambitious use of CGI to depict body parts more than we can possibly perceive. It is true that we can still see Yen fight, but the fighting spectacles are mediated, if not enhanced, by digital effects, so that this film exhibits a distinct star appeal from his previous ones. The altered visibility of the star of Wu Xia generates a different sort of spectatorial pleasure. The spectator is not merely a passive viewer, but a subject who interacts in the action of the film, taking the pleasure of watching and providing a meaning to the film (Mayne 1993, p. 1; Aaron 2007, p. 1; Mayne 1993, p. 1). According to Judith Mayne’s Cinema and Spectatorship (1993), spectatorship refers to “how film-going and the consumption of movies and their myths are symbolic activities, culturally significant events” (p. 1). Based on the pleasure derived from the act of looking, the eyes are not only considered organs of perception, but also of pleasure. They become “modes of access for libido to explore the world” (Wright 1984, p. 117). The pleasure incited by Wu Xia is unlike the fascination of likeness and identification that Laura Mulvey suggested in her groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975); nor is it similar to the craving discussed in Dana Knight’s analysis of the over-involved female spectatorship in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) that unfolds a quality of excess and naïveté, as epitomized by the character of Cecilia who has a “glowing face of spectatorial ecstasy” (Knight, n.d.). Rather, as I intend to argue here, the spectators are interpellated to engage with the wuxia hero by keeping distance from him, as they observe and inspect his body. This “look” prevents the viewers from becoming obsessive voyeurs (Mulvey 1975), but instead meticulous observers, though this does not mean that scopophilic pleasure is necessarily derived. Wu Xia, as a reinvention of traditional martial arts films, offers new visual possibilities, which are mediated, facilitated, and intensified by digital spectacles, to the spectators. According to Schehr (2000), spectators delight in the aptitude exhibited by martial artists and the accuracy of their movements (p. 103). They also seek a glimpse of something new that they may be able to graft on to their techniques, toward reconstructing choreographed fight scenes (Schehr 2000, p. 102). If Schehr’s argument holds true, in the case of Wu Xia this reconstruction is

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enabled by digital spectacles that replace “technique” with “technics” (Khoo 2007, p. 84) and translate (in)visibility from the realm of the corporeal to the digital. In an interview with the Italian press, director Peter Chan notes that in order to present something new to martial arts film viewers, he uses technological spectacles simulating the human body in lieu of the “jumping, leaping and flying” in traditional wuxia pian: “We realize that if we want to keep the fighting, the action grounded and real, we have to find something that is fantastical, that is new” (YouTube 2011). What he refers to as “new” and capable of creating “grounded and real” action is computerized wuxia spectacle, which is, in fact, no guarantor of realism at all. These digitally-propelled spectacles create ruptures of the organization of knowledge of the wuxia body, providing novel dimensions of the knowledge and spectatorial pleasure of the cinematic wuxia.

Conclusion and Limitation With the use of digital effects, Wu Xia provides us a new frame for discerning and interpreting the martial arts body. The penetrative gaze enabled by simulation technology provides a new horizon of vision of the wuxia body in terms of deessentializing tendency, disciplinary logic and looking relationships between stars and spectators. With the amalgamation of the concepts and practices of Western and Chinese medicine, the heroic body is made visible and legible while being hollowed with cultural substantiality. The medical gaze not only challenges the xia construct but also responds to the pathology of the heroes, reformulating the generic traces and character depiction. Moreover, the CGI becomes a form of disciplinary practice to regulate the bodily excess, which is principally signified by grisly expressions. Digital imaging technology also transforms the mode of spectatorship and the star-audience dynamics entailed by the martial arts genre. Classical martial arts cinema encourages audience identification that is closely tied to the display of the body. Yet Wu Xia alienates the spectators from the heroes by creating a digitally-propelled inspecting site, while otherwise providing new pleasure for spectators. In this fashion, Wu Xia reinvents the representation of martial arts on film and its pertinent spectatorship by showing the delicate interplay between corporeality, visibility, and technology. Although this chapter represents an initial effort to explore the emergent dimensions of critical discourse of the wuxia film and the looking relations that are involved, this effort is not exhaustive due to its relatively limited scope. Therefore, I would like to propose some further studies on the structural significance of digital effects in wuxia film and the power dynamics that lie within. Referring to Foucault’s (1979) argument on the institution of the clinic (p. xix), the current scholarship on wuxia film assumes a monolithic quality that is marked by the visual nature of digital images. Among the questions that may be answered in future studies: though a continual demand for CGI-driven spectacle is evident in the global viewing public, how does the increasing use of digital effects shape viewers’ responses to wuxia films? In what ways does digital filmmaking institutionalize our knowledge of the wuxia body on

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screen? The institutional approach allows a close study of these questions in terms of ideology, reception, and power that may potentially and significantly expand the theoretical enterprise of wuxia cinema studies in the digital age.

References Aaron, M. (2007). Spectatorship: The power of looking on. Great Britain: Wallflower Press. Chan, K. (2011). The contemporary wuxia revival: Genre remaking and the Hollywood transnational factor. In S. H. Lim & J. Ward (Eds.), The Chinese cinema book (pp. 150–157). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Enns, A. (2009). The spectacle of disabled masculinity in John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” films. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 17(2), 137–145. Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. (A. M. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (A. M. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (2006). Psychiatric power: Lectures at the College de France 1973–1974. (J. Lagrange, Ed., G. Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hunt, L. (2011). Dragons forever: Chinese martial arts stars”. In S. H. Lim & J. Ward (Eds.), The Chinese cinema book (pp. 141–149). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hunt, L. (2014). Too late the hero? The delayed stardom of Donnie Yen. In W. Leung & A. Willis (Eds.), East Asian film stars (pp. 143–155). London: Palgrave Macmillan. H2O. (2007). ‘The last TEN years…’ (香港CG電影十年回顧), Retrieved 2 December, 2015, from www.cgvisual.com/headlines/HKCG10/CGVheadlines_hkcg10_p1.html. Jacobsen, S. (n.d.). The text and the hero: Review of One-armed swordsman (Dubi dao). Retrieved December 8, 2015, from www.stinemariejacobsen.com/wuxiafilmreviews/index.html. Khoo, O. (2007). The Chinese exotic: Modern diasporic femininity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Knight, D. On spectatorship. IDEAS|FILM. Retrieved June 7, 2017, from https:ideasfilm.org/. Landreth, J. (2010). Martial-arts actioner Wu xia lands international presales. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved June 7, 2017, from www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/martial-arts-actionerwu-xia-35438. Lau, D. (2019). Chinese stardom in participatory cyberculture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lee, V. (2007). Virtual bodies, flying objects: The digital imaginary in contemporary martial arts films. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1(1), 9–26. Li, Z. (2019). From affective space to performative depth: spatial aesthetics in 3-D wuxia films Flying swords of dragon gate (2010) and Sword master (2016). Asian Cinema, 30(1), 73–90. Lo, K. C. (2005). Chinese face/off: The transnational popular culture of Hong Kong. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mayne, J. (1993). Cinema and spectatorship. London & New York: Routledge. Ndalianis, A. (2000). The frenzy of the visible: Spectacle and motion in the era of the digital. Senses of cinema. Retrieved December 7, 2015, from http:sensesofcinema.com/2000/featurearticles/matrix-2/. Rayns, T. (1981). The sword as obstacle. In S. Lau (Ed.), A study of the Hong Kong swordplay film. Hong Kong: Urban Council. Schehr, R. C. (2000). Martial arts films and the action-cop genre: Ideology, violence and spectatorship. Journal of criminal justice and popular culture, 7(3), 102–118. Tasker, Y. (1993). Spectacular bodies: Gender, genre and the action cinema. New York: Routledge.

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Tasker, Y. (2006). Fists of fury: Discourses of race and masculinity in martial arts cinema. In D. Eleftheriotis & G. Needham (Eds.), Asian cinemas: A reader and guide (pp. 437–456). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Teo, S. (2009). Chinese martial arts cinema: The wuxia tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wang, H., & Rawnsley, M. T. (2010). Hero: Rewriting the Chinese martial arts film genre. In G. Rawnsley & M. T. Rawnsley (Eds.), Global Chinese cinema: The culture and politics of Hero (pp. 90–105). London & New York: Routledge. Wright, E. (1984). Psychoanalytic criticism: Theory in practice. London: Routledge. Yip, M. (2014). In the realm of the senses: Sensory realism, speed, and Hong Kong martial arts cinema. Cinema Journal, 53(4). Retrieved December 5, 2015, from http:muse.jhu.edu.libezproxy.hkbu.edu.hk/journals/cinema_journal/v053/53.4.yip.html. YouTube. (2011). WU XIA—Sentieri Selvaggi meets Peter Ho-sun Chan. Retrieved June 10, 2017, from www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6HfuFEShZU.

Chapter 3

Cinematic Contemplation Online: The Art and Philosophy of Life-world Series (2017) Jose Gutierrez III

Introduction The initial drive for this project was the intention to conduct a study of cinematic realism. It began with a reading of the works of the classical realist film theorists, André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. In due course, originally through Ian Aitken’s writings on those thinkers (1998, 2001, 2006, 2007), John Grierson and Georg Lukács were added, as they, along with Bazin and Kracauer, are regarded as “the major realist film theorists” (Aitken 2016, p. 37). The project followed Aitken’s (2016) consistent approach in elucidating the interweaving threads of those theorists’ philosophical influences, to bring about a more holistic appreciation of the wider intellectual traditions at play. Aitken identified the main influences on the ideas of the realist film theorists: Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl for Kracauer (2016, p. 19); Henri Bergson for Bazin (p. 26); Francis Herbert Bradley for Grierson (p. 30); and the philosophers belonging to the German tradition for Lukács (p. 23). To manage its scope, this study focuses exclusively on the realist film theory of Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), a German-Jewish film theorist, philosopher, film critic, sociologist, and architect whose career covered the years from the Weimar Republic in Germany to the United States in the 1960s (Richter 1997, p. 233). Incited by its encounter with Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960)—regarded as “a canonical work of classical film theory” (Gilloch 2015, p. 173; Hansen 1997, p. viii) that “remains a key work in the field” (Armstrong 2007, p. 62)—this project delves into the main philosophical influences on Kracauerian thought: Husserl’s work on phenomenology and Kant’s ideas on “the ‘judgment of taste’” (Aitken 2016, p. 21) focusing on the “free experience of the object of judgment” (p. 21). Drawing on Aitken’s (2006) emphasis J. Gutierrez III (B) Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] University of the Philippines Film Institute (UPFI), Quezon City, Philippines © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_3

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on “the Husserlian notion of the Lebenswelt as a key to understanding Kracauer’s assertion that “physical reality” can be redeemed through cinema” (Wils 2016, p. 76), the study identifies the Lebenswelt (life-world) as the subject matter of the chapter author’s research-based filmmaking project Life-world Series (2017, 118 min), which is composed of ten short film episodes shot in Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, mainland China, and the United States of America. This chapter operates under the aesthetics entailed by the realist film theory of Siegfried Kracauer—anchored in the cinematic realist tropes of the quotidian, the fortuitous, the indeterminate, the flow of life, and the spiritual life itself—in contemplating the phenomenological notion of the life-world. Central to both Husserlian phenomenology and Kracauerian cinematic realism is the concept of the life-world or the Lebenswelt, “the surrounding ever-changing world of our everyday experience and perception” (Aitken 2016, p. 15). It is “the world given to us most immediately” (Russell 2006, p. 194). Husserl further described the Lebenswelt as “the world of lived experience” (Russell 2006, p. 189) and our everyday life-world as “the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable … the real world of experience” (p. 189). There are “thick” and “thin” concepts of the Lebenswelt (Russell 2006, p. 194). In the “thick” version, the Lebenswelt is used “to denote the entire world given to us in immediate experience that is bound up with sensuous fullness, cultural richness, and manifold practical meanings that surround the intersubjective experience” (Russell 2006, p. 194). On the other hand, Husserl uses the “thin” version of the Lebenswelt “to denote that narrower set of phenomena, belonging to the world of experience, which are invariant from culture to culture” (Russell 2006, p. 194). This thin sense of the Lebenswelt can therefore be called “nature” (p. 194), or “at least nature as it is subjectively experienced” (p. 194). This idea of “nature” is different from the conventional definition of nature as features and products of the earth—for example, plants, animals, the landscape, and other such things—as opposed to humans or human creations. Within the context of the thin sense of the Lebenswelt, Nature is more inclusive and expansive. It includes the human population on earth; the invariant features of physical reality—for example, the transient, fortuitous, indeterminate, flow of life, and spiritual life itself—as experienced by the human being; the very essence of humanity itself; and the entire universe of which human experience is part but accounts for only a speck. From the perspective of the Lebenswelt in the thick sense, human beings are “caught up” (Russell 2006, p. 184) in what “Husserl called everyday lived experience” (p. 184), wherein we are “immersed in the cultural and practical world and only subsequently do we come to isolate the world of natural experience within it” (p. 194). This “world of natural experience” delves into the essence of reality itself, which, Husserl noted, is drowned by the preoccupations of the modern subject; thus, we are unable to contemplate it. In “Film in Our Time”, the concluding chapter of Theory of Film (1960), Kracauer gravitated towards the idea of the film medium’s redemptive potential through its affinity for aspects of physical reality—i.e., the Kracauerian cinematic realist (KCR) tropes—thus fostering for the spectator an intuitive awareness of the invariants or essences of human experience. This is the very province of phenomenology, which concerns itself with the said

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Fig. 3.1 Life-world Series (2017) poster. The full movie is available at http://heritage.lib.hkbu.edu. hk/view.php?id=11179

invariants or essences; indeed, phenomenology is a “science of essences” (Russell 2006, p. 22) (Fig. 3.1).

The Quotidian The subject matter of Hong Kong: Study One (7 min, 35 s) is the Lebenswelt as expansive. This film was shot over almost three months – from winter to early spring of 2016—in Hong Kong. It is a product of the filmmaker-researcher’s regular wandering about the city, an activity in which he engages as a form of meditation. During one of these walks, he reflected on the notion that we human beings intuitively understand the Lebenswelt as expansive, but in the rush of the everyday, we fail to grasp this insight; thus, our purview is limited to the practical realm. This film attempts to put forward the awareness that although the Lebenswelt includes human concerns, such as our everyday rush to go to work, it extends beyond the human dimension. The title of the film primes the spectators to anticipate cinematic images that correspond to the notions commonly associated with Hong Kong, such as its efficient transportation system and its global edge as finance hub; however, the film takes another path. The filmmaker of Hong Kong: Study One assembled the footage along a continuum that ranges from the general mass of people to the concrete presence of objects that are part and parcel of the Lebenswelt or “the world of lived experience” (Russell 2006, p. 189); Figure 3.2 features nine screenshots presented in chronological order vis-à-vis the film’s timeline.

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Fig. 3.2 Hong Kong: Study One (2016)

Figures 3.2a, b include large groups of people, whilst succeeding images show gradually less. Figure 3.2c contains significantly fewer people, thus allowing the opportunity to focus on a single person, a concrete instance of the increasingly familiar phenomenon of the Hong Kong working elderly trying to earn their keep by picking up materials for recycling. The camera gradually pans left to follow the elderly woman’s direction and speed as she pushes her cart along the busy Bulkeley Street in Hung Hom. This simulates the human experience of occasionally noticing a significant and insightful detail amidst the tumult of the everyday modern experience. The second row of Figure 3.2 features fewer people: several in Fig. 3.2d; a few in Fig. 3.2e; and a single man in Fig. 3.2f. While the tram setting of Fig. 3.2d is a familiar sight for Hong Kong residents and tourists, the image of Fig. 3.2e is somewhat less so, since construction sites in the city are usually hidden by perimeter walls. Figure 3.2f, which reveals the phenomenon of collecting the detritus of modern machinery, is even more unfamiliar, as this happens during inactive hours, when the office workers sleep to prepare themselves for another day of work. No human images are seen in the last row of Fig. 3.2, thus foregrounding the various other co-existing entities in the physical reality of Hong Kong. In Fig. 3.2g, the camera bears silent witness to the parade of brake lights refracting through a textured window on a footbridge; in Fig. 3.2h, the high-angle canted shot depicts one of the many trees that line the busy Waterloo Road as grand and striking in their organic naturalness; finally, in Fig. 3.2i, the very last shot of Hong Kong: Study One, the camera frames a slice of the road, cars whooshing by, to highlight its disinterested character and invite contemplation of Hong Kong life and the Lebenswelt itself as expansive. This film reveals what the spectator encounters in the daily business of living, but does not really see, because this imagery is generally filtered out as either useless or redundant. What

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the film is trying to show here is a transformation of the meditative experience of wandering around in physical reality into the spectatorial experience of penetrating “camera-reality” (Kracauer 1960, p. 28), which is one of the terms—aside from “material reality”, “physical existence”, and “actuality”—that Kracauer identified as equivalent to physical reality (1960, p. 28). Hong Kong: Study One responds in part to Kracauer’s statement quoted below: If they are true to the medium, they will certainly not move from a preconceived idea down to the material world in order to implement that idea … The cinema is materialistically minded; it proceeds from “below” to “above” … Guided by film, then, we approach, if at all, ideas no longer on highways leading through the void but on paths that wind through the thicket of things. (Kracauer 1960, p. 309) This passage crystallizes the general approach of the project. As early as Hong Kong: Study One (2016),1 the filmmaking procedure began with the director’s immersion within the physical milieu. As the camera captured images from physical reality, the filmmaker envisioned a full range of appearances, thus producing a matrix of possibilities for the work-in-progress film. Instead of starting with a preconceived notion to implement in the filmmaking process, he began with his physical engagement with the “thicket of things” (Kracauer 1960, p. 309),2 or, in Husserlian terms, “the things themselves” (Russell 2006, p. 18) in the thick sense of the Lebenswelt. This crucial process in the project’s film production methodology enabled the director to see the invariant features, or more simply, the essences, of the Lebenswelt—for instance, as expansive—as they came into view. The direction is from “below” (material reality, in the thick sense of the Lebenswelt) to “above” (essences, in the thin sense of the Lebenswelt). For Kracauer, these essences, from the “below” to the “above”, are redemptive because they are extracted from physical existence by the film, which can foster an “insightful experience of our existential situation” (Aitken 2016, p. 16); ideologies, on the other hand, are ideas from the “above” (abstraction) imposed on the “below” (physical reality), thus taking us to “highways leading through the void” (Kracauer 1960, p. 309). The subject matter of Hong Kong: Study One, the Lebenswelt as expansive, was a result of this below-to-above process. It presented itself—or, in phenomenological terms, the subject matter as an intentional object appeared – to the director’s consciousness during the process of filmmaking; it is worth noting again that the production process operates from the “below” (penetrating external reality) to “above” (Imagination and Understanding harmonizing within the director’s consciousness to intuit a corresponding insight on the Lebenswelt). The subject matter of the remaining nine studies shares similar origins. The subject matter of Study Nine: Yard Life (6 min, shot in the United States) is the Lebenswelt as multi-layered. This film features a layer of the Lebenswelt, 1 The

original plan for the project was to shoot the entire series only in Hong Kong; thus the name of the first short film. After considering the expanse of the Lebenswelt, the director decided to shoot the collection in several countries; thus, the present name of the series. From that point on, the next nine films were named according to the format Study [Number]: Title. 2 Kracauerian scholars have noted that KCR can be epitomized by its “exploration of the thicket of everyday life” (Sieg 2010, p. 106) and that it manifests “Kracauer’s plea for a cinematic realism of everyday life” (Hansen 1997, p. ix).

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Fig. 3.3 Study Nine: Yard Life (2017)

that is, physical existence outside the ambit of practical human life, which is often invisible in everyday experience. The title cues the spectator to anticipate seeing activities that relate to the concept of yard life; however, although the film does explore the concept, it does so without allowing people to be visible. Though the Lebenswelt is multi-layered, it is founded on physical reality. An invariant feature of a physical object is that it is bounded by a surface. Our experience of the Lebenswelt as “the one that is actually given through perception” (Russell 2006, p. 194), is through our sensory encounters with surface phenomena; for example, in Fig. 3.3a, the transparent, translucent, opaque, and reflective surfaces enable us to see the rain droplets on the windshield, the shadow of the cables and electric poles, the headlights of the car behind the windshield, and in the trees, more electric poles and the faraway mountain in the background. The film unconventionally portrays “yard life” by focusing purely on surface phenomena; for example, the dried leaves on the porch are animated by the tiny and ephemeral whirlwind in Fig. 3.3f (the last photo in the second row). For Kracauer, surface phenomena have an “unconscious” quality; they are liberated from conscious ideological censorship that can distort, displace, or condense (Sieg 2010, p. 105) the experience of reality. Our disinterested contemplation renders visible the images in Study Nine: Yard Life (2017) despite—or perhaps because of— the threat from, say, capitalist ideology that asserts that this endeavor has no productive value. There is nothing to be acquired, for example, in terms of knowledge of wind dynamics or genre-induced emotional response such as the thrill caused by an action film; what is to be gained is the feeling of connection with the Lebenswelt that results from the cinematic meditation of the wind—which is invisible but cinematic— and the resulting intuitive understanding of how it cinematically makes the artifacts left behind by humans appear to us as if they were breathing life. In particular, these

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artifacts are the parked boat trailer in Fig. 3.3b; the wet tiki torch in Fig. 3.3c; in the second row, the bamboo wind chime playing solo in Fig. 3.3d; the bamboo curtain with a tree “peeking” behind in Fig. 3.3e; in the middle of the last row, the monkey bars that mount a couple of backyard ornaments in Fig. 3.3h; and the lawn mower at rest in Fig. 3.3i. The film also features an artifact left by “man’s best friend”: the blue-green-white dog toy in Figure 3.3g, the first image of the third row. Ultimately, the spectator attains an appreciation of the Lebenswelt as alive, with its many layers contributing to its complexity akin to an organism. This leads to an intuitive awareness of the intricate web of other layers of everyday life, even though they are not part of the instrumental preoccupations of the modern world. This cinematic revelation in Study Nine: Yard Life (2017) results in an intuitive understanding of the plurality of possibilities in our experience of the everyday. This intuitive route may be subtler than, say, formal discourse against capitalist ideology, but this just might be more resonant for people who, on a daily basis, consciously or unconsciously struggle to sift through the overwhelming deluge of images and discourses that strive to maintain the efficient machinery of the modern world to which they are subjected.

The Fortuitous The subject matter of Study Seven: The Street (7 min and 12 s, shot in Hong Kong) is the Lebenswelt as flowing. This film attempts to depict the flowing nature of the Lebenswelt by using six simultaneously playing screens. The documentary footage of the individual frames exhibit movements—with varying levels of speed and direction—of the elements within each screen and in relation to elements on the other screens. The result is an enhanced perception of the speed and multidirectionality of the organic flow of images, the cinematic quality of which is determined by their coming from the same stream of physical existence. Each screen manifests an instance of “unstaged reality” (Kracauer 1960, p. 19)—“the enthusiastic embrace of the unpredictable, the unintended and the improvisational” (Gilloch 2015, p. 170)—which, as Kracauer notes, stresses “the fortuitous” (1960, p. 19). The film’s fortuity is enhanced by two other factors. First, the multi-screen setup allows for chance to match the elements of each frame in relation to the others. In Fig. 3.4b, for example, the matching of the walking directions of the men in the last two intra-screens (the prefix “intra-” here indicates that we are still talking about Fig. 3.4b) is fortuitous. Another interesting point is that the spectators may not even catch this because their attention may be directed to another chance happening in another part of this complex visual symphony. The director did design the shifting of the sound from one screen to the next, but in terms of the cinematic experience, there is still so much that is left to chance, such as the matching of this soundtrack with the six simultaneously playing videos, and the intervention of the spectator’s flowing attention. The resulting complex of spectatorial experience of the audiovisual kaleidoscope that is Study Seven: The Street is therefore akin to our empirically and perceptually rich experience of city life.

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Fig. 3.4 Study Seven: The Street (2016)

The second factor that contributes to this film’s fortuity is its focus on the street— as the title suggests (Fig. 3.4a) – which is, for Kracauer, in the extended sense of the word, “an arena of chance encounters” (1960, p. 72). The street is “of interest as a region where the accidental prevails over the providential, and happenings in the nature of unexpected incidents are all but the rule” (Kracauer 1960, p. 62). The second intra-screen of 4c, for example, unintentionally reveals the date and time— 30 November 2016 at exactly 14:20—the shot was taken. Kracauer designated the “street” as a term “to cover not only the street, particularly the city street, in the literal sense, but also its various extensions” (1960, p. 62) such as the karaoke bar on the second intra-screen of Fig. 3.4d and the metro railway station on the third intra-screen of the same figure. The subject matter of Study Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers (13 min and 49 s) is the Lebenswelt in the process of becoming. The film endeavors to depict this idea by featuring a group of young people who are themselves in the process of becoming. The film was shot at two locations, Solas Restaurant-bar in Central District (first row of Fig. 3.5) and a function room at the Philippine Consulate in Hong Kong (second row). In the first location, we see young Filipino-Hongkongers in an informal setting, as they perform songs for a fund-raising event on 21 May 2016 for their upcoming musical, Sa Ugoy ng Duyan/Sway of the Cradle.3 In Fig. 3.5a, the camera, together with the live audience members, watch Aaron, the lead actor in the play, with his ukulele, delivering his rendition of the song Make You Feel My Love by Bob Dylan; the film spectator will notice that the framing of this shot is quite unconventional. The shot is composed in this way to highlight another thread of the physical existence that was coinciding and interweaving with the performance on stage: Aaron’s colleagues and friends who are casually enjoying the night (on 3 Study

Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers (2016) was integrated as the multi-media component of this play that was staged on 3 July 2016 at the Y Theatre in Wan Chai, Hong Kong.

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Fig. 3.5 Study Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers (2016)

the right side of the frame). Figure 3.5b is at the same venue but another part of the program. Here, the dynamic among the planes is more pronounced: in the foreground is a guest who is relishing the Filipino food served on the buffet table; in the middle ground are the others, some watching their friend who is presenting a study on the Filipino youth in Hong Kong, while some are preoccupied with something else; in the background is the presenter, a postgraduate student of Filipino descent who was born and raised in Hong Kong like the cast members of the play, and behind him are some of them, including the performer in Fig. 3.5a, who are listening to his talk. This visual composition maximizes the cinematic space to optimize the shot’s ability to capture chance happenings, thereby realizing the film medium’s affinity for the fortuitous. If the framing and composition were executed in a conventional manner—that is, the singer in Fig. 3.5a and the presenter in Fig. 3.5b dominating their respective screens by their relative size and centrality at the core of the camera’s visual field, while the other elements are relegated to the fringe—the shots would have excluded a significant number of cinematic elements that penetrate and reveal physical reality. The fly-on-the-wall technique as exemplified in the first row of Fig. 3.5 simulates our perceptual experience of the Lebenswelt; for instance, in Fig. 3.5c, various material entities enter and exit the camera’s visual field as the song performance happens. Spectators of the cinematic film savor witnessing small and random movements such as the guest’s subtle dancing in Fig. 3.5c; although she occludes their vision, the spectators feel a connection with her because they recognize that she cinematically portrays common situations of the human experience that are not usually rendered by the cinema. The lively pairing of the dancing guest in the foreground and the song performer in the background in Fig. 3.5c is an example of what Kracauer called “haphazard contingencies” (1960, p. 62) that refer to a “characteristic of camerareality” (p. 62) and embodies the film medium’s affinity for the fortuitous. In the second row of Fig. 3.5, shot from the second location identified earlier, we see the cast members rehearsing for their musical play. In this film, we witness the learning process that these amateur theatre performers (see Fig. 3.5d, the first image in the second row) undergo with the help of the director of the play, Cathe Marsden. One

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challenge in their learning experience is that the play is in Filipino and most of them, as they were born and raised in Hong Kong, can barely speak the language. In the film, the director explains the meaning of the lyrics to them and motivates them to proudly express their Filipino identity. During the course of the shooting, the camera captured another haphazard contingency, when Cathe’s phone rang while she was in the middle of giving a talk to the students (see Fig. 3.5e, which shows her in the middle of the act of standing up). The filmmaker did not turn off the camera because he was reminded of a similar film shooting “accident” that happened to Werner Herzog when he was shooting Grizzly Man (2005), when “Spirit the Fox” unexpectedly walked into the frame when Herzog was about to turn off the camera. Through voice-over in the documentary film, Herzog contemplates the fortuitous incident: “Now, the scene seems to be over, but as a filmmaker, sometimes things fall into your lap, which you couldn’t expect, never even dream of. There is something like an inexplicable magic of cinema” (Herzog 2005). The last part of Study Two is a set of interviews with the cast members. In the process of becoming, these young people speak about their experiences and visions of the future. Their process of becoming grows more complex as they are third-culture individuals, raised in a culture other than their parents’; their identities flow between Hong Kong and Philippine cultures. The final image of Fig. 3.5 is from Aaron’s part of the interview, in which he articulates his ambition to become an English teacher in Hong Kong and perhaps find a way in the future to contribute to the betterment of the lives of Filipinos in the motherland.

The Indeterminate The subject matter of Study Three: Floating Notes (13 min and 15 s, shot in Japan) is the Lebenswelt as resonantly intersubjective. This experimental documentary has four elements. In Fig. 3.6a, we are concurrently engaged with the following components: video footage taken from a window of an airplane on the way to Japan; the evocative titles (text notes in white) below it; and the photograph4 on the lower left corner; what we do not see here is the asynchronous sound—in relation to the video, whose sound is muted—that comes from a recording of the actual sound environment inside a metro train in Fukuoka, Japan. The purpose of this four-component design is to produce a complex cinematic experience that reverberates for the film spectator the shared nature of the Lebenswelt. The following describes how each of the four elements contributes in achieving the objective of making the insight on the intersubjective Lebenswelt resonantly felt by the film spectator. First, the video component features footage captured from “unstaged reality” (Kracauer 1960, p. 19), which, as mentioned earlier, stresses “the fortuitous” (p. 19). The experience of awe brought 4 This belongs to a set of 60 photographs featured in the director’s solo exhibition “Home for Now”,

which was exhibited at the Gallery of the Hong Kong Baptist University Main Library from 1 June to 3 July 2016; the Gallery of the Philippine Consulate General in Hong Kong from 4 to 8 September 2016; and the Foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Hong Kong on 25 June 2017.

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Fig. 3.6 Study Three: Floating Notes (2016)

about by “fabulous coincidences” (Kracauer 1960, p. 19), such as witnessing the ephemeral presence of the rainbow in the video component of Fig. 3.6b, enhances the film spectator’s feeling of connection with the larger realm of human experience. Second, the evocative titles in Fig. 3.6d, such as “I feel the deaths in Paris, Orlando and Istanbul,5 and anywhere in the world”, elicit our empathy with the suffering of others; the film tries to take this feeling-oriented route to remind the spectators that they are more connected with each other than their intellect can ever grasp. Third, the 60 photos that run through the length of the short film are not verbally identified, unlike the video component that is labelled as having been shot in Fukuoka, Japan. The purpose of withholding the geographic sources of these images is to let them—in their fundamental state as taken from material reality—interact with the others, particularly the other photographically-based component, the video footage, in a way that fosters their resonance with each other, notwithstanding that the sets of photos and video footage happen to come from different countries. In other words, although these photos were all shot in a particular city, when they are experienced in the context of the four-component Study Three: Floating Notes (2016) they feel more universal. The spectators begin to grasp how these components intertwine with the other elements to invoke the Lebenswelt—intuitively understood as beyond geographical boundaries—that brings us all together as belonging to what Kracauer calls the “The Family of Man” (1960, p. 309), or to use a more familiar term, humanity, 5 These refer to the Orlando nightclub shooting on 12 June 2016, the Istanbul airport bomb explosions

on 28 June 2016, and the Paris attacks in the same year. Note that one of the elements within the photograph component at this point is a street sign that indicates currency: $, ¥, £, and e. This match between the photograph and the evocative text is designed to allude to the convertibility of human experience; although we use different currencies, and although tragedies happen in different places, their essence is the same.

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the essence of the collection of human beings. Finally, the soundtrack of the film makes the spectator feel connected with the other modern subjects—in Japan, Hong Kong, or in any other place—who hear the metro train’s interior soundscape as they go to work or travel to meet friends for leisure. This familiar sound evokes feelings, for example, of resonant connection with other workers during the morning rush, or that of longing to travel far to explore new worlds and experiences—for instance, Figure 3.6c, in which the sound of the metro train concurrently transpires with the impressionistic photo of the metro train (Hong Kong, work) and the video of the boat on which we see shadows of the trees above (Japan, travel). The director decided to make this metro train sound asynchronous by not showing its corresponding video component so that it would stand on its own as a valid component in the short film’s four-component structure and stand out as a sensory element that summons its own disinterested consideration. As a whole, the perceptually rich experience in this film—with all four components contributing to the symphony—provides multiple interpretations, which also manifest the manifold nature of the intersubjective Lebenswelt; indeed, “‘a film that is not open to interpretation”, according to the great poetic documentary filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff, “is a dead film” (Barnouw 1983, p. 187). Kracauer observed that because of their indeterminate nature, “film shots are particularly fit to function as an ignition spark” (1960, p. 165); that is, these indeterminate shots may induce “chain reactions in the movie-goer—a flight of associations which no longer revolve around their original source arise from his agitated inner environment” (p. 165). The phenomenological appearances of the so-called ignition sparks can hardly be predicted, since they are predicated upon the individual differences among spectators, but the film can foster the possibility of their formation by optimizing cinematic complexity, as Study Three has attempted to demonstrate. The subject matter of Study Ten: Under the Bridge (9 min and 4 s, shot in the United States) is the Lebenswelt as a thing of beauty. This film makes visible and foregrounds the “meaningful formations” (Aitken 2016, p. 20) of the natural shapes, patterns, and configurations of movement that busy commuters often ignore. The result is a disinterested apperception of the natural environment along the Cedar River in Washington State during the late winter of 2017. The film was shot from dusk until complete sundown, when the camera could no longer capture any image; the director regarded this aspect—visible only through the gradual shift from relative light (first row of Fig. 3.7) to relative dark (second row)—as one of the natural elements that the film contemplates. The film’s pairing of the natural occurrence of entering the night phase with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Op. 84 dramatizes the flow of cinematic images; the effect is a representation of the Lebenswelt as a product of a background intelligence that is capable of creative and not merely functional design. For Kracauer, a photographic or cinematic image is “necessarily indeterminate because it is bound to convey unshaped nature itself, nature in its inscrutability” (1960, p. 20). The meaningful formations in the film manifest a compelling sense of organic design: the reflections, shadows, and ripples in Fig. 3.7a, c; the silhouettes of the vein-like tree branches in Fig. 3.7,. e; the night and nature engulfing the bridge in the last image, Fig. 3.7f; and finally, the tree roots that form a figure that suggests

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Fig. 3.7 Study Ten: Under the Bridge (2017)

a person lying down with legs partially crossed in Fig. 3.7b. The apparent enigma of nature makes the meaningful formations that are revealed in Study Ten: Under the Bridge more salient for the film spectator; as Kracauer declared, films like this “invite us to absorb them; they seem to be elements of a sustained inquiry” (1960, p. 279).

The Flow of Life The subject matter of Study Eight: Intercity (12 min and 16 s, shot in mainland China and the United States) is the Lebenswelt as relating to essences. In this film, the shots alternate between two cities that are thousands of miles apart—Shenzhen 深圳 and Seattle—and sequence them to cover four essential (relating to essences) clusters of city life: the mundane, the sustaining, the sharing, and the conjuring. By cinematically engaging in this kind of distillation of essences, this film demonstrates how the spectator can contemplate the city where he/she resides—or any other place for that matter—in terms of its essences. This cinematic exercise in pondering the alternating flow of elements from material reality to extract essences of city life is a stepping-stone to the intuitive understanding of the Lebenswelt as relating to essences. The “stream of material situations and happenings” (Kracauer 1960, p. 72) rendered by the cinematic film—as exemplified in Fig. 3.8—stimulates a “continuous influx of the psychophysical correspondences” (p. 72) for the film spectator, thus suggesting “a reality which may fittingly be called ‘life’” (p. 72). The psychophysical correspondences in this film start from “the mundane” cluster that is part of the flow of life. Initially, the spectator, conditioned by the modern condition to see differences more than similarities, is drawn to the elements that mark the alternating shots as belonging to different cities, such as the language of street signs. Figure 3.8, for instance, shows Shenzhen in the left column and Seattle in the right. As early as the end of this first cluster, however, the shots gravitate more towards the physical

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Fig. 3.8 Study Eight: Intercity (2017)

similarities between the two cities: the full shot, for example, in Fig. 3.8b, maintaining cinematic continuity, could have very well been immediately cut from the wide shot in Fig. 3.8a. The continuous flow of a multitude of cinematic shots taken from the matrix of material reality of the two cities remains in the active minds of the spectators; in their consciousness, these images are then combined and recombined as they come to terms with the cinematic experience. The film enhances the coming together of the two geographically distinct cities by taking a route that emphasizes the shared human experience of the Lebenswelt, which, as mentioned earlier, is beyond geographical boundaries. The second and third clusters are of this route. The two images of the second row of Fig. 3.8 come

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from the cluster of “the sustaining”. While the language markers are still present, the film spectators begin to recognize the similarity between the two shots because they connect on the more basic level of the universal human need to eat for survival, as exemplified by the fast food restaurants in Fig. 3.8c, d. The two images in the third row of Fig. 3.8 follow the same path, the connection here being the human need for a place in the city that reinforces our shared experience as human beings, thus belonging to “the sharing” cluster of the flow of life. This takes the form of the temple as a place for the shared experience of praying in the third row (Fig. 3.8e) and the Space Needle in Fig. 3.8f as a symbol of the shared identity and history of the people of Seattle. The last cluster of the flow of life as cinematically rendered in Study Eight: Intercity (2017) is “the conjuring”. At this point in the film the cinematic images evoke more of the Lebenswelt in the thin sense (essences): the flickering beams of sunlight passing through the leaves blown by the wind, producing a delicately sublime visual effect, in the last row of Fig. 3.8 (left image); and the aerial shot of the city as snow flurries silently fall in Fig. 3.8h (right). These images shore each other up to conjure the human yearning to reflect on not only city life but the very essences of life itself, and its flow that includes, but not limited to, human experience. Ultimately, this film is an invitation to the spectators, who are ineluctably part of the modern condition, to be sensitive to the essences of city life and the greater sphere of the Lebenswelt – in the thin sense, the realm of essences. The subject matter of Study Five: 雨/Rain (14 min and 1 s, shot in Hong Kong) is the Lebenswelt as cyclical. This film follows one cycle of the rain phenomenon: from its portending (Fig. 3.9, first row) to its materializing (second row) and subsiding (third row). An immanent by-product of this cinematic coverage, through the “stream of material situations and happenings” (Kracauer 1960, p. 72) that unfolds on screen,

Fig. 3.9 Study Five: 雨/Rain (2016)

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is the portrayal of the flow of life. The film covers the rain brought about by Typhoon Nida that raised the signal number 8 (the highest being 10, which indicates a hurricane) on 1 August 2016 in a sober manner, reflecting the relaxed attitude of the city dwellers who are confident that the infrastructure of Hong Kong is equipped to handle natural phenomena such as typhoons. The film’s meditative depiction of rain also intimates the viewers’ latent sense of excitement whenever they collectively anticipate the coming of the natural phenomenon to temporarily slow down the pace of city life. Through its continuous flow of images, the film meditates on the sense of silent awe in witnessing the natural phenomenon as a manifestation of the sublime, for instance through the portending feeling evoked by the rippling of the normallystill waters in Fig. 3.9b and the dog that seems to forecast the coming of a storm in Fig. 3.9c. The complex mixture of awe and fear of the manifesting typhoon is cinematically rendered in the first image of the second row, Figure 3.9d, which depicts a person with an umbrella enduring the downpour and an orange trash bin blasted by the wind. The rain presents profound opportunities for disinterested rumination, such as the droplets on the window (second image of the second row, Figure 3.9e), and, as the rain subsides, the image of the diminishing rain clouds by the peak of the mountain (Fig. 3.9f). The mixture of fear and awe is again felt in the aftermath of the storm, as represented by the uprooted tree in Fig. 3.9g, the first image of the third row. The end of the cycle in this event, which is just one element in the vast web of happenings in the Lebenswelt, is the clean-up procedure (Fig. 3.9h, second image of the third row) as the city rushes to return to its regular flow of life, but the film does not end there, as it continues to provide images of the remnants, such as the puddle that reflects the return of the sunshine, while at the same time showing us the manhole cover below it—nature and technology in one shot (Fig. 3.9i, final figure of the third row).

The Spiritual Life Itself The Lebenswelt is “laden with meaning for persons who live together in the world and who confer “spiritual” meaning on it” (Russell 2006, p. 195); that is, “the world is for us first a world of valuable and useful objects, not ‘mere things’” (p. 195). Kracauer argued that the film medium, due to its ability to kindle “the experience of a large number and multiplicity of sense perceptions” (Aitken 2006, p. 166) for the film spectator, can initiate “some kind of qualitative transformation which occurs within the individual observer as a consequence of undergoing such an experience” (p. 166). This sense of transcendence was the basis for Study Four: Resilient Textures (20 min and 15 s, shot in Vietnam), whose subject matter is the Lebenswelt as transcendent. This film undertakes a simulation of the “rich complexity of immediate experience” (Aitken 2001, p. 178); that is, through camera movement that is gradual, fluid, and organically directed, it portrays the perceptual encounter with richly complex

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Fig. 3.10 Study Four: Resilient Textures (2016)

textures, shapes, and patterns of the spiritually-inspired sculptures that are immediately experienced as objects of contemplation, as seen in the entire first row of Fig. 3.10 and the first three images in the second row (Fig. 3.10e, f, and g). The film continues to invoke the notion of transcendence by manifesting objects that are used in rituals across diverse cultures such as the array of lit joss sticks that exude fragrance (Fig. 3.10h, last row of the second row) and places for prayer such as the Marble Mountains cave temple in Da Nang, Vietnam, seen in the third row of Fig. 3.10, wherein the shapes of the sculptures blend with the patterns of the natural formations of the cave. Study Four: Resilient Textures promotes the intuitive understanding of the Lebenswelt as transcendent, an offshoot of our individual consciousness as “consciousness of something transcendent to itself” (Russell 2006, p. 18). This transcendence is the basis of what Kracauer called “the spiritual life itself” (1960, p. 309). This accounts for the common human feeling of yearning to connect with something bigger than ourselves, which, in turn, conjoins us with other living beings: an invariant feature, or essence, of the human experience. Although some of the images in Fig. 3.10 can be identified as belonging to particular religious traditions, the film focuses on their essential features by highlighting their oneness with nature, such as the first three images in the last row of Fig. 3.10, from the glorious clouds (Fig. 3.10m) to the clear blue sky (Fig. 3.10n) to the radiance of the sun beaming (Fig. 3.10o) through the trees. Kracauer’s idea of “the spiritual life itself” (1960, p. 309) is “a mode of being characterized by revelatory insight, of a secular rather than religious tenor” (Whitehead, qtd. in Aitken 2006, p. 166). To illustrate this point, when Kracauer pronounced that “the physical is endowed with meanings which do emanate from it and which may indeed be spiritual” (1975, p. 76), he was referring to concrete experience as interlacing with the transcendent; thus, the

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familiar perceptual experience of witnessing the “radiance of the sunset”6 (Kracauer 1960, p. 296) (Fig. 3.10p, the final image) can lead us, the film spectators, to envisage our “place within a Lebenswelt which is also ineluctably linked to external reality” (Aitken 2016, p. 16). The subject matter of Study Six: Return Home (14 min, shot in Indonesia and Hong Kong) is the Lebenswelt as meaning-laden. The film anchors its subject matter to the intuitive idea of home. The notion of home is dynamic; it varies – but can hardly be fully predicted—based on one’s relationship with the material of the shelter, village/city, or homeland, and the psychophysical correspondences and flight of associations that they elicit, such as safety, family, identity, community, or nation. The dream-like Study Six—involving physical objects presented in mixtures of black-andwhite and color, still photos and videos—is profound but not out-of-this-world since all its images come from the experience of everyday life; indeed, “among all possible realities—dreams, sleep, imagination, and many more—the world of everyday life takes center stage” (Ayaß 2017, p. 519). When the spectators encounter the title of the film, their expectation is that this film will delve into the theme of going back home; they then ask themselves, while contemplating the images in the film, what or where is home? Indeed, Husserl’s phenomenological approach regards the life-world as “not something over and against the subject” (Gander 2017, p. 116); thus, the “clarification of the connection of life can only take place in the form of a self-contemplation or self-enlightenment” (p. 116). The film, drawing on the continuum of physical existence, emanates images that are not easy to pin down but elicit intrigue among the spectators who recognize them as either part of their own worlds or within the realm of the experienceable. This experimental film is like a puzzle that engages one’s notion of home. The first row of Fig. 3.11 exhibits one layer of Study Six: Return Home, which is the physical action of going home through a combination of various modes of transportation: by car, in Indonesia (Fig. 3.11a); by bike rickshaw, also in Indonesia (Fig. 3.11b), by airplane, as suggested by the boarding gate in Singapore airport (Fig. 3.11c), and by boat, at the Sai Kung Public Pier in Hong Kong (Fig. 3.11d). Kracauer noted that films that “cover vast expanses of physical reality” (1960, p. 64), like travelogues or films involving travel, as is the case of the film being discussed here, certainly have “a cinematic flavor, provided they sustain the impression of traveling and show real concern for the far-distant places that they picture in the process” (p. 64); one such example is the first row of Fig. 3.11, the transportation sequence from Indonesia to Hong Kong. This film is characterized by the pairing of the black-and-white— to highlight the formal qualities of the image in terms of shape and movement— transportation sequence with the colored photographs that are interjected throughout the length of the film. The experimental use of the photography component in this film is intended to interrogate the meaning of home and to produce an insight on 6 Whitehead’s entire text reads, “When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere

and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality” (1925, p. 199).

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Fig. 3.11 Study Six: Return Home (2016)

the interaction between the photo and video elements in this bifurcating setup. The clusters of images in the film are laden with meaning for the director, but since all of them are from physical reality where the spectators also “live in”, these cinematic images serve as jumping-off points for them to form their own meaning. This sort of cinematic experience is akin to how an encounter with the “concrete richness of the material art object” (Aitken 2016, p. 21) profoundly engages the beholder as it also continues to do so for the artist. Both artist and viewer have their respective contours of meaning for the artworks; when those meanings match, it is good; but if they do not, this can also be more interesting, because the art object can be considered as a constellation that bears “elements of a sustained inquiry” (Kracauer 1960, p. 279). Compared with the preceding discussions, the ensuing section takes a different approach. The explication in this section involves the filmmaker’s own subjectivity, particularly implicating his personal memories, because he initially designed the selection and assembly of the images in Study Six: Return Home to be grounded on the particulars of his own experience. However, since all of these materials are sourced from the physical reality that he shares with the spectators, the final engagement with the film is of a public nature, true to the medium. As demonstrated by the previous illustrations, the pattern of cinematic engagement in the KCR film moves from the “below” (physical reality) to the “above” (shared essences recognizable by the experiencers); the same applies to the following discussion on Study Six, whose images represent physical existence, albeit initially predicated upon the point of view of a single person. Before we proceed, it should be noted that although the next few sentences will be personally revelatory, the film itself does not overtly exhibit the details that the reader is about to gather. The film was designed to be both indeterminate and impressionistic. If the reader were to watch it without reading this section first, its indeterminacy would be optimized; however, since the reader will have read

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the following introduction before viewing the film, his/her spectatorial experience would be enriched. The indeterminate character of the film explains why, when it was publicly screened on 7 April 2017, it was the one among the ten short films that generated the most responses from the spectators, many of whom had their own interestingly varying interpretations of it. It was as though each of them took the impressionistic flow of images as “ingredients” in coming to terms with their own experience of the film; the spectators had diverse ways of “owning” the theme of the film, which is “home”, the concern for which is an invariant feature (essence) of human experience. The second row of Fig. 3.11 shows the photographic interjections that flesh out various visual aspects of Hong Kong, which the director considers home: a residential building in Fig. 3.11e; street food in Fig. 3.11f; university grounds in Fig. 11g; and a leisurely ferry ride to an outlying island in Fig. 3.11h. The third row of Fig. 3.11 preserves in memory the director’s various travels: the traditional way of making beef balls, as he witnessed in Shenzhen (Fig. 3.11i); a perceptual experience inside the Shenzhen metro train (Fig. 3.11j); his first time to see a bamboo mountain in Hunan 湖南 Province, China (Fig. 3.11k); and a tea farm, also in Hunan (Fig. 3.11l). The first three images in the last row of Fig. 3.11 continue to exhibit his memories of traveling: an arcade in Fukuoka, Japan (Fig. 3.11m); a perceptual experience inside a metro bus also in Fukuoka (Fig. 3.11n); and the sight of another bike rickshaw, but this time carrying items for delivery, in Da Nang, Vietnam (Fig. 3.11o). These images demonstrate that the photographic medium has a strong affinity for preserving and activating memories; on the other hand, as suggested by the video track on which the photos interject, the cinematic footage gravitates more towards the liveness of the ongoing action—in this case, taking different modes of transportation with the objective of going home. The last image (Fig. 3.11p) is of the Supermoon phenomenon that the filmmaker shot on 14 November 2016, a few weeks after he returned to Hong Kong after his trip to Indonesia to shoot the video component of this film. This final image is laden with meaning for the director because the moon appearing particularly large in the sky due to the coincidental concordance of its closest approach to the earth sparks within him the insight that what home means to him is the world, which points to preponderant spheres such as the Lebenswelt. For the reader, this is a demonstration of one instance of “owning” the cinematic experience. Once the reader watches the film, he/she will also have his/her own way of comprehending this impressionistically indeterminate cinematic work; it is worth indicating, though, that this process of interpretation is not free for all, since the intersubjectively distilled essences of “home”, “homing”, “homelessness”, or “athome-in-the-world”, as suggested in the film title, serve as prospective anchor points in the resultant cinematic discourse on Study Six: Return Home. Kracauer declared that films “help us not only appreciate our given material environment but to extend it in all directions. They virtually make the world our home” (1960, p. 304). As the film demonstrates, the cinematic experience is able to foster a feeling of homing amongst people who have developed an intuitive awareness of the meaning-laden Lebenswelt, which is shared by all, regardless of race, gender, religion, nationality, or other classifications. This resonates with Kracauer’s idea of “the spiritual life itself”

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(p. 309) that can open a universe of possibilities “for reflecting and endorsing the actual rapprochement between the peoples of the world” (Kracauer 1960, p. 310).

Conclusion The research-based filmmaking project Life-world Series (2017) is a two-pronged phenomenological investigation of the notion of the Lebenswelt and the aesthetics of Kracauerian cinematic realism as anchored in five KCR tropes: the quotidian, the fortuitous, the indeterminate, the flow of life, and the spiritual life itself. The engagement of the ten component short films with the five KCR tropes shaped the aesthetics of these works and yielded the following set of invariant features (essences) of the Lebenswelt as expansive, multi-layered, flowing, in the process of becoming, resonantly intersubjective, a thing of beauty, relating to essences, cyclical, transcendent, and meaning-laden. Since these KCR tropes are “aspects of reality” (Aitken 2001, p. 175) and the notion of the Lebenswelt, as per Aitken (2006), is a “key to understanding Kracauer’s assertion that ‘physical reality’ can be redeemed through cinema” (Wils 2016, p. 76), it follows that Kracauerian film practice, as embodied by the Life-world Series (2017), requires an active concern with physical reality and a profound contemplation of both reality and the Lebenswelt. As this chapter demonstrates, the use of film practice in investigating KCR entailed not only applying the KCR tropes as aesthetics for the film project, but also acquiring a working knowledge of Husserlian phenomenology, especially its notion of the Lebenswelt in both its thick and thin senses. Subsequent studies of Kracauerian cinematic realism should give the final trope, that of the spiritual life itself, more attention, as it can stand on its own and deal with critical research on film philosophy, cineaste groups, or film festivals. Future studies should also be conducted to assess how the KCR aesthetics and theory that emerged during the age of celluloid applies to the age of the digital. This kind of interdisciplinary study that intersects film theory and media studies will definitely enrich the larger study of cinematic realism as an important research thread in film studies. Another suggestion is to use filmmaking as a tool in phenomenological investigations in the social sciences. While video recording has been used in ethnography and visual anthropology, its purpose has been relegated to that of documentation. Drawing on the case of Life-world Series that investigated the Lebenswelt—in both the disciplines of film studies (humanities) and philosophy—film practice can also be used by social scientists who study social theories or cultural phenomena and their intersections with philosophy. Finally, this chapter recommends further study on the pedagogical applications of the Kracauerian realist film. Students can be assigned to make short films such as those in Life-world Series, and as with this collection, upload their own works online to reach a wider audience; then, in the classroom, they can engage, and be engaged, in discussions about film aesthetics, cinematic-realist theory, and philosophy. Film exercises such as these are good starting points in documentary and experimental film courses; in addition, since discourses on realism are

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located at the very essence of cinema, even introductory courses on film can also benefit from this type of realist filmmaking activity. Acknowledgement The research that led to the current book chapter was supported in part by the University of the Philippines through the PhD Incentive Award given to the author.

References Aitken, I. (1998). Introduction. In I. Aitken (Ed.), The documentary film movement, an anthology (pp. 1–68). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aitken, I. (2001). European film theory and cinema: A critical introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aitken, I. (2006). Realist film theory and cinema: The nineteenth-century Lukácsian and intuitionist realist traditions. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Aitken, I. (2007). Physical reality: The role of the empirical in the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, John Grierson, André Bazin and Georg Lukács. Studies in Documentary Film, 1(2), 105–121. Aitken, I. (2016). Introduction. In I. Aitken (Ed.), The major realist film theorists: A critical anthology (pp. 1–40). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Armstrong, R. (2007, January 1). Siegfried Kracauer. Metro (Melbourne) (pp. 62–66). Ayaß, R. (2017). Life-world, sub-worlds, after-worlds: The various ‘realnesses’ of multiple realities. Human Studies, 40(4), 519–542. Gander, H. (2017). Self-understanding and lifeworld: Basic traits of a phenomenological hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilloch, G. (2015). Siegfried Kracauer: Our companion in misfortune (key contemporary thinkers). Oxford: Wiley. Hansen, M. B. (1997). Introduction. In Kracauer, S. (Ed.). Theory of film: The redemption of physical reality (pp. vii–xlv). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Herzog, W. (Writer & Dir.). (2005). Grizzly man [Motion Picture]. Kracauer, S. (1960). Theory of film: The redemption of physical reality. London, New York, & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kracauer, S. (1975). The mass ornament. New German Critique, 5, 67–76. Richter, G. (1997). Siegfried Kracauer and the folds of friendship. The German Quarterly, 70(3), 233–246. Russell, M. (2006). Husserl: A guide for the perplexed. London and New York: Continuum. Sieg, C. (2010). Beyond realism: Siegfried Kracauer and the ornaments of the ordinary. New German Critique, 37(1), 99–118. Whitehead, A. N. (1925). Science and the modern world. New York: New American Library. Wils, T. (2016). Phenomenology, theology and “physical reality”: The film theory realism of Siegfried Kracauer. In I. Aitken (Ed.), The major realist film theorists: A critical anthology (pp. 67–80). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chapter 4

Cinematic Surrealism of the Interactive Virtual Space David Kei-Man Yip

Introduction If in the early twentieth century, Expressionism expressed the artist’s vision and conscious feelings about a subject, its succeeding movement a decade later took one step deeper into the inner mind of the artist by expressing his/her subconscious thoughts, desires, and dream. Begun in France in the late 1910s, Surrealism was first a literary movement and then a major art movement that lasted through the late 1940s. Surrealism is defined as “pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, or otherwise, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral considerations” (Breton 1924, p. 75). This art movement liberated the subconscious and “challenges the viewer to embrace the world of the marvelous, the dream, the abject and the irrational” (Creed 2007, p. 115). Surrealists made no distinction between fantasy and reality; if it could be imagined, it existed. Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) strongly influenced the movement of surrealism. Freud believed that dream was a direct path to the subconscious. In the development of a dream, more fragmented dream thoughts were subconsciously and randomly condensed together to form dreamlike images or “dream-content”, which “includes disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches and even bits of unmodified thoughts” (Freud 1952). These fragmented thoughts and images were often drawn from desires, memories and life experiences, which gradually formed our subconscious. As the result of this random effect of condensation process, “dream-content” was disconnected and irrational. Freud’s theory was an important step in the development of surrealism, as it provided a basis

D. K.-M. Yip (B) The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_4

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to inspire surrealist artists to visualize the subconscious beyond logic and reason through painting dream-like images. Highly influenced by Freudian psychology, surrealism sought to bring the subconscious mind to visual life. Surrealists adopted Freudian methods of free association by juxtaposing unrelated and disproportional images. Optical illusions with distorted shapes and forms were used to express abstract concepts of the irrational and the enigma of the painter’s desire and fear, which revealed the mystery and hidden secrets of the artist’s subconscious. Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.—Salvador Dalí

The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was considered a pioneer of the new wave of illusionistic surrealism. This project began by carefully examining Dalí’s most important and influential works in hopes of finding creative inspiration and guiding principles for the next stage into the digital re-production of surrealism.

Project Aims Digital technology allows us to expand surrealism cinematically and beyond two dimensions by digitally “re-making” some of Salvador Dalí’s paintings and putting them in a virtual environment. This creative synthesis of art and technology gave surrealism a new digital treatment that allowed us to expand our creative imagination and enrich our cinematic experience. As a work of digital humanities (Lugmayr and Teras 2015), Surrealism in 4D offered users a new immersive experience in a surreal dream through digital animation and interactivity. It added a new important interactive feature or dimension to similar precedent work on digital surrealism that did not have the interactive feature, such as Dreams of Dalí, featured in the Dalí Museum. By creating a surreal dream in a virtual environment in the style of Salvador Dalí, this project invited the user to become an “active creative dreamer” who could interact with and re-shape objects in the virtual dream. The project presented a paradox between the subconscious act of being in a dream and the conscious act of interaction within the dream, inviting the user to be creative in a subconscious dream world.

Research Questions This project attempts to transport a single user into a virtual dream world that, according to Freudian psychology and theory of surrealism, forms a path to the subconscious. It follows the tradition of many works of surrealism that questioned our perceptions of reality and challenges the blurry lines between dream, fantasy,

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and reality. Virtual reality technology allows users to experience these thin lines by being immersed in these realms themselves. In the process of researching concepts of surrealism and patterns of surrealist images, the first important step was to study the creative concepts and techniques that went into the making of surrealist paintings and other art forms such as surrealist cinema. This was important in selecting what surrealist images would be used and how interactivity could enhance and not contradict the project’s surreal qualities. In the later stage of the production process, the second key question was about the implications of this digital treatment of surrealism when these concepts and techniques were translated into 3D and, later, 4D media with interactive functions; in other words, how and whether the newly added digital treatment could serve the surrealist tradition as intended, and how the new digital treatment of surrealism could enhance the surreal qualities of the new digital images rather than disrupting or contradicting them. To answer these questions, we can begin with the understanding of the conscious and rational styles and techniques surrealist painters used to visualize the subconscious. At their first meeting, Freud said to Dalí, “It is not the unconscious I seek in your pictures, but the conscious… your mystery is manifested outright. The picture is but a mechanism to reveal itself” (Ades 1974, p. 49). These two questions remained the key research questions throughout the creative and production process of this Surrealism in 4D project.

Double Imagery and Optical Illusion One of the techniques often seen in Dalí’s early paintings was his use of double imagery, which was considered his paranoiac-critical method involving discrediting and distorting reality through optical illusion (Seckel 2004). Double imagery was actually a process of composing multiple layers of visual images to “systematize confusion”. I think the time is rapidly coming when it will be possible … to systematize confusion thanks to a paranoiac and active process of thought, and so assist in discrediting completely the world of reality.—Salvador Dalí

In 1938, Dalí used this method of double imagery technique in several of his paintings. Invisible Afghan with the Apparition and Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach shared similar styles of visual illusion, consisting of three key fragmented images overlapping and interlocking in similar composition. This instability, appearance of fragmented images, and unexpected juxtaposition of unrelated images produced an uncanny feeling and an enigmatic world of hidden secrets. Instead of double or triple images, the 1938 painting The Endless Enigma uses six different layers of images: a philosopher and a greyhound lying down, a mythological beast, the face of the great Cyclopean Cretin; a mandolin; a fruit dish with pears and figs on a table; and a woman seen from the back mending a sail. Dalí was fascinated

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Fig. 4.1 Surrealism in 4D

all his life with optical illusions. He believed that this method of “double images” not only added a mysterious dream-like quality to his work but also represented his creative process of visualizing subconscious thoughts and feelings (Fig. 4.1).

Optical Illusion and Gestalt Principles of Visual Perception Dali’s use of optical illusion created a new and startling experience for the viewers of his paintings. He rationalized their visual perception by controlling what he wanted his viewers to see through his multiple images in different layers. The viewers would then perceive the result as mysterious and surreal. His use of illusion relies on how people perceive visual information; it is consistent with our perception of the visual world, as the human brain has a unique ability to recognize forms, shapes, and patterns, as outlined in Gestalt psychology or principles of visual perception (Arnheim 1954) (Fig. 4.2). Developed in the 1920s, Gestalt theories of visual perception attempted to describe how people tend to organize visual elements in groups or unified wholes. According to Rudolf Arnheim, an influential theorist of perceptual psychology and art, visual perception “is not a passive recording of stimulus material but an active concern of the mind” (Arnheim 1969, p. 37) that is necessary for human survival (Fig. 4.3). Gestalt is a German word that loosely translates as “shape, form and likeness” or “unified whole”, indicating that the sum of all images is not perceived the same way when all other images are viewed separately: “The sum of images is greater than its parts.” Gestalt principles of visual perception are based on the organization and processing of visual information according to certain patterns such as symmetry, closure, similarity, proximity, and continuity (Stadler and Kruse 1990) (Fig. 4.4).

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Fig. 4.2 The Endless Enigma, 1938 (Courtesy of https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/allworks)

Fig. 4.3 Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages), 1940 (Courtesy of https://www.wikiart. org/en/salvador-dali/all-works)

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Fig. 4.4 Un Chien Andalou (1929) (Courtesy of https:// www.wikiart.org/en/sal vador-dali/all-works)

For instance, the law of similarity states that the mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. Such similarity may depend on relationships of form, shape, color, size, or brightness. The 1940 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire is one of the best examples of the law of similarity, as the images of the two Dutch women and the color and shape of their clothing were drawn and painted to match the facial composition of the Bust of Voltaire (Fig. 4.5). The law of closure states that our minds perceive things we do not see, and our perception actively seeks to complete the missing space or element in a regular figure; in other words, the mind tends to fill in the empty or negative space of a figure. The shape of a dog in Invisible Afghan with the Apparition and the shape of the forehead of the Bust of Voltaire are examples of how viewers use their imaginations to fill in spaces (Fig. 4.6). Fig. 4.5 Design for Spellbound Dream Sequence (Courtesy of https://www. wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/ all-works)

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Fig. 4.6 Different angles of Bernard Pras’ exhibition (Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= a7LCTT7HKzc)

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Fig. 4.7 Screenshot of Magritte’s door in Surrealism in 4D

Dalí’s 1940 painting Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages) uses a combination of the Gestalt laws of closure, similarity, and proximity to create feelings of mystery, secrets, and fear of aging (Fig. 4.7).

Dalí’s Melting Clock and His Concept of Time and Memory The most famous icon in Dalí’s paintings is the image of a melting clock, which symbolizes the ever-changing nature of time. Over the years, Dalí’s concept of time also changed (Ball 2008). Initially, he depicted and symbolized time with the presence of not just one but three melting clocks in his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory. The dominant figure in the painting is a decaying human face bounded by a melting clock. As the title indicates, the painting suggests that human memory persists against the erosion of time, symbolized by the melting of the clock as though a soft cheese is being melted by heat of the sun, representing the constant battle between time and memory. the soft clocks are nothing more than the paranoiac-critical, tender, extravagant, solitary, Camembert cheese abandoned by space and time … —Salvador Dalí

Dalí’s signature style of drawing melting and decaying objects is also seen in his 1940 painting Spider of the Evening, which expresses the artist’s fear of the devastation of World War II. The melting of a human body and other objects represented a decaying process and a feeling of vulnerability in time of war and suffering. In his later years, Dalí took an interest in physics, particularly Einstein’s Relativity theory, which presented a revolutionary view of time and space and their relationship. In the atomic era of the 1950s, his interest in the concept of time switched from an

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emotional one to a more scientific one, as shown in his re-vision of the melting clocks in his 1954 painting The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, with blocks of new elements drawn and arranged like blocks of atoms. Dalí had found his new inspiration in the natural science of quantum physics, within which the atomic phenomenon could produce similar magical and dream-like qualities for a new style of surrealism.

Surrealist Cinema The influence of surrealism rapidly moved from painting to film, as the latter is a more powerful visual medium in which surrealist artists can experiment with the blurred lines between dream, fantasy, and reality with moving images and the spacetime structure (King 2010). Considered the most important avant-garde and surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), directed by Luis Buñuel and his close friend Salvador Dalí, shocked audiences with its illogical narrative structure and graphic imagery. Buñuel and Dalí created a series of fragmented dream-like image sequences devoid of typical conventions of plot, shocking viewers with their expressions of inner desires, fantasies, and phobias. The most iconic and disturbing sequence features a man slicing a woman’s eye open with a razor blade (Ferguson 2016), intercutting to clouds slicing across the moon at night with a quick cut of the continuous action of the razor blade cutting across the eye of a cow. This shocking image of cutting up an eyeball appeared again in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 murder mystery film Spellbound, for which he collaborated with Salvador Dalí to create the famous dream sequence, filled with rich iconic surrealist images, to symbolize the main character’s traumas and phobias. The film tells the story of a mysterious man with double identities and a haunting past that caused him to suffer from memory and identity loss, with deadly consequences. The film explores themes that were central to Freud’s work, such as the distinction between the conscious and the subconscious that can only be made accessible through hypnosis and dream analysis. In the film, the main character’s trauma was later revealed and healed through psychoanalysis, a therapy treatment of hypnosis and dream analysis founded by Sigmund Freud. Although Freud believed that dream-content was the fragmented association of random dream-thoughts, this dream-content is often highly coded with hidden meanings of one’s deep desires and lost memories. He believed that understanding how dreams developed was a key to understanding how many psychological traumas, anxiety disorders, and phobias developed within the human brain: “Dream-work is … responsible for the generation of hysterical symptoms, of phobias, obsessions and delusions” (Freud 1963, p. 83). Freud believed that what people remembered when they woke up hid meanings that might be revealed by the dreamer’s associations through psychoanalysis. Alfred Hitchcock embodied this idea in the dream sequence of Spellbound, designed by Salvador Dalí.

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The Dream Sequence of Spellbound—Dalí Paintings in Motion The dream sequence of Hitchcock’s Spellbound is an example of surrealism in 2D motion; it is also Salvador Dalí’s hallucinatory approach to visualizing Freud’s psychoanalysis. The dream, a path to the main character’s traumas, phobias and self-inflicted guilt in his subconscious, began with a group of eyes symbolizing the main character’s helpless feeling of being watched or spied on, as well as his selfinflicted guilt at the subconscious level. The sequence then leads into a gambling hall with eye curtains being cut by an oversized pair of scissors. The cutting through an eye was similar to the famous eye-cutting image in Un Chien Andalou (1929), which shocked its audience with similar imagery, for which there was no logical narrative explanation. Dalí used this image again in Hitchcock’s film, but this time it had a clear logical storyline and narrative purpose, which was to reflect the main character’s traumas. The rest of the dream sequence expanded Dalí’s signature style from paintings to cinematic form by juxtaposing disproportional moving figures and optical illusions with distorted forms and shapes to express the inner traumas and guilt of the dreamer. In addition to Dalí’s paintings, the iconic images in Un Chien Andalou could also be found in his only animated project in collaboration with Walt Disney. Destino was unique in that its production originally began in 1945, fifty-eight years before its eventual completion. The film told a simple love story about a girl in search of her lost love as she danced through many surreal and magical scenery inspired by Dalí’s paintings. His signature images of melting clocks, eyeballs, and ants crawling out of a hand could be seen in the film, with his style and themes clearly recognizable throughout. Previously, Dalí had used images of ants to symbolize death, decay, and sometimes also overwhelming sexual desire, though the recurrences of ants and other insects in Dalí’s paintings may also have been inspired by his own personal phobia of insects.

Discussion of the Findings and Their Implications The two research questions asked in this chapter focus on how research on surrealism and the works of Salvador Dalí informed the creative development and production of this 4D project. Three findings were identified and served as the guiding principles in digitally re-constructing the surreal dream world: the use of optical illusion, the use of iconic dream-like motifs to visualize the subconscious, and a homage to surrealist cinema. Surrealists were interested in visualizing the uncanny subconscious, and they believed that dreams were a path to the subconscious. Optical illusions that trick and sometimes shock our visual perception are often used in surrealist paintings to evoke mystery through pattern recognition and organization. One of the relevant techniques

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often used in surrealism is double imagery, in which meanings are hidden in the juxtaposition of layers of images and revealed by breaking down these layers. However, this technique works best on a two-dimensional plane with a forced perspective. The sole perspective of a 2D surreal painting gives the viewers no alternative perspective on the optical illusion. However, when it is transformed into a 3D world with no fixed perspective, this optical illusion becomes harder to discover in a virtual world with boundless angles and perspectives. An example of a real-life three-dimensional optical illusion that emerges from multiple unrelated imagery can be seen in Bernard Pras’ depiction of Ferdinand Cheval. Pras used forced perspective to create this impressive optical illusion: what looked like a portrait of the man at first glance was actually made up of many everyday objects and pieces of junk, including rusted chairs, a busted guitar, a old wheelbarrow, and an ugly couch, precisely put together to deceive the viewers. Only when the viewer stands in just the right spot does the pile appear as the perfect likeness of a French postman, Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924), who spent 33 years building Le Palais Idéal in France. Without a fixed perspective in a virtual world of boundless perspectives and angles, locating this optical illusion can be a difficult task. This can add a new level of challenge for a user to identify the hidden imagery, especially when the optical effect is purposely placed below a typical human eye level. Since surrealism is meant to evoke a sense of mystery, this optical illusion placed in a new digital platform was particularly appropriate. However, if the optical effect is intended to be discovered by an especially observant user, the position of the hidden double imagery should be placed with a visual clue or hint that allows the users to locate it for themselves.

The Dream Worlds of Dalí and Magritte Surrealists like Salvador Dalí also use dream-like images as visual motifs to symbolize the subconscious; for example, the iconic image of the melting clock to symbolize decay, insects to symbolize fear, and eyeballs to symbolize hallucination and hypnosis. Seen in many surrealist paintings and cinema, the image of eyeballs has long been an uncanny iconic symbol of surrealism, as the eye is considered a window to the soul and subconscious. In visualizing a dream world of the inner mind that is different from reality, would the laws of physics in the real world apply to the dream world? If a metal clock could be melted and deformed on its own like a melting cheese in the dream world, would other dream-like images obey the laws of physics in this virtual world? Many of Dalí’s paintings did not seem to defy the law of gravity. However, his works show inspiration from the paintings of another surrealist legend, René Magritte (1898–1967), whose dream world is free from the physical constraint of the real world. Both Dalí and Magritte were influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis and used optical illusions by juxtaposing unrelated dream-like images to evoke mystery. However, the major difference between them was that Magritte used everyday objects

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in simple, unusual and sometimes repetitive context. Many of his best-known paintings, such as Personal Values (1952), juxtaposed familiar everyday objects to achieve dream-like optical illusions. If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.— René Magritte

Many of Magritte’s surreal paintings not only presented optical illusion through spatial ambiguity, but also depicted a dream world without gravity. In works such as Golconda (1953) or The Castle of the Pyrenees (1952), weight ambiguity enhances the surreal quality of his paintings, implying that motion in the dream world does not need to obey the law of gravity. A user of a VR project could consciously interact with objects without necessarily being subject to the laws of physics in a surreal dream world. In Magritte’s dream world, big floating rocks can appear in mid-air, and naturally one should be able to easily lift such a rock up and put it down because of the rock’s weightless quality. However, the distance between the floating rock and the user’s position should make it impossible for the user to even touch the rock from such a faraway distance. The question of space and distance perspective in this virtual and surreal world is an important issue in this project. How real should the senses of space and distance be when other physical constraints or laws of physics such as weight and gravity have already been broken? Should the interaction be made with some degree of believability? At the end of the day, it was also decided that this surrealism project should have the creative license to break free from all the physical constraints of the real world. At the end, the user can move the floating rock even though he/she is “actually” standing many meters away. Likewise, aside from interaction, another important feature in virtual reality is the ability of the user to transport or teleport him/herself from one space to another space as though using the transporter in Star Trek. Some sorts of “affordance” (Dalgarno and Lee 2010; Shin 2017) are needed to indicate this purpose. Like the eyeball motif found in many of Dalí’s paintings, symbolizing a path to one’s inner subconscious, one of the common motifs found in Magritte’s paintings is the door, which can symbolize a path to another space. Within the very confined moving space for VR users in the real world, the ability to transport or teleport the users from one space to another through Magritte’s door in the virtual world has become part of the interaction in this project. Nevertheless, the challenge of converting these surrealist paintings into a 3D virtual environment is that many of Magritte’s paintings depict the world in a flat space without clear perspective. In converting objects from 2D space to a 3D VR environment, a new field of view must be set up in order to create a sense of distance in the VR world. Any setting different from what human eyes were used to would cause feelings of dizziness and weightlessness due to the false sense of distance. Test trials were necessary to correct this setting to fit the human eyes. Another interesting implication of Magritte’s paintings in the context of digital treatment or adaptation into virtual reality is that some of Magritte’s paintings were particularly unsuitable to be directly adapted into a 360-degree virtual environment. Doing so would apparently contradict the painter’s original intention to conceal

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certain visual information in order to arouse viewers’ curiosity and evoke mystery, as, for example, in The Son of Man (1964), in which a man’s face is purposely covered by an apple in the air. Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.—René Magritte

It was simply impossible and unethical to create the face behind the apple according to Magritte’s intention. Allowing a curious user the freedom and mobility to take a peek at the concealed face in the virtual environment would violate his original intention for this image; therefore, a conscious effort was made to remain as true as possible to the artist’s intention when digitally reconstructing these surreal images. By introducing “passively active” interaction between an object and the user’s position, the concealed face can be constantly covered by a moving object in passive response to the active movement of a curious user. This “passively active” interaction is particularly designed against the will of the user who tries to see the concealed face. The third and final finding of this project was the strong historical tie of surrealism with cinema, implicating the need to relate this VR project to cinematic tradition and heritage (Kateros et al. 2015; Champion 2016) This finding served as one of the guiding principles in this virtual reality project. While simply animating iconic surreal images was already an act of tribute to the first iconic image in narrative film, as shown in Fig. 4.8, the developers made sure not to add animation that would contradict the artist’s intention. One major difference between cinema and virtual reality is that space in conventional cinema is shot one shot at a time, assembled via editing, and screened on a two-dimensional

Fig. 4.8 The AR project pays tribute to one of the first narrative films, The Great Train Robbery

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Fig. 4.9 Screenshot of Le Sommeil in motion

screen. Unlike conventional cinema, a virtual reality presents a 360-degree world with one continuous and undisrupted space that need not be shot and edited shot-byshot (Steed 2013). Nevertheless, despite this spatial difference in these two media, both cinema and virtual reality are both time-based (Fig. 4.9). With a few exceptions of films that take place in real-time, screen-time in cinema is almost always an extension of actual reality; so is time in virtual reality. This shared characteristic of these time-based media inspired the construction of a kind of timeline that can condense day and night in a rapid fashion. This allows the user an immersive experience of the different times of the day and night with different moods and effects of natural sunlight and night light (Fig. 4.10).

Designing the Virtual Dream in 3D—From AR to VR A pilot version of the AR (Augmented Reality) was conducted before the VR project began. One significant difference between AR and VR is that AR remains a screenbased medium while VR is a total immersive 360-degree experience that incorporates body and motion sensors. Therefore, AR was considered technically friendlier and conceptually less challenging than VR. AR devices such as smart phones download a program that allows the internal camera to recognize the pre-set image targets and scan the relevant images. When a match occurs, the downloaded program plays a real-time calculated animation to match the still image as though the still image could move by itself. No extra sensors are needed to detect the position of the user, as the internal camera can recognize the different angles of the image target and generate the corresponding animation accordingly. There is also no limit to the number of users, as long as each user holds a device with an AR program. In addition, the position, angle, rotation, and scale of the generated virtual object can also change

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Fig. 4.10 Screenshot of optical illusion in VR

spontaneously and automatically to fit the image target, based on the location of the viewers. VR, however, requires external sensors to detect the body’s position and motion so that it can instantaneously correspond with the real-time animated images to match the action and reaction of a single user in real-time speed. Therefore, VR is an advanced extension of AR. At this stage, our existing limited technology capability did not allow more than one user to be in one virtual reality at one time. After studying many of Salvador Dalí’s works with these guiding principles in mind, this VR project began with the selection of the key visual motifs of surrealism to be followed by the 3D production of these motifs and the construction of the dream world. The multiple layers and color tone of the 1938 painting The Endless Enigma was used as a creative and tonal reference to construct a vast 360-degree dream world in an alienated desert.

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As mentioned earlier, among the key iconic motifs of surrealism frequently found in Dalí’s paintings and cinema are eyeballs, melting clocks, and insects. Naturally, in terms of adding animated motions, the blinking motion of the eyeballs could make these standalone eyeballs come to life and enhance the uncanny quality of the dream. The constant and slow melting of the clocks, and flying insects and butterflies, were among the new animations in this dream. The animation of the horse struggling fiercely to get rid of the melting clock on his saddleback was inspired by Dalí’s 1980 sculpture Horse Saddled with Time, echoing Dalí’s recurring theme of the conflict between memory and time. In addition to these iconic images, one of the new iconic motifs added to this project was the soft face in the 1937 painting Le Sommeil (Sleep). In this painting, a large soft human face in a deep sleep in the middle of a nowhere-land is stretched like a large piece of cloth, supported by several crutches hooked on the different parts of the face, holding the face in a rather unstable position. The sleeping expression made the face look as though hypnotized, without feeling any pain from the hooks holding the face in a fragile position. Long thin crutches or legs are often used to express a sense of fragility of support in Dalí’s paintings, such as The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) which includes animals with extended thin legs. To enhance this sense of fragility, these crutches were animated to move like long extended legs, slowly and carefully sleepwalking across the vastness of the alienated desert. Large objects like the stretched face are placed in the background while the butterflies fly around, the wild horse saddled with the melting clock runs frantically in the middle ground, and the blinking eyeballs sit and float between the foreground and the middle ground.

Optical Illusion The next stage was to re-create an optical illusion through double imagery with reference to Salvador Dalí’s early paintings. Although human perception can recognize and organize visual patterns, finding one fixed perspective out of 360 degrees to reveal the hidden image composed from different layers of other fragmented images remains a challenge. In this experiment, creating a double-imagery illusion is much easier in 2-dimensional painting, photography, or AR because a bounded or fixed visual focus helps the viewer discover the double imagery more easily. However, a user’s point of view cannot be easily bounded inside a 360-degree virtual environment. Even when the hidden image was placed at human eye level, no user could locate it without hints. In addition, the existing VR headgear and its long thick cable wire in the back was heavy and impeded the user’s mobility. The new lighter wireless setup would improve that problem in the future.

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Designing the 4D Interaction As mentioned above, a form of “passively active” interactivity was applied to the Surrealism in 4D project, involving digital models inspired by the works of René Magritte. Designed to blend into the rest of the surreal world, this feature was added in “passive” response to the potential actions of a curious user trying to move around to peep at the concealed object. It was designed with a practical purpose: to protect the original spirit and intention of the artist, while maintaining and enhancing the overall surreal quality of the work. Nevertheless, one of the most challenging design tasks of this VR project was to introduce other interactive functions to the surreal dream world, which was seen as unprecedented, as no previous virtual-reality project on surrealism had incorporated such a function. The 2016 VR project Dreams of Dalí, featured in the Salvador Dalí Museum, presented a 360-degree spectacle allowing visitors to explore Dali’s 1933 painting Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus in a virtual trip without any interactive functions. If Freudians and surrealists believed that dreams are a path to one’s subconscious, then it becomes interesting to discuss the role of one’s conscious behavior within a subconscious dream. When one dreams, does he/she have any conscious control over the content of the dream? If so, how much conscious control can one have within a dream “dictated” by one’s own subconscious? Is the dreamer in a total state of passiveness experiencing what his/her subconscious unfolds to him/her in the form of the dream? Or are any actions and reactions of the dreamer within the dream merely part of his/her subconscious in action? These were some of the questions encountered in considering designing other interactions within a virtual dream. Why would we want to have conscious interaction within a dream, which is supposed to tell us something about our subconscious? After pondering this possible contradiction between a subconscious dream and conscious interaction within the dream, no simple answer or solution can directly satisfy the above questions. Many other possibilities were considered, but many were also deemed technically impossible to achieve, especially when the VR software mainly dealt with 3D models and scenes. This 3D challenge had limited other interactive options such as interacting with light beams, waves, or smoke. At the end, adding interaction in the virtual dream had one clear and simple goal: a simple desire to enhance the user’s immersive experience in this VR project. Instead of a passive viewing experience as in other 2D and 3D media, interaction would add to the user’s experience by allowing the user the ability and freedom to re-shape or re-arrange the objects in the dream. As mentioned above, this was unprecedented. Our latest version allowed the user to move the eyeballs and throw them into the air, in order to defy gravity as in many of Magritte’s paintings. The user is thus able to re-create a surreal image by arranging the composition of the dream, making the surreal dream more surreal.

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Conclusion Although VR technology had been in development since the 1980s by NASA as an enhanced remote control device in space (Ellis 1994), the commercial use of VR technology for the general public has been relatively recent. Many of its existing applications are in gaming, therapy, education, simulated training, and many other forms of private and shared recreational functions, such as VR rides in amusement parks. With lighter, wireless, and more user-friendly setups with multiple users sharing experience features, its applications could be enormous. Like surrealism, which aimed to break conventional boundaries, VR technology creates new dimensions by breaking the conventional boundaries of the screen. Our interest in digital surrealism with VR application lies in its expanding ability to immerse a user or a group of users in a dream world in which magic could occur in many different forms and shapes with unlimited possibilities. For a dream experience full of mystery, hidden secrets, and shocking optical illusions, users can embark on a virtual trip into the world of Salvador Dalí. For a more relaxed dream experience full of out-of-this-world fantasy and amusement, users can embark on a virtual trip into the world of René Magritte. The next phase of our project is working with mental health specialists to examine the use of virtual reality with Magritte’s surreal images in psychotic treatment for anxiety disorders. We believe that there are many cross-disciplinary applications in virtual therapy. There has been much anticipation of future development of the improved and the combined use of AR and VR, or what has been called MR (Mixed Reality). MR would allow a user or a group of users to engage in any physical environment, not just in virtual reality, with augmented vision through real-time scanning image enhancement and high mobility. However, one challenge in digital treatment of traditional arts has remained, on both technological and philosophical grounds. Would the ever-changing and more powerful digital technology enhance traditional art forms or hinder them? In our case, would the fourth dimension (or 4D interaction) enhance surrealism or diminish it? Was there conflict between art and digital technology? To be more specific, was there conflict between traditional arts and interactive technology? As discussed in this chapter, the developers of this VR project made a conscious effort to follow and enhance the tradition of surrealism in hopes of enhancing the surreal experience of the user in VR with interaction. However, this chapter is limited by an extensive study of interaction as a new art form. The question of whether this digital treatment contradicts the spirits and principles of surrealism is left for further study, discussion and interpretation.

References Arnheim, R. (1954). Art and visual perception: A psychology of the creative eye. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Breton, A. (1924). First surrealist manifesto.In Surrealism (pp. 66–75). New York: McGraw-Hill. Ball, P. (2008). Quantum weirdness and surrealism. Nature, 453(7198), 983–985. Champion, E. (2016). Critical gaming: Interactive history and virtual heritage. London, UK: Routledge. Creed, B. (2007). The untamed eye and the dark side of surrealism: Hitchcock, Lynch and Cronenberg. In G. Harper & R. Stone (Eds.), The unsilvered screen: Surrealism on film (pp. 115–133). London: Wallflower Press. Dalgarno, B., & Lee, M. J. (2010). What are the learning affordances of 3-D virtual environments? British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(1), 10–32. Ellis, S. R. (1994). What are virtual environments? IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 14(1), 17–22. Expo Bernard PRAS—Palais du facteur cheval. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=a7LCTT7HKzc. Ferguson, K. L. (2016). The slices of cinema: Digital surrealism as research strategy. In C.R. Acland & E. Hoyt (Eds.), The Arclight guidebook to media history and the digital humanities (pp. 270– 299). Retrieved from http://projectarclight.org/wp-content/uploads/ArclightGuidebook.pdf. Freud, S. (1952). On dreams. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Freud, S. (1963). An autobiographical study. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Kateros, S., Georgiou, S., Papaefthymiou, M., Papagiannakis, G., & Tsioumas, M. (2015). A comparison of gamified, immersive vr curation methods for enhanced presence and humancomputer interaction in digital humanities. International Journal of Heritage in the Digital Era, 4(2), 221–233. King, E. H. (2010). Dalí, surrealism and cinema (Vol. 1). Oldcastle Books. Lugmayr, A., & Teras, M. (2015). Immersive interactive technologies in digital humanities: A review and basic concepts. In Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on immersive media experiences (pp. 31–36). New York, NY: ACM. Rene Magritte. WikiArt visual art encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.wikiart.org/en/renemagritte. Salvador Dali: List of works. WikiArt visual art encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.wikiart. org/en/salvador-dali/all-works. Seckel, A. (2004). Masters of deception: Escher, Dalí & the artists of optical illusion. New York, NY: Sterling Publishing Company Inc. Shin, D. H. (2017). The role of affordance in the experience of virtual reality learning: Technological and affective affordances in virtual reality. Telematics and Informatics, 34(8), 1826–1836. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.05.013. Surrealism. Heilbrunn timeline of art history. Retrieved from http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ surr/hd_surr.htm. Steed, A. (2013). Recreating visual reality in virtuality. In M. Grimshaw (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of virtuality (p. 420). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Stadler, M., & Kruse, P. (1990). Theory of Gestalt and self-organization. Self-steering and cognition in complex systems (pp. 142–169). New York, NY: Gordon and Breach. The Dali Museum. Dreams of Dali: 360º Video. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=F1eLeIocAcU. WikiArt visual art encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://www.wikiart.org. Worldviz. Retrieved from https://www.worldviz.com/virtual-reality-solutions.

Part II

Gender in the Digital Age

Chapter 5

Selfies: Putting the “Me” into Media Ana Oliveira Garner

Introduction Selfies have become a common social practice throughout the world. The combination of advances in digital photography, mobile phones, social networks, and highspeed Internet formed the environment that has allowed the practice to take place. Even though humans have tried to represent themselves in different ways for thousands of years, traditionally only artists could present images of themselves that could potentially reach a wide audience. Now, with social media, virtually everyone has become viewers of self-representations. This affects our daily lives and our social relations, including the potential to produce changes in power relations. The initial aim of this chapter is to approach selfies via a critical analysis of the media coverage of the phenomenon. This is important because how we talk about something represents our knowledge of it, and can be used to justify behaviors and attitudes towards it. Following Foucauldian discourse analysis, my intention was not to cover all online articles, but to raise issues regarding how popular online media portray selfies, in order to exemplify some of the discursive resources and topics that surround the subject. I observed that discourses in the media usually either condemn, celebrate, or try to regulate the practice of selfies. Trying to understand the general attitudes of the media towards selfies sheds light on how they can challenge power relations in our society. Therefore, the second part of this chapter is based on a literature review of scholarly writings on the selfie phenomenon and focuses on a discussion of the role of selfies in personal empowerment. This can happen in two ways. First, selfies can provide visibility to marginalized groups. Historically, the mainstream media do not significantly represent those who deviate from the standard patterns of beauty or behavior. When representatives of A. O. Garner (B) City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_5

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groups that are underrepresented in the media share their selfies, they are exercising their agency to narrate their own stories and contribute to their own and their group’s positive visibility. The usually positive responses that their selfies generate, through likes and comments, can add to the creators’ feelings of personal empowerment. Second, selfie-making circulates a series of techniques for taking and manipulating photographs that were at one time restricted to professionals or students of photography. This, then, can contribute to the perception of how the media work, which, when aligned with media literacy goals, can raise critical awareness.

Media Discussions on Selfies To obtain a complete picture of the selfie phenomenon and its wider social significance, we need to understand how the media, as major social actors, approach it. What is said of selfies in the mainstream media builds a discourse around them that is a part of the phenomenon itself. As Gómez-Cruz and Thornam (2015) put it: “selfies resonate wider socio-cultural, political, and visual practices and how we approach them has political, ideological, and cultural significance” (p. 2). How, then, do these discourses contribute to the way we think about selfies, and how do these discourses relate to power effects? For Foucault (1977), discourses are points at which power and knowledge intersect. They provide the language we use to represent knowledge—how we talk about things. Therefore, discourses produce knowledge, and this influences how we think about something and how we act based upon our thoughts. Moreover, discourses play a role in governing what can be said or done in relation to specific things, and, ultimately, in the organization of society, on an individual and on a cultural level. Foucault was interested in uncovering how discourses work and what their effects are on society. Discourses not only represent one’s thoughts, but are at the same time, a way in which the “truth” is produced and interpreted. According to Foucault (1969), discourses “systematically form the object of which they speak” (p. 54). Foucault argued that power is not exercised merely via violence, but also through the production and use of knowledge. When certain statements are repeated and reinforced by different sources, they appear to be truths. Power is sustained by the continuing production of discourses that repeat these truths. For example, in the case of selfies, their constant association with narcissism may naturalize a truth that justifies the social control of behaviours. Therefore, to analyze discourses is to try to understand how power is sustained and transmitted. Also, since discourses are products of their social and historical contexts reflecting historical balances of power, studying the discourses on selfies allows us to capture the fears, anxieties, and challenges of our society. The aim of this chapter is to identify the specific ways in which the media build a discourse about selfies. To achieve this goal, I read and compiled news articles related to selfies that were published on popular online media. I was particularly interested in stories that were published by different outlets or that went viral. Rather than conducting quantitative research, I chose those articles whose content were most pertinent to this study. The

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articles mentioned here were selected based on their ability to demonstrate these themes. I kept the analysis at the macro level, focusing on the content rather than going into too much detail into grammar or performing a linguistic analysis. It was possible to categorize the articles according to their rhetoric: selfies are dangerous and shameful; selfies are good and empowering; and the selfie practice needs to be regulated.

Dangerous and Shameful Selfies have been accused of causing addiction, physical pain, suicide attempts, and even death. The article “A Selfie with a Weapon Kills: Russia Launches Campaign Urging Photo Safety” (The Guardian 2015) featured the following subheading: “Russian interior ministry responds to spate of recent deaths and injuries caused by highrisk selfies with leaflet, video and website offering safety advice to public.” The article stated that the campaign was inspired by more than a hundred accidents, and dozens of deaths, caused by high-risk selfie attempts, citing one specific accident and two deaths that occurred earlier in that year. It also contained images taken from the Russian campaign, in which we can see people posing for different selfies inside a crossed red circle. The article finished with a warning that an extreme selfie might become a posthumous one. The article “More People Have Died while Taking Selfies than Have Been Killed by Sharks So Far This Year” (Rizzo 2015) reported a statistic released by Mashable, showing that selfies had killed 12 people as of that point in the year, while shark attacks had killed eight. The article implied that this was a significant difference and briefly described six of the selfie-related deaths, including falling from great heights; posing with wild animals or weapons; and getting hit by moving vehicles. The article cited the death of a 66-year-old Japanese women who had had a heart attack after falling down some steps, and who was believed to be attempting a selfie before she fell. This was reported without any mention of the dubious nature of the classification as a direct selfie-related death. The article further claimed that the number of non-fatal accidents involving selfies is increasing, even though no numbers were mentioned. It stated that wildlife parks had been closed because people were taking selfies with bears, but did not provide a source or a hyperlink for this information. The article also reminded readers about the Russian government campaign for selfie-taking safety. These two articles are examples that seem to imply that selfie deaths go against the natural order of things. As Maddox (2017) put it: “selfies emerge not only as transgressions, but transgressions that kill” (p. 4). However, people have died from preventable causes for a very long time. According to Dewey (2015), People get injured as a result of their distractions every day! They mess with the radio and rear-end another driver; they think about their next vacation and burn themselves on a stove. Radios and day-dreaming aren’t novel, however; we aren’t fetishizing and dramatizing and antagonizing over them, the way we are smartphones. (p. 10)

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This leads us to question why there is even a reason to mention selfie-related deaths. The article “The Year of the Selfie—Statistics, Facts & Figures” (Miltner and Baym 2015) contained a graph released by techinfographs.com, which stated that over one million selfies are taken each day. This infograph contained percentages related to selfie retouching and the online platforms on which they were shared. The article stated that 52% of women and 50% of men have taken a selfie, and that selfies represent 30% of the photos taken by people between 18 and 30 years of age. It also included a world map pointing out the countries where selfies are more popular. Some of the commenters implied that these high numbers were reason for alarm. However, the source of the numbers was not clearly stated. The attribution “according to Samsung” did appear; however, it was not clear if this was referring to the statistic below or above this sentence, or if it referred to all of the given data. Furthermore, it did not specify how these numbers were obtained, such as how many people were interviewed or how many photos were analyzed. Articles such as “My Selfie with Brooklyn Bridge Suicide Dude” (Martinka 2013) and “‘I’m Famous Y’all’: Teenager Is Criticised for Smiling Selfie at Auschwitz and Her Excitement at It Then Going Viral” (Robinson 2014) are examples of articles that shame selfie makers. In these articles, selfies were associated with a bad event or a damnable behaviour, and the people involved in the stories were depicted as selfish, lacking a sense of morals, or being insensitive or plain stupid. There are also several articles that associate selfies with narcissism (either of individuals or of society; see Titlow 2013; The Guardian 2014a), with self-esteem (too low or too high; see Walker 2013), or even with psychopathy (Seidman 2015). The choice of words and expressions, such as “spate”, “obsession”, “media craze”, “worrying”, “self-promotion”, and “addicted” reveal the negative connotations associated with selfies. In general, there is a tendency to denigrate selfie makers and to associate selfies with young people, particularly women. Together, these kinds of articles form a discourse that gives the impression that selfies put people in danger or make them look stupid.

Good and Empowering On the opposite side, a few articles have defended selfies and portrayed them as a good thing. In “Selfies Are Good for Girls” (2013), Simmons affirmed that her research showed that girls learn the language of the humble: they learn that they should not be publicly proud of themselves; they deflect compliments and sometimes even put themselves down in order to get a compliment. Simmons stated that “the selfie is a tiny pulse of girl pride—a shout-out to the self” (2013, para. 4). For her, girls use selfies to promote themselves, which traditionally boys do more easily. Therefore, dismissing selfies as narcissistic and problematic means that we lose the chance to see the potentials of the practice to help girls escape the “good girl” culture. Simmons worried that parents and educators position “girls as passive targets instead of agents

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of their own lives” (2013, para. 10). She emphasized that each girl is different and that each selfie should be analyzed within its own context. In addition to empowering women and other groups, it is claimed that selfies help people with goals that can be seen physically, such as weight loss (HuffPost UK 2016), and promote values such as breastfeeding (Reuters 2016). They also help to give visibility to marginalized groups such as transgender people (The Telegraph n.d.) and, because of that, they play a role in identity affirmation. Selfies have also been used in social campaigns to try to raise awareness and/or funds, or to get public engagement.

In Need of Regulation Some articles introduce a practical consequence of living in a world with selfies: the need to regulate the practice. Some relate to how regulation about selfies was created, or needs to be implemented, whilst others try to regulate selfie-taking. In their respective studies of the media discourses on selfies, Burns (2015) and Trivundža (2015) both noticed the presence of articles that seek to regulate and normalize the practice. Stories such as the monkey selfie (The Guardian 2014c) and the horse photobomb (Keane 2016) raised copyright issues: if an animal takes a selfie or even appears in one, who owns the rights to the image? Another story about paramedics who posted selfies with patients inside the ambulance (Chan 2016) raised issues about the limitations of current laws to rule over new practices. If a person is unconscious and cannot agree (or disagree) with appearing in somebody else’s selfie, how can the photo taker be punished? Under what law should the person be judged, and what is a fair penalty for these cases? These are examples of regulations that have to be created or adapted because of the selfie phenomenon. Most of these cases are shown in mainstream media as bizarre stories and do not present a deeper discussion on the legal, philosophical, or cultural implications of selfie usage. Some places had to decide on whether to allow selfie taking and selfie sticks in their premises. In “Don’t Even Think About Bringing Your Selfie Stick to These Tourist Destinations”, Lekach and Ciechalski (2017) compiled a list of tourist attractions, museums, sports venues, and even cities that banned selfie-sticks or the practice of selfies, alleging they are a hazard or a nuisance. However, places such as the National Gallery in London decided to lift the selfie ban (The Guardian 2014d), whilst others such as Yellowstone National Park in the U.S decided to guide visitors on how to safely take selfies (Kwak-Heffernan 2019). There are also articles dedicated purely to dictating how selfies should be taken. They state what a good selfie is and try to define what is, and is not, acceptable. These attempts at regulating the practice of selfies are in the fields of the visuals, occasions, and places, and can be in the form of criticizing selfies that are not considered appropriate, or in the form of “do/do not” lists. “The Kim Kardashian Guide to Taking the Perfect Selfie” (Valenti 2016) is one example amongst thousands of online articles that try to list how to take a good selfie. These usually give tips regarding

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light, angle, poses, make-up, hairstyles, use of accessories, editing, and other factors. They also state what one needs to avoid, such as fluorescent light. Articles such as this one behave as though there is one unique correct way to produce good selfies, and seem oblivious to the fact that not all selfies are created to make people look good. Sometimes people may have other intentions, such as showing an emotion or making a political statement. The article “From Posing Cheerily at Auschwitz to Taking a Self-Portrait at a Dead Relative’s Funeral… It’s the World’s STUPIDEST SELFIES” (Daily Mail 2014), for instance, dictates when taking a selfie is not appropriate, such as at funerals, in front of accidents or fires, or at sad events. The article shared 12 selfies and one video that had been posted online by different people. Each of them is accompanied by a brief caption that explained and ridiculed the people in the selfies. “The Worst Places to Take a Selfie” (The Telegraph 2015) is a similar example of an article that tries to say where one should not take selfies, featuring condemnations of people who shared photos when smiling at Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Ground Zero, the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, war memorials, and even at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. According to the article, these places require solemnity, and selfies break this requirement. The article further stated that there is no need for a selfie to be taken in those places. These examples show how the media try to regulate the practice of how, where and when is appropriate to take a selfie. For Foucault (1977), classifying a subject’s behavior, in this case, that of selfie makers, as abnormal opens the path to legitimize disciplinary actions. To marginalize and disdain behavior as deviant from the norm is a technique of control. Drawing on Foucault, Burns (2015) stated that the multitude of articles with “tips, prohibitions, and the ridicule of subjects who do not follow the rules” (p. 1717), helps to create a disciplinary act, since it establishes which behaviors are accepted. The establishment of norms and the provision of advice on how to follow those norms are instruments of power. The negative discourse of the media about selfies is therefore a form of social control.

Critiques of the Media Discourses on Selfies When analyzing these media discussions about selfies, we need to consider what the rhetoric is in relation to persuasion. What are these messages doing in the larger context? They try to clarify what is good and bad, what people should and should not do, what is desirable and what is not. In this respect, they act as mediators that set up standardization. The regulatory function and the advisory language help to standardize the world, to make it less complex and easier to follow. This is where ideology lies, which is not to say that the authors of these messages are conspiring, or are even totally conscious of what they are doing. People in the media dealing with selfies believe they are offering good advice and that it is their timely task to make sense of this world for the general public. Each has his/her own voice, and sometimes these messages can be contradictory and competing. Discourses can be constructed

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in contradictory ways, and free societies contain many contrasting discourses on the same topic. This freedom of speech means that people have to make up their minds and exercise their judgment. Therefore, the regulators tend to simplify things for the general public, in order to help them make decisions. In this case, they need to decide if selfies are good or bad, acceptable or dangerous, and so on. Analysis of media discussions on selfies allows us to point out some issues and certain general characteristics that are present in many online articles that contribute to the construction of generalized discourses about the subject. The first one is related to their treatment of numbers and statistics. Gunthert (2015) reasoned that, even though the number of selfies is counted in millions, studies have shown that the proportion of selfies on Instagram is actually low when compared to other kind of images shared on this platform (3–5%). He also stated that some individuals, especially celebrities, share many selfies a day, which inflates the numbers. For Maddox (2017) “simplistic statistics may inflate a moral panic” (p. 4), an issue that will be discussed further. Thus, articles that highlight statistics such as one million selfies a day, or 12 deaths a year, without contextualizing these statistics with other numbers such as how many images are posted per day on the Internet, or on how many deaths by other causes there are in a year, may be implying that the numbers are alarming and that the selfie phenomenon has gone out of control and should be feared. With regard to statistics that find that young women post more selfies on Instagram than any other group, this might simply reflect the wider social media demographics. Instagram users are predominantly young women. By September 2019, 52% of users were female, and 72% of teenagers had an Instagram account (Omnicore 2019). It is therefore likely that the majority of selfies posted on Instagram would correspond to the majority of users of the platform. However, this aspect is usually not taken into account in media reports. Another issue in the reporting on selfies is that, sometimes, a photo that is not a selfie is treated like one. For instance, in 2014, UK Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted a photo of himself on the phone and wrote that he was talking to US President Barack Obama. A few minutes later, two famous actors posted selfies mocking the prime minister, which started a chain of retweets, likes, and parodies. According to Bellinger (2015), when the press reported the fact, they referred to Cameron’s photo as a selfie, even though clearly he had not taken the photo. The fact that the press wanted to ridicule the prime minister’s act of sharing the photo might have influenced the choice of word. Another example was when, in February 2016, a story of people on an Argentinean beach who had passed around a dolphin in order to take selfies with it, which led to its death, went viral. A video was posted showing people carrying the dolphin from the sea to the sand and then a multitude gathering around to see it. In some articles, the video bore the caption “selfies kill dolphin” (Sky News 2016). In the video and photos of the people gathered around the dead dolphin, it is possible to see them stroking the dolphin and taking pictures of it, but we cannot see anyone taking a selfie. This news generated outraged comments about evil humans and selfie blaming (DuBois 2016). The following day, an extended version of the video, with the original audio, was revealed (Nagesh 2016), in which we can

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hear people saying, in Spanish, that the dolphin was already dead. An Argentinean news outlet confirmed that many dolphins had died and their corpses had washed up on the beach. The tourists tried to put the dolphin back in the sea but it would not swim; that was when they took it and placed on the sand. In fact, it is possible to observe that the dolphin does not move at any point in the video, not even in the beginning, when it is being taken out of the water. Once again, the fact that it was not possible to see anyone taking a selfie, and that it was not clear when the dolphin died, allow us to conclude that these reports were attempts to associate this sad event with selfies; associating negative events in order to provoke an emotional response is a common persuasive tactic. Many approaches also see selfies as an individual practice rather than as a collective phenomenon. To call selfie makers narcissistic is to say that those individuals have a psychological characteristic that happens to be considered unfavorable. Trivundža (2015) argued that “the psychopathologization of selfie-making and the individualization of blame it entails also fails to account for the centrality of the production and circulation of images in advanced capitalist societies” (p. 106). Therefore, discussing the motivations and meanings of selfies only from the individual’s perspective provides an incomplete picture. Another discursive technique is illustrated by an exceptional selfie being taken and analyzed as the rule. Tifentale (2015) brought to attention the fact that “sometimes claims are made based on outstanding exceptions that catch people’s attention, go viral, and easily become a symbol of the whole phenomenon” (p. 4). For instance, it is not uncommon to see the media making generalizations about the practice of making selfies after Kim Kardashian posts a polemic selfie, despite the fact that her images are far from being representative of most selfies. According to Goldberg (2017), “some selfies have been made famous … . For the most part, however, selfies are unremarkable, ordinary, and quotidian” (p. 2). Using an exception to talk about selfies in general in this manner misses the point of the phenomenon and seems to suggest a forced negative approach. We should also look at what is missing in these discourses. While popular media discussions focus on concerns such as narcissism or safety, other relevant issues are set aside. For Douglas and Poletti (2016), “these discussions often fail to account for the complex relationship young people have with digital media, creativity and self-representation” (p. 21). Young people’s engagement with digital media and their construction of online identities need to be discussed, and problematized if necessary, with less passion and more objectivity. For instance, Choi and Behm-Morawitz (2016) hypothesized that millennials’ engagements with social media and selfies meet “their needs of being up-to-date, interacting with others, passing time, seeking information, and escaping the pressures or boredom of daily life” (p. 2). These needs are not generally discussed by the media as motivators for selfie practice. In summary, media discussions of selfies contain discursive techniques such as word choice, inflated numbers or statistics without context, taking the exception as the norm, homogenizing of different practices, association with bad events, and the individualization of blame. To try to understand these negative and sometimes contradictory views of selfies, Rettberg (2014) used Bourdieu’s idea that what is

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perceived as worthy of being photographed is determined by social norms. This may therefore explain the discomfort related to selfies: “we are still bound by these social norms but technology allows us to photograph so much more than when the social norms for photography developed” (Rettberg 2014, p. 53); in other words, the technology has evolved, but our cultural filters still have not totally changed. Moraine (2014) gave another explanation of the complexity of the discourses on selfies: The discourse around selfies is fraught because selfies are complex locations within which gender and mental wellbeing and the attention economy and the politics of self-presentation and a hundred other things all collide into a tangled mess of a thing. Selfies are fraught because almost everything of which a selfie is conceptually and culturally comprised is controversial. (para. 10)

Elaborating on this view, Tiidenberg (2017) saw the negative media discourses on selfies as a rhetoric of moral panic. Moral panic spreads when there is a threat to the status quo. Sometimes, a new cultural artifact or behavior is introduced in society, usually by young people, which provokes feelings of uncertainty among those who are unfamiliar with that artifact or behavior. Cohen (2011) stated that moral panic tends to escalate when a particular form or practice of media is adopted by young people, women, or people of colour. The moral panic arises in the form of stories that depict certain practices or people as threats to the values and interests of society, casting a moral judgment on these practices and people. Shaming is an efficient strategy to control people and make them stick to existent norms, while selfies challenge the privileges of who has the right to be seen in their own terms. Undoubtedly, selfie practices and social media use in general can and may indeed have negative consequences. The problem is that generalizing these practices as bad or harmful means that we miss both their positive potential and their relation to power dynamics. Therefore, it is problematic to analyze the selfie phenomenon as if it is constituted of only one product. For Tifentale (2015), “the alleged millions of selfies cannot be the same, although the uniformity of the genre and the restrictions of the medium (such as the square format in Instagram) might suggest so” (p. 4). Indeed, I tried to identify different kinds of selfies, uses, and motivations, and concluded that selfies should be understood as a multidimensional phenomenon, with coexisting motivations and reasons for engagement. Although some are for self-promotion, others are created to produce a visual diary. There are also many artistic projects involving selfies in some way.1 Scholars such as Williams and Marquez (2015) affirmed that people make selfies to follow a trend or tendency in social behaviour: everybody is doing it, so I should do it too. Some selfies are used to show where someone is or how they look like at a specific moment, the result of a documentarylike motivation. Nemer and Freeman (2015) stated that people living in danger zones such as slums use selfies to prove to their loved ones that they are safe. Selfies can also be used as political statements, by showing agreement or disagreement with certain political positions; for example, thousands of Turkish women shared smiling selfies after a politician said that women should not smile in public (Saul 2014). People also 1 See,

for instance, Amalia Ullman’s performance on Instagram, Excellences & Perfections, and Kyle Warfield’s animation with an everyday selfie for a year, Last Year of Selfies.

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use selfies as part of social campaigns that aim to raise funds or spread awareness (Frank 2013; The Guardian 2014b), whilst some representatives of ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities use selfies as a way to affirm their identities and generate discussion about their issues. Widya and Soerjoatmodjo (2016) reported that boredom and leisure time are reasons for adolescents to take and post selfies; Lasén and García (2015) studied selfie practices relating to flirtation and self-pornification. Selfies are also increasingly being used for commercial purposes: some companies are using selfies in their promotions or marketing campaigns as an attempt to increase their brand visibility among people who like making selfies.2 Of course, many selfies exist simply because there was nobody else around to take the photo. As Tiidenberg (2017) argued, selfies “are a form of self-expression that can stimulate creativity and soul searching, just as they can be a form of trolling or bad behaviour or abuse. They can be incredibly imaginative or repetitive” (20:08). Selfie makers have different motivations, and the selfie phenomenon is composed by a multiplicity of practices. Some selfies can be purely narcissistic, whilst others can be empowering. Therefore, to study selfies as one single thing is to reduce the multiple sides of the practice and to oversimplify it.

Putting the “Me” into Media After conducting a literature review on the academic discussions on selfies, I realized that one of the gaps in knowledge was related to selfies and empowerment.3 Some scholars have indicated the potential of selfies to enable personal empowerment (Murray 2015; Senft 2015; Zhao and Zappavigna 2017). Burns (2015) and Warfield (2015) have specifically focused on how women are being empowered, and can be benefited, by the practice of selfies. For them, the possibility of not only being the object of the masculine gaze, but also of choosing and controlling how they want to be seen, defies gender inequality. However, there is a general lack of detailed discussion about the broader implications of selfies on power relations. I will unpack this issue by using Foucault’s ideas on power and technologies of the self. For Foucault, power always involves having a certain type of knowledge. Especially in his later works, he was less interested in how top-down authority exercises power, and more focused on understanding how power circulates in society through diverse power structures. For him, power is dispersed in microlocations, and is therefore pervasive and inescapable. Rather than defining power, he was concerned about how power is exerted, including how we talk about ourselves; how we tell our stories and how we narrate our lives to others are both influenced by and create power. 2 For

a critical compilation of selfies-related commercial campaigns, see “Your Selfie Idea Is Not Original” (n.d.). 3 This chapter is also a result of my broader research, which uses autoethnography, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation of Instagram profiles. Although I do not have the space to detail these in this chapter, the remainder of the chapter reflects my observations obtained via these methodologies.

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In Technologies of the Self , Foucault (1988) stated that the self is an ongoing project that needs individual and collective effort to be developed. To develop the self, one needs to know oneself and take care of oneself . The process of caring for the self is not only done individually, but is co-constructed by society. One of the ways to know and cultivate the self is via what he called technologies of the self : the telling of personal stories via letters, religious confession, talks and so on. His discussion of self-techniques is tied to his general concern of how power domination often occurs in non-coercive ways in the form of self-rationalizing, self-volunteering micro-practices in our daily routines. For Foucault (1988), technologies of the self permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (p. 18)

Technologies of the self are therefore forms of self-control, or non-coercive instruments, which an individual uses to voluntarily submit to power. In this subjectification process, people place themselves within power relations. Foucault called governmentality the connection between what he called technologies of domination and technologies of the self. An individual constructs and modifies his/her self via self-governed processes that are negotiated with the structures of domination and power. Governmentality entails awareness and analysis of the many power structures that shape our actions. Under this light, Hampton (2015) suggested that selfies provide a means for people to dialogue with hegemonic ideologies. Because through selfies, people at the same time negotiate and subject themselves to normative ideologies, have control, and are under surveillance, selfies embody the notion of governmentality: “They collapse the duality of freedom and ideological power, acting as a ‘contact point’ for ‘technologies of domination’ and ‘technologies of the self’” (Hampton 2015, p. 6). Thus, selfies are another way to narrate ourselves: a technology that we can use to tell personal stories. Foucault opened the path for a discussion that embodies both the exercise of agency and an individual’s voluntary response to the demands of a contemporary citizen, and to an evolving social life in general, the latter being largely based on technological innovations. Selfies can be seen as technologies of the self in Foucault’s sense: we use them to shape and discipline ourselves, both individually and as a society. When people copy the style of the selfies they see online, or try to submit to the rules of how to take the perfect selfie, they are shaping the visual patterns for personal photos shared online. Selfies can help to reconfigure dominant discourses because they are not only means to describe and present the self, but also serve as leverage for self-transformation. This is especially noticeable in people who deviate from the standard beauty patterns, and that use the technological tools available via the selfie phenomenon, to present themselves in a positive light. By styling the self and by becoming more self-aware, people can “problematize their identity and question what seems natural or taken for granted. Making apparent the limits of their subjectivity in this way opens up opportunities to create new experiences, or selves” (Kelly et al. 2017, para. 10). In this process, people can become agents, able

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to challenge and resist power structures. Even though people may be submitting to and complying with the dominant discourse of what is beautiful and worthy of being seen, they are also controlling their own image and exercising their agency. I should reiterate that in cultural studies, the idea of empowerment is not about getting power. We refer to a power not as power for good, but as a momentary tactic to negotiate domination in a specific moment, in the here and now. Power control through self-techniques always involve personal ethical commitments: time spent, trials and errors, overcoming hardship, exercising one’s will power and perseverance, and even convincing oneself that it is meaningful. Foucault pointed out that selftechniques involve effort, in that we have to learn them and we may have to try many times. With selfies, people experiment with light, angles, make-up, and other factors in order to try to achieve the effect of creating images that will better engage viewers. This notion of empowerment dialogues with Certeau’s notion of tactics, which is where he locates agency. For Certeau (1984), while strategies are planned actions to achieve something, tactics are spontaneous and opportunistic actions to negotiate everyday life via temporary disruptions of the hegemonic norms of controlling spaces and assets. People adapt their actions according to the social structure to which they are relating. Even though Certeau was describing how readers appropriate the books they read, Vainikka et al. (2017) argued that we could expand this view to encompass how people use social media. They argued that people use social media platforms and make them their own by posting what they want, and so become content producers and meaning makers. For Vainikka, Noppari and Seppanen, “tactics as resistance are not necessarily conscious resistance towards, for example, the strategy of a social media platform, but rather very individual justifications of one’s actions” (2017, p. 117). For instance, users’ decisions about what to post, where to post, and what to delete are tactics regarding their privacy. Selfies can be used as a tactic to make regular people visible and in a positive manner, exerting a degree of control over how they are seen. This can be especially empowering for people who are usually excluded from normative standards.

Positive Visibility During the twentieth century, the mass media had control of widely circulated images, specifically through newspapers, film, and television, whilst material conditions limited the circulation of amateur photos to albums shown to family and friends. Now, personal photos have become more public as they can be widely shared on the Internet. This means that virtually anyone, including those people who used to be excluded from traditional media, have the power to build their own personal brand. As Eagar and Dann (2016) affirmed, “the selfie represents the breakdown of established image production structures … and the rise of the individual as brand manager negotiating the emerging structures of technology, social media, and mediated self” (p. 1). Until recently, a regular person could not compete against the visual domination of images produced by and distributed through the media. This means that

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selfies allow any people to present themselves in positive ways, and to use selfies to drive social change. Selfies have been credited with empowering marginalized groups by giving them positive visibility (Duguay 2016; Kuntsman 2017; Liu et al. 2017). Representatives of underrepresented groups can share their selfies as a tactic that contributes to their visibility. The mostly positive responses that their selfies generate, through likes and comments, can contribute to a change in the perception of that group. According to Giroux (2015), “various individuals and groups are using selfie culture to expand the parameters of public dialogue, public issues and the opportunity for different political identities to be seen and heard” (p. 163). For Giroux, this movement reconnects the personal to the political, by rewriting selfpresentations that deal with notions of difference and justice. Selfies are a tactic that makes possible the expansion of public discourses. In some cases, selfies can contribute to a person’s own perception of their self. As Nayar (2014) suggested, People whose bodies do not fit these norms and who have otherwise found it difficult to gain social acceptance (except in negative ways) have particularly benefited from the “bodypositive” advantage of the selfie, studies show. In such interpretations, the selfie is seen as a significant instrument of self-assertion, confidence—and morale-building exercises and psychological well-being (shall we call it selfie-esteem?). (p. 80)

Selfies are a tool that allows people to not only present themselves in a positive way, but also to visually narrate their lives, therefore becoming agents of their own stories. For Lucas (2016), having agency is not equal to having freedom of choice or to not being coerced; it means at the same time being constituted by stories and having a number of stories about oneself to tell. For Lucas, when a person or group of people cannot get their stories heard, their agency is compromised. For Lucas “substituting a single story for the complex and heterogeneous stories that make up another person—failing to see another as an agent, in other words—is an exercise of power” (2016, p. 11). To enable social change, we need to recognize each other as agents capable of making sense. To think of agency as the ability to make meaningful action is a way to recognize that agency is possible even in situations of oppression and power subordination. It means that we can see people as capable of performing actions that we cannot predict, and that we are not only seeing them through other people’s narratives about who they are, because one problem with narratives is that they are made according to dominant normative conventions. The stories about ourselves are usually repurposed accounts of other’s ideas of what is wrong, right, or normal. Stories about other people are commonly reduced to single identity narratives. According to Lucas (2016): These broad narratives limit our agency both by cutting off our creative capacity for telling new stories and by keeping us from seeing others as capable of adding unpredictable new meaning to the world because we see those others as totally defined by already existing narratives (the ‘welfare queen’, the ‘immigrant who is stealing jobs’, etc.). If this is true, then how can we challenge these dominant narratives? How can we create newly meaningful ideas about who we are, and how can we recognise the capacity for unpredictable meaning-making in others? (p. 88)

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Her answer is that narrative agency provides the potential for shifting dominant narratives. Lucas’ thesis is that a non-sovereign self can have agency through narrativity, because the individual is constituted via relationships and one understands oneself as an individual via the narratives about one’s actions. Autonomy is accomplished via moments of recognition by others. For Lucas, a person’s narrative is always changing and being shaped by narrative agency. To have narrative agency is to have the capacity to confront norms and create new narratives, producing new meanings. This is done more easily in a community that listens to and recognizes a person’s speech and action. In order to exercise one’s political agency, one must be confident that they will appear and be recognized as a unique being by others. Thus, narrative agency refers “to the subject’s capacity to construct a meaningful narrative, and not to the actual content of that narrative” (Lucas 2016, p. 109). Since narrative identity is determined by relationships, and some of these relationships are subordinating power relations, narrative identity is political. Gender and ethnicity, for instance, are attributes of identity that are also embedded in cultural meaning. With selfies, the recognition of others is made with interactions via likes and comments. Historically, the media do not significantly represent those who deviate from standard patterns of beauty or behavior, unless it is to reinforce negative stereotypes, which can affect minorities’ self-concepts (Milkie 1999). However, nowadays, the number of pictures in the public sphere that show models with skinny, tall, and white bodies have been outnumbered by photos of real people. These real people are celebrated and, according to Rutledge (2013), this celebration can have a normalizing effect, as we learn to find beauty not in an ideal body type, but in the many variations of bodies, including those not usually portrayed in the mainstream media.

Media Awareness This resistance to normative patterns leads to the second empowering implication I wish to discuss: the potential of selfies to influence people’s skills to critically analyze the media. This potential is in dialogue with media literacy scholars, who emphasize the importance of creating media in order to be better able to analyze and evaluate the media. According to the Center for Media Literacy, an updated definition for media literacy would be a 21st Century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms—from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy. (Center for Media Literacy, n.d.)

This concept highlights the importance of the skills of both reading and writing media. Using the knowledge of how media is produced to then produce some of one’s own is a means of developing skills in analyzing and evaluating media. Selfies and social media are therefore a method of inscribing oneself in the media. However, the

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most important part of media literacy is to be able to take action based on the skills one acquires. In order to understand how individuals can use selfies to tactically position themselves in relation to the media, I draw on Deuze, Blank, and Speers’s discussion of the need for an ontological turn to take place in the way we understand and use the media. In their words, the “media have become so inseparable from us that we no longer live with media, but in media” (Deuze et al. 2012, para. 1). They note that we must understand that the media have become invisible and, therefore, all-powerful; nonetheless, individuals also have the potential “to shape their lives and identities and produce themselves (and therefore each other) in media” (Deuze et al. 2012, para. 5). The creative skills required to produce and share content may take place within the same parameters and constraints set by the dominant discourses, hence the accusations that images on social media are only reproducing existing beauty patterns. According to Deuze, Blank and Speers: It is indeed a fascinating paradox that much of the media’s creativity takes place within the parameters and constraints set and to some extent controlled by the same institutions that historically have set the parameters within which most people would have understood their reality: corporations and the state. It begs the question whether people inevitably end up reproducing the system they seek to subvert, or if they can in fact tactically gain a foothold exactly because they are part of the system. (2012, para. 19)

For these scholars, media creativity is not always liberating and empowering, but depends on the individual’s aptitude to master the techniques. Regardless of that, “the mastery of such creative notion makes debates about digital divides, the participation gap, media competence and multimedia literacies all the more crucial” (Deuze et al. 2012, para. 19). However, some have said that people are not free from the influence of the media and their practices on social media reflect this lack of freedom. Veum and Undrum (2017), for instance, stated that Instagram users “seem to adapt the homogenized multimodal language, thereby contributing to spreading values and interests of global corporations. As a consequence, SNS users get a rather narrow impression of how people, especially young girls, should behave and could look” (p. 15). However, individuals do not need to be totally independent from the language of the media, but can use the media’s own language as a tactic to subvert its values. Warfield (2014) has specifically examined how girls are challenging the visual conventions established by the mainstream media via reiteration. For her, selfie practices allow girls not only to watch but to make media, by inserting themselves into them. She found that when girls insert themselves into the media’s visual conventions of how a woman should look, they realize that those media images are inauthentic and fake. In this way, selfies can be a tactic to resist the media’s power to dictate beauty patterns. Tiidenberg’s study (2017) reinforced this, emphasizing that these users actions disrupt the status quo of both photography and the beauty and fashion industries. For her, selfies provide a tool to produce a self that feels good, unlike previous tools that have been used to write history and that had simultaneously erased or misportrayed certain groups. Thus, selfies can be therapeutically used, or used in an activist manner, to express, understand, and redefine oneself “within a visual culture that makes so much money off of making all of us believe that we are never good enough and uses strategic shaming to sell us more and more crap” (Tiidenberg 2017,

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21:00). As Shipley (2015) noted: “selfie techniques both build upon and reshape established social relations, providing new potential futures” (p. 413). Shipley also pointed out that some types of selfies, such as the #uglyselfie, seem to deliberately want to subvert aesthetic assumptions of beauty. When users take selfies in order to try to look good, they experiment with light, angles, hair, and make-up. They may also apply filters and retouch features after the photograph is taken. These are precisely the techniques used to create professional images in mainstream media. Therefore, in doing so, selfie makers can increase their knowledge of how the media works. Whilst many people know in theory that media images are retouched and manipulated, the practice of producing selfies enables them to do this for themselves. Becoming aware, through knowledge gained by experience, is empowering. When someone does not look in person as they do in their selfies, they are sharing their ideal self, similar to what the mainstream media do. As people become more proficient in making “professional-looking” images themselves, they become more aware of the construction of images and stories by the media.

Conclusion This chapter began by analyzing the popular media discourses on selfies and brought to light how these discourses help to constitute the phenomenon itself in contradictory ways, including condemning the practice and selfie makers. The second part of the chapter dealt with a gap in the academic selfie literature: the potential of selfies for empowerment. I should emphasize, however, that this does not mean that all selfie practices can be empowering. Even though selfies allow some people to exercise their agency of narrating their own stories, users still must submit to the norms of social media, and their agency is limited by the platform’s constraints, by what it allows users to make, post, and comment. Social media (and, by extension, selfies) are embedded within power relations. Users produce content for free, which is then used by platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, who have commercial interests. The content is sorted by algorithms that are used to select what is shown to another user and when. Users’ data are collected directly or indirectly, and can then be used to generate income for the platforms. The power of the platform is also present in subtle forms of censorship, as, for example, when certain kinds of posts are prohibited, or are simply not shown to others as frequently. On the one hand, users choose what information to disclose, as in what to make public or private. On the other, in order to use these platforms, they must comply with the terms of use, and they are then subjected to involuntarily information disclosure. These platforms are designed in a way that motivates users to connect and share more and, as Ridder (2015) noted, are “not built around the creativity of people or their intimacies in the everyday, but rather on rational choices that enable profit” (p. 361). Users serve the commercial purposes of the platforms, which control the communication flow according to their own economic interests.

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Selfies are often taken as consequences of the society of spectacle and consumption, which is based heavily on the cult of celebrities and the commodification of the self. Paradoxically, they are also a way for people to insert themselves into this society, and to participate in the media and public spheres, by narrating and performing their selves. The less that people are constrained by social media’s economic interests, the freer they are to exercise their narrative agency. Therefore, scholars and society need to think about ways to promote more online spaces for the better exercising of agency. Finally, to prioritize the capacity for new meaning creation (and agency) is a feminist assumption, since feminists are interested in notions of agency that can resist oppression, coercion, and marginalization.

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Moraine, S. (2014, July 18). How I (sorta) stopped worrying and (kinda) learned to love the selfie. The Society Pages. Retrieved from https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2014/07/18/how-isorta-stopped-worrying-and-kinda-learned-to-love-the-selfie/. Murray, D. C. (2015). Notes to self: The visual culture of selfies in the age of social media. Consumption Markets & Culture, 18(6), 490–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.105 2967. Nagesh, A. (2016). Apparently that dolphin WASN’T killed by tourists taking selfies. Metro.co.uk. Retrieved from http://metro.co.uk/2016/02/19/apparently-that-dolphin-wasnt-killed-by-touriststaking-selfies-5705566/. Nayar, P. K. (2014). The Selfie and the world. In Seminar (pp. 79–81). Retrieved from https://www. india-seminar.com/semframe.html. Nemer, D., & Freeman, G. (2015). Empowering the marginalized: Rethinking selfies in the slums of Brazil. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1832–1847. Omnicore. (2019). Instagram by the numbers: Stats, demographics, & fun facts. Retrieved from https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/. Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reuters. (2016). U.N. supports “brelfies” to encourage breastfeeding. Retrieved from https://uk. reuters.com/article/us-socialmedia-brelfies-idUKKCN10919R. Ridder, S. (2015). Are digital media institutions shaping youth’s intimate stories? Strategies and tactics in the social networking site. Netlog. New Media & Society, 17(3), 356–374. Retrieved from http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0. 2&res_id=xri:ilcs-us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:rec:abell:R05211214. Rizzo, C. (2015). More people have died from selfies than shark attacks this year. Mashable. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2015/09/21/selfie-deaths/#7dULKWS.kkqX. Robinson, W. (2014, July 21). “I’m famous y’all”: Teenager is criticised for smiling selfie at Auschwitz and her excitement at it then going viral. The Daily Mail. Retrieved from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2699755/I-m-famous-yall-Teenagercriticised-smiling-selfie-Auschwitz-excitement-going-viral.html. Rutledge, P. (2013, April 18). #Selfies: Narcissism or self-exploration? Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201304/selfies-narcis sism-or-self-exploration. Saul, H. (2014). Women in Turkey have a laugh in public at the deputy Prime Minister’s expense. The Independent. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/women-inturkey-have-a-laugh-in-public-at-the-deputy-prime-ministers-expense-9637987.html. Seidman, G. (2015). Are selfies a sign of narcissism and psychopathy? Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/close-encounters/201501/are-selfiessign-narcissism-and-psychopathy. Senft, T. (2015). The skin of the selfie. In A. Bieber (Ed.), Ego update: The future of digital identity. Dusseldorf: NRW Forum Publications. Shipley, J. W. (2015). Selfie love: Public lives in an era of celebrity pleasure, violence, and social media. American Anthropologist, 117(2), 403–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12247. Simmons, R. (2013). Selfies are good for girls. Slate.com. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/ articles/double_x/doublex/2013/11/selfies_on_instagram_and_facebook_are_tiny_bursts_of_ girl_pride.html. Sky News. (2016, Feb. 18). Dolphin dies being passed around for selfies. Retrieved from https:// news.sky.com/story/dolphin-dies-being-passed-around-for-selfies-10171630. The Guardian. (2014a, Mar. 14). Sharing the (self) love: The rise of the selfie and digital narcissism. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/ mar/13/selfie-social-media-love-digital-narcassism. The Guardian. (2014b, Mar. 25). No-makeup selfies raise £8 m for Cancer Research UK in six days. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/25/no-makeup-selfies-can cer-charity.

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Chapter 6

Discussion of Web Literature: Feminist and Post-Feminist Ideas on Hong Ying’s Blog Kaby Wing-Sze Kung

Introduction Internet usage in China has experienced dramatic growth since the mid-1990s. Yu (2010) states that China has been the second-largest Internet-using nation, after the United States, since 2002. According to CNNIC’s report in 2017, the total number of Internet users in China had reached 731 million, an addition of 42.99 million from December 2015. Among all the Internet activities in China, “weblogs represent the largest, and most dynamic, communication platform on the Chinese internet” as they provide abundant opportunities for netizens to express their personal views on national and private matters (Leibold 2011, p. 1025). In addition, Nouraie-Simone (2005) has pointed out that the Internet has provided a “new world” in which people, in particular women “netizens”, can abandon their identities and forge new ones: Internet technology affords writer and reader the freedom and safety of anonymity. This anonymity removes from online interaction any predominated notions, based on physical, gendered presence. It also liberates women to freely articulate repressed identity or forbidden subjects. (p. xvii)

1 It is possible to challenge this comment by stating that printed publications can serve this function too, as writers can use pseudonyms to publish their works and do not need to reveal their real identities. However, I would argue that printed materials always carry more restrictions, and writers’ identities are much easier to identify in print than on the Internet. In order to publish literary works in printed form, writers must have publishers, and it is impossible to hide one’s identity completely as certain personal information has to be revealed to the publisher for legal reasons. In contrast, writers can publish their writings online freely whenever and wherever a site for them to upload their writings exists, and they can easily hide their identities due to the relative dearth of personal contact.

K. W.-S. Kung (B) The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_6

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As there is no absolute proof of one’s identity—nationality, sexuality, age, or profession—in the cyberworld, Internet users can always abandon their existing “identities” and create new ones when they surf the Internet.1 In light of this, the gender boundary has become blurred, as gender can be seen as only one kind of “performativity” in cyberspace. Along this line of reasoning, Judith Butler’s poststructuralist feminist argument that “identities are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (1999, p. 136) can be verified, as cyberspace indeed provides a new “space” for women to reconstruct their gender identities. I would argue that, from a post-feminist and a cyberfeminist point of view,2 the virtual world provides a great platform for women to fight against the patriarchal constraints that have been imposed on them in reality. Based on these arguments, this chapter demonstrates how Hong Ying 虹影, a prominent and controversial female writer in China, has used her weblog as an innovative means of simultaneously creating her own personal discourse and communicating with her readers. To introduce this investigation of the implications of post-feminist ideas in Hong Ying’s blog, the first section of this chapter provides a general outline of the idea of post-feminism and cyberfeminism.

The Emergence of Post-Feminism and Cyberfeminism Post-feminism emerged from feminism as a result of the social circumstances and academic theories that evolved during the 1980s and 1990s, including poststructuralism, post-modernism, and post-colonialism. The term “post-feminism” is problematic, as various post-feminists have different interpretations of the notion. Adriaens (2009), for instance, claims that post-feminism has no fixed meaning and is a pluralistic discourse in television and cultural studies; furthermore, it is not against feminism, and is about feminism today: Post-feminism is a new form of empowerment and independence, individual choice, (sexual) pleasure, consumer culture, fashion, hybridism, humour, and the renewed focus on the female body can be considered fundamental for this contemporary feminism.

Adriaens’ definitions of post-feminism provide innovative perspectives from which to understand the “new woman” of the twenty-first century. By applying Adriaens’ definition of post-feminism to Hong Ying’s blog, we can read it as a revelation of the image of the “new woman” in twenty-first-century China. On the other hand, the appearance of cyberfeminism could be seen as a predictable outcome of the engagement of traditional feminist thought with the virtual world. Reiche and Kuni (2004) have argued that cyberfeminism brings feminism into a new era and helps synchronize feminist ideologies to the post-modern technological era: 2 According

to Galloway (2005), cyberfeminists emerged from Adelaide, Australia, in the early 1990s, when a group of artists and activists calling themselves VNS Matrix published the first Cyberfeminist Manifesto: “From this early rant, the cyberfeminist movement began to grow and shift. It began to coalesce around Europe. And on September 20, 1997 in Kassel, Germany, the First Cyberfeminist International met at Documenta X, an international exhibition of contemporary art”.

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Cyberfeminism is not simply an evolution of historical feminism created as a more adequate answer to meet the changed conditions of the Information Age. Cyberfeminism can perhaps best be described as a feminist intervention into these new conditions, and an exploration of how they challenge the political and social conditions of feminism. (p. 2)

As cultural and social developments continue throughout human history, it is expected that philosophical theories that describe anthropology need to be constantly modified and reformed, so when feminism converges with cyberspace, it must be adjusted to account for the complexity of women’s issues on the web. Different cyberfeminists have their own definitions of the term when they try to comment on this heated topic in the cyberworld. Gajjala and Mamidipudi (1999) simply defined the term as referring “to women using Internet technology for something other than shopping via the Internet or browsing the world-wide web” and regard it as a type of feminism that is in relation to “cyberspace” (p. 8). Similarly, cyberfeminists Faith Wilding and C. J. Rower agreed that cyberfeminism is open, fluid, and not yet defined by those who are engaged in its development as a new feminist theory. However, Rower (2008) narrowed the definition focusing on gender and technology, claiming that “cyberfeminism looks at technologies and explores the intersection between gender, culture, the body and technology” (p. 129). Taking Rower’s comment further, another cyberfeminist, Hall (1996), defined cyberfeminism in a post-structuralist manner and proposed the idea that the virtual world can deconstruct gender boundaries: [Cyberfeminism is] influenced by postmodern discussion on gender fluidity by feminist and queer theorists, imagines the computer as a liberating utopia that does not recognize the social dichotomies of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. Because of its similarity to what is often referred to as “liberal feminism” in the non-virtual world, I identify this perspective as liberal “cyberfeminism.” (p. 148)

Even though her definition of cyberfeminism is very broad, this chapter uses Kira Hall’s definition of cyberfeminism to analyze Hong Ying’s blog, because it highlights the features of post-structuralist feminist ideologies. Therefore, Hall’s cyberfeminism is a useful framework from which to explore how Hong Ying’s blog illustrates the theme of deconstructing the “social dichotomies” of gender boundaries.

Women Internet Users in China In “A Brief History of Weblog”, Rettberg (2008) cited the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of a weblog, normally shortened simply to “blog”: A frequently updated Web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources etc., typically run by a single person and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary. (p. 22)

The first weblogs began in the mid-1990s in the United States and did not appear in China until August 2002 with the introduction of blogchina.com (Lange 2010,

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p. 3; Yu 2010). However, the phenomenon did not arouse public interest until the appearance of Muzimei’s 木子美 sex diary on blogchina.com in 2003, creating “the Muzimei phenomenon”. According to the Sydney Morning Herald (2003): The country’s most popular Internet site, Sina.com, credits with her attracting 10 million daily visitors. Another site, Sohu.com, says Mu Zimei [Muzimei] is the name most often typed into its Internet search engine surpassing one occasional runner-up, Mao Zedong.

By the end of 2005, the number of Chinese bloggers had reached 16 million, while the total number of Internet users had reached 111 million (Liu 2011, p. 50). 2005 has been claimed as a ground-breaking year in the short history of blogging in China (Yu 2010) as, due to Muzimei’s popularity, many female bloggers followed her example in order to gain attention via their weblogs. One significant example was “Sister Hibiscus” (Furong Jiejie 芙蓉姐姐), a normal woman who posted pictures of herself in which she claimed to be a super beauty, based on her excessive selfconfidence (Washburn 2005). As blogging developed in China, the practice came to play a significant part in many women’s lives, with many Chinese women bloggers described in metaphorical terms such as “A woman is a fish and the blog is water, women can be set free in the blog world”, “A woman is a cook and the blog is a restaurant, only with a good cook can the restaurant be welcomed”, “A woman is a director who can make good movies”, and “A woman is a model and the blog is a runway women show their different styles on a runway” (Lu 2006).

Celebrities Go Blogging! Seeing how easily members of the general public could obtain fame in the blogosphere overnight, users came to regard weblogs as good platforms for gaining publicity. Because of the Chinese government’s censorship policies, however, only certain Internet search companies are allowed to operate in China. Sina.com is one of the biggest Chinese websites, providing online information and news content for local Chinese and overseas Chinese. Eng (2008) has commented on the issue of Chinese women’s cyberactivity in both Hong Kong and Shanghai: It is most common for Chinese women to tap into several common China-based websites such as sina.com rather than those from outside of China. This could be attributed to the ease of access of these websites, but also to the fact that some of the foreign-based websites are blocked by the State and Mainland Chinese have no access to them. (p. 36)

Government policy can, therefore, be seen as one of the most important contributing factors to the success of Sina.com in China. On the other hand, the marketing strategy of Sina.com also plays a crucial part in the site’s success. In 2005, Sina.com started inviting celebrity entertainers, such as mainland Chinese actress Xu Jinglei 徐靜蕾 and Taiwanese actress Yi Nengjing 伊能 靜, to post their blogs on the website (Lu 2006, p. 43).3 Following this trend, prolific 3 In

2006, Xu Jinglei’s blog ranked first at sina.com, reaching 36 million readers, much higher than any men bloggers.

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writers such as Hong Ying also started blogs on Sina.com. Hong Ying posted her first entry on Sina.com on 21 October 2005, and in doing so created a new platform from which she could interact with her readers, allowing her readers to get to know her better beyond reading her published works. This action formed a connection between the author and her readers and catalyzed the spread of feminist ideologies on the Internet. Hawthorne and Klein (1999) have stated that connectivity is at the heart of feminism (p. 5); thus, Hong Ying’s blog helps to connect the author and, specifically, her female readers to engage in dialogue.

Scope of Data Collection Because Hong Ying is still blogging on Sina.com, my data collection of her blog entries only includes those from the first entry on the blog to the last entry at the end of 2009, the period in which she had been most active updating her blog. Apart from celebrity blogs, Sina.com also introduced Sina Weibo 新浪微博 (a type of microblog, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) in 2005. According to Macmillan’s Dictionary, “microblogging (Weibo) means putting short updates such as brief texts, photos etc on a personal blog, especially by using a mobile phone or instant messaging software”. Although Weibo 微博 is a type of blogging that has become very popular in recent years, with a total of 340 million active users on Weibo in China (China Internet Watch 2017), and Hong Ying has a Weibo account, I have not included Weibo in this dicussion in order to limit the range of data collection.

Hong Ying’s Blog As noted by Bowen (2008), women writers can freely create homepages when they start writing on the web. They can choose their own layout for their web pages, as there are no guidelines, parameters, or restrictions; they can write themselves in any color of ink they choose. There is no structure to their art and no instruction to their design; they are free to “subvert the Symbolic Order without fear of penalty or reprisal” (Bowen 2008, p. 314). In other words, cyberspace provides women writers with a new space to start their own creations without the restrictions of traditional publishing. Even though the format of the blogs provided by Sina.com has become somewhat set, Hong Ying is still free to choose her own presentation styles for her blogs. She can choose her own background pictures, colors, themes, type size, and font types to personalize her blog. Since Hong Ying is a provocative feminist writer with a very close relationship with the media circle, it is not surprising to see more photographs of her and explicit comments about herself on her weblog. She is open about her personal life and accepts interviews on different media channels; therefore, the content of her blog is equally open. One prominent example can be found in her entry for 28 December

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Fig. 6.1 Hong Ying’s wedding photo from Italy, from her personal blog at Sina.com

2009 (http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e98efa0100gaxi.html), in which she posted the photographs from her second wedding in order to share her happiness with her readers (Fig. 6.1). Although the divorce rate has increased in China in the past ten years,4 divorce has been taboo in Chinese society until fairly recently, because, for women in particular, marriage is expected to be life-long, as hinted in the proverb “If a woman marries a chicken, she should stick with the chicken; if she marries a dog, she should stick with the dog.” Hence, divorce has been considered shameful (Fan 2005, p. 213). Given that the unhappy ending of Hong Ying’s first marriage became known to readers through her autobiographical novel, Good Children of the Flowers [Hao’er nühua 好兒女 花]5 prior to this entry in 2009, her open attitude towards divorce and remarriage not only allows her readers to learn more about her personal life, but also helps to deconstruct the myth of divorce as a calamity and promotes the relatively new idea that women can find happiness in remarriage. to the Beijing Times 京華時報, officials from the Ministry of Civil Affairs released statistics showing that in the last three quarters of 2011, 1,466,000 couples had registered for divorce throughout the country, and the number had increased by 11.9% compared with the same period in 2010. Up to 2011, the divorce rate had already been increasing progressively for eight years in succession, with Sichuan, Shandong, and Jiangsu the top three (Articles Base n.d.). 5 This novel is discussed in more detail in the section “Blogging as a Tool of Promotion”. 4 According

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At the end of this entry, Hong Ying also attached a link to her wedding videos in order to invite her readers to learn more about her wedding. This openness allows her readers to get to know her personal life better, and breaks down the “veil” that exists between authors and readers. Without the help of her online diaries, readers can only “communicate” indirectly with Hong Ying by reading her works or acquiring news about her from newspapers or television programs. However, by uploading personal photos and writing personal events on her own blogs, Hong Ying creates a “friendlier” image for her readers, encouraging them to interact with her as she is willing to present herself as a very approachable person. In addition, by posting personal photos and videos of her daily life, she has marketed herself as a “product” on the Internet, and the visual media on her blog become promotional tools to attract readers to her blog.

Blogging as a Tool of Promotion Hong Ying’s blog is more like a personal diary, though she does use it to promote her publications as part of her personal activities. Her autobiographical novel, Good Children of the Flowers, was released in 2009, and between 19 October and 22 December 2009, she posted ten entries discussing the book. She revealed the content of the novel to her readers bit by bit in these posts, which helped arouse her readers’ curiosity about it. The novel covers some sensitive issues included sensitive information, such as the reason for the breakup of her first marriage. In her entry on 22 December 2009, she subtly referred to her ex-husband’s affair. Because she is the host of the blog and uses it to share her intimate thoughts with her readers, she can write whatever she chooses to, and thus evade the restrictions that she might have experienced in traditional publishing culture. As a famous writer and celebrity in mainland China, Hong Ying has been a guest on many talk shows on Phoenix Television 鳳凰衛視, and has initiated gossip topics on her blog in connection with these appearances so as to attract her readers’ curiosity. This type of connectivity demonstrates the feminist nature of Hong Ying’s blog, since “connectivity” is the fundamental argument of second-wave feminist ideologies. Connectivity here implies the image of the network, a term that originally referred to “a fabric made of netted threads, later woven or ‘webbed’, its female-identitied techniques both tactile and social” (Thornham 2007, p. 124). From a cyberfeminist point of view, Manuel Castells provides a new insight on the term “network” in a social media sense: “the rapid diffusion of ideas in a globalized culture, and in an interrelated world, where people and experience travel and mingle, quickly weaving a hyperquit of women’s voices throughout most of the planet” (qtd. in Thornham 2007, p. 124). In this way, therefore, Hong Ying uses her blog to break away from the constraints that prevent Chinese women from speaking in public about their points of view. This can be justified by Michael Keren’s comment:

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What can be more liberating than millions of women who formerly lacked a public voice, asserting new identities, blurring the private/public divide that kept women’s issues away from the public sphere, and educating each other, and the world at large, of updated norms and values? (2006, p. 37)

Not only does Hong Ying create a platform for her readers on which she can express her opinions, but she also participates in the discussion with the deliberate intention of connecting female voices: “the computer emerges out of the history of weaving, the process so often said to be quintessence of women’s work…It is about weaving women and cybernetics, and is also weaving women and cybernetics together” (Plant 1995, p. 46). It may seem that she uses Sina.com to promote herself, but, on the contrary, her blog can be seen as a platform to express her intimate thoughts and discuss her personal activities with the agenda of promoting female consciousness.

The Feminist Ideologies in Hong Ying’s Blog Apart from promoting new publications, Hong Ying also uses her blog to express feminist thoughts. In the entry for 22 December 2009 in which she revealed her ex-husband’s extra-marital affair, she quoted her view on feminism when she was interviewed by Wuhan Wanbao 武漢晚報. In the interview, Hong Ying explicitly portrayed herself as a “post-feminist” and stated that her writings should not be categorized as feminist writings but as “gender-netural writing”, because she intends to deconstruct gender boundaries in her work and believes that she possesses an “androgynous mind”, a term originating in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own . In addition, when the reporter asked Hong Ying about the marginalized status of the female protagonists of her novels, Hong Ying declared that all her protagonists, like her mother, represent subaltern women who are denied the right to speak. As an author and creator, Hong Ying empowers them to speak and allows them to air their grievances against patriarchal restrictions (see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4 6e98efa0100g86h.html). In this light, her female protagonists are not willing to be placed in subordinate positions to men, as the protagonist of K: The Art of Love demonstrates.6 On 23 May 2006, Hong Ying posted an article discussing a contemporary Chinese critic’s view of feminism and feminist thoughts. She stated that Lin, the main character of K: The Art of Love, is a feminist who does not play the role of a submissive woman, or even a victim, as most female characters in Chinese literature do, but is aggressive and knows how to seduce her Western lover, Julian Bell, using every means possible in order to satisfy herself (see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e9 8efa010002xw.html). This is not the only time that Hong Ying has written about a sexual relationship between a Western man and a Chinese woman; her earlier 6 Hong

Ying’s K: The Art of Love was finished in 1999 and published in 2001, but was banned in China in 2002 due to a libel case.

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short story “The Woman Who Disappeared from the Forked Road” also features a Western/Chinese couple: the American Mark and the Chinese Linda. However, K: The Art of Love provides a different image of “Chinese woman” than the usual stereotypes of Chinese women in contrast to Western men. In order to highlight the contrast between “the East” and “the West”, Edward Said’s Orientalism is a useful starting point from which to examine the deep-rooted stereotypes of Chinese women in Western literature. Orientalism is a perspective on world relations in which the West produces a particular version of the Orient, which then serves to justify the latter’s subjugation as culturally, morally, and politically inferior to the West (Grice 2002, p. 111). In other words, the Orient is metaphorically feminized (Louie 2002, p. 5). Asian men and women are depicted in positions of inferiority compared to the powerful masculine West (Ngan and Chan 2012, p. 157), as demonstrated in Western novels such as The World of Suzie Wong . According to Lucille Lok-Suk Ngan and Chan Kwok-bun: Western representations of women frequently focus on their exotic and sexual characteristics, yet other stereotypes portray Chinese women as passive submissive and docile-attributes of the oppressed subject of traditional Chinese patriarchal practices. (p. 157)

In mainstream Western literature, Chinese women have been objectified as exotic ideals for Western men. Nonetheless, Hong Ying does not follow this “tradition” in describing relationships between Chinese women and Western men; instead, she takes an “occidental” approach to her female protagonists, particularly in K: The Art of Love: “‘Occidentalism’ is bound to gain recognition for engaging and challenging Orientalism’s tendency to depict the oppositional intellectual traditions of ‘East and West’ as static” (Dai 2002, p. x). What is Occidentalism? According to Dai Jinhua 戴錦華, “‘Occidentalism’ can actually have a politically and ideologically liberating effect on contemporary nonWestern culture”; furthermore, “it illustrates how the position of Third World native cultures can create subversive intellectual inquiries in the theoretical development of American academia and English-language scholarship” (2002, p. x). Using Fredric Jameson’s “national allegory” to read K: The Art of Love, the main female protagonists, Lin (also known as K) could be perceived as the East and Julian Bell (the nephew of Virginia Woolf) as the West. Unlike other Chinese women in Western literature who are merely sex symbols and dainty playthings for Caucasian men (Sue and Wagner 1973, p. 77), Lin is an aggressive woman who uses her Western lover to satisfy her sexual needs (see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e98efa010002xw. html). In this respect, Hong Ying uses her blog not only to promote, but to clarify the intention of, her works; by inserting her own comments into her interpretive posts, she presents her feminist views both inside and outside her texts. I would argue that Hong Ying makes herself both a post-feminist and a cyberfeminist, as she uses the cyber world to deconstruct gender boundaries as she emphasizes her aspiration toward “gender-neutral writing” in which women can freely express themselves on the web without paying attention to gender identities.

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The Emphasis on Motherhood Since motherhood is a key element in psychoanalytic feminist ideologies, Hong Ying has dedicated several of her blog posts, such as those of 3 May 2006 and 24 November 2006, exclusively to her mother, commemorating the memories of the time they spent together and her feelings after her mother’s death. In addition, because her memoir Good Children of the Flowers is about herself and her mother, her posts discussing this book also touch upon the subject of motherhood. On 25 October 2007, Hong Ying posted “The Person that I Like the Most,” (see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e98efa01000afw.html) in memory of her mother who had passed away a year earlier. At the top of the page, she posted a picture of her kneeling down in front of a picture of her mother, illustrating her respect for her. The post began with a discussion of her own little daughter Sybil, and how Sybil reminds her of her mother, revealing both Hong Ying’s maternal connection with her daughter and her filial connection with her mother. Her emphasis on motherhood makes men invisible, as her intent is to connect with female readers in a manner that is exclusive to women. The entry concludes with Hong Ying’s statement: “Mother, the person that I love the most, I have been apart from you for a year and only you will know how lonely I am without having you around”.7 Her demonstration of her relationship with her mother also conveys the message that only a woman can understand another woman, as Bodger (2001) points out: There are things only women understand. We can’t help it – we were raised that way. It just goes with the territory. If you’re a woman, you would know exactly what I mean. If you are not … well, only women understand these things. (p. 1)

One comment (Fig. 6.2) made on the post expresses sympathy to Hong Ying, and taking Bodger’s statement into account, we can assume that the respondent is female, based on the emotions present in the comment: The belief, conveyed in this comment, that only women can understand the essence of motherhood, comes from the mother/daughter relationship as an innate ability

Fig. 6.2 A reader named “Fei Hua Piao Yin 飛花飄茵” comments on Hong Ying’s post. Translation: “No matter whether mothers are alive or have passed away, they are always the spiritual fortress for their daughters. Whenever we are upset, our mothers will be there missing us in the other world.” original Chinese version is as follows: 妈妈, 我最最爱的, 离开你一年, 只有你知道, 没有 你的日子, 我是多么孤独! (See http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e98efa01000afw.html).

7 The

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in women, a biological rather than conceptual bonding, much like the difference between the terms “sex” and “gender”. This echoes with Hélène Cixous’s idea of “écriture feminine” (2001, p. 2039). Thus, Hong Ying’s focus on the mother/daughter relationship in her blog makes it a tool to connect her women readers.

Redefining Femininity in Hong Ying’s Blog A post-feminist approach to Hong Ying’s blog demonstrates her expression of the post-feminist ideal “having it all” (Wilkins 2016, p. 149): on the one hand, her blog uses typical feminine imagery, but on the other, it also helps her redefine what femininity is. Traditionally, according to the social doctrine of gender dichotomies, men are encouraged to demonstrate masculine traits such as toughness and leadership, while women should demonstrate feminine traits such as softness and submission. This social doctrine generally sees women as inferior opponents of men, an attitude that most second-wave feminists seek to resist. With the emergence of post-feminism, post-feminists try to redefine femininity through reinforcing the idea of domesticity: women can be proud of their femininity and of their roles as wives and mothers without being suppressed by patriarchal ideals. According to Genz (2009): I suggest that we “unsettle” femininity by pushing it over the postfeminist edge and I put forward the term postfemininity to highlight the challenges and paradoxes of a postfeminist femininity/domesticity that can no longer be conceptualized along a sharp split between feminism and housewifery, agency and victimization, work and family life. This is to acknowledge that femininity is changeable and can operate in a variety of ways, acquiring a range of different meanings that have come to the fore in our postfeminist present. Post-ing femininity (like post-ing feminism) thus involves a certain amount of rethinking, not a reversal of well-established dualisms, but a process of resignification that threatens to reinscribe what it also transposes. (p. 54)

Genz’s definition of femininity shows that women can be tough (masculine) and soft (feminine) at the same time. Her emphasis on femininity does not reinforce the gender dichotomies, as femininity is not a negative thing which makes women inferior to men, but is a quality that can only be possessed by women. In Hong Ying’s case, her blog exemplifies Genz’s definition of femininity as she portrays herself as a feminine icon in order to show her readers that being a postfeminist does not mean losing the essential feminine-ness of a woman. For instance, she depicts herself as a gentle cook, in her book I Am a Gentle Cook [Wo zhe wenrou di chuniang 我這溫柔的廚娘] and a blog post from 2 December 2008 (Fig. 6.3). Hong Ying, who is the first among the top ten Chinese female writers in China, shares the secrets of her cooking and how to taste good food on CCTV. She’s also one of the top ten food tasters in China and has visited different countries to taste the local cuisine. She is a harsh food taster, yet she’s also a heroine to all Chinese women. She’s a gentle female cook, but she’s also an extreme feminist. As she endured famine when she was young, she was “a daughter of starvation”; therefore, she has a natural instinct towards food. She is a writer and

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Fig. 6.3 At the end of this entry, she posted a recommendation from the editor of the book I Am a Gentle Cook (see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e98efa0100b7fh.html) a cook; she writes about her unhappy past and she cooks whatever she wants. Even though she is Hong Ying, this is the only time she is not the writer, Hong Ying.8

Hong Ying posted this comment on her blog in order to show her readers that she can be a tough, hard-core feminist on the one hand, and a gentle feminine cook on the other. She demonstrates that she enjoys being a “housewife”, with her emphasis on domestic femininity revealing her post-feminist qualities: “The postfeminist housewife is no longer easily categorized as an emblem of female oppression but she renegotiates and resignifies her domestic/feminine position, deliberately choosing to ‘go home’” (Genz 2009, p. 50). This entry, as elsewhere in her blog, shows that Hong Ying consistently presents herself as a strong controversial woman who will 8 The

quotation in the original Chinese is as follows:

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not be defeated. In 2006, she was sued by a Chinese woman for an issue of liability regarding her book K: The Art of Love; Hong Ying lost the lawsuit, but she did not admit she that she had been defeated; on the contrary, she still claimed that the novel was based on truth.9 At times, she explicitly declares herself a feminist, reinforcing her public image as an aggressive muscular woman. Nonetheless, this is not the image that she wants her readers or even the general public to perceive; she wants to reveal her feminine side as well, as demonstrated in her usual style of dress and the photographs she posts on her blog. I would argue that Hong Ying does not want to be a typical second-wave feminist who hides her femininity, but rather wants to redefine “femininity” and to be a post-feminist. She claims that a tough woman can also have a soft feminine side, that women in the contemporary era can be multi-faceted, and, most importantly, that women can take charge of their own lives. One of Hong Ying’s readers posted the following reply to this entry (Fig. 6.4): This comment indicates that Hong Ying’s presentation of herself as an androgynous woman—a woman who has both masculine and feminine qualities—has succeeded, as her reader recognized the effort she has put toward her public post-feminist image. Unlike some second-wave feminists, Hong Ying rejects the traditional feminine roles that are imposed on women, and instead redefines femininity by playing along with these roles while adding her own insights of being a woman. She also demonstrates “girl power” (Taft 2004, p. 72) in her blog as she has presented herself as an all-round woman and a feminist intellectual, and in doing so exemplifies the post-feminist and cyberfeminist presence in the Chinese blogosphere.

A New Platform for Author/Reader Correspondence Women’s weblogs not only express their authors’ and readers’ right to speak out, but also help to form a new type of author/reader relationship. In traditional print culture, if readers want to comment on an author’s work, they can write letters either to the publisher or directly to the author; and some readers might even become literary critics to discuss these works from an academic perspective (see Hockx 2011). However, these interactions involve time: letters need time to be written and sent, and articles need time to be published. With the presence of blogs, authors

Fig. 6.4 A comment from a reader named “Ling Mao Shen Yun 靈貓神韻”. Translation: “A female writer is also a woman; Hong Ying, you have become the model of being a woman!” 9 See

the appendix in Hong Ying’s K: The Art of Love.

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who want to receive instant responses from their readers can simply use their blogs as a communication tool. Barbara Kaye has stated that blogs are combinations of websites, bulletin boards, and e-mail that can be used as both one-way and two-way forms of communication. Blog users will read the bloggers’ posts, click on the links that the bloggers provide, or even send the bloggers their viewpoints and analyses, and in this way, the blog users and the bloggers are engaged in a dialogue. Since “blogs are one- and two-way methods of communicating where users choose their level of participation, they may gratify entirely different needs from those met by than other Internet resources” (Kaye 2007, pp. 129–130). Hong Ying often updates her blog and is willing to respond to her readers’ comments, and thus creates an interactive platform for herself and her readers to communicate with one another. The following exchange is a useful example (Fig. 6.5):

Fig. 6.5 A comment from a reader named “I am farming when I am reading books一邊種地一 邊讀書” on 10 April 2010. Translation: “I would like to show my greatest respect to the best contemporary female writer, Hong Ying.” See http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/profile_1189711610.html

On the same day, Hong Ying replied, “Thank you! I really want to give you my new book as a present and would like to seek your advice on my writing.” (see http:// blog.sina.com.cn/s/profile_1189711610.html) (Fig. 6.6).

Fig. 6.6 Hong Ying’s reply to “I am farming when I am reading books” on the same day

Another reader, “Shu San Mao”, wrote to Hong Ying on 8 November 2009 to ask about obtaining a copy of Good Children of Flowers. Hong Ying replied that

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Fig. 6.7 A comment from a reader named “Shu San Mao 鼠三貓”

the book can be ordered through a Chinese website, Dang Dang Wang 當當網 (see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e98efa0100flqu.html) (Fig. 6.7): These two examples demonstrate the effectiveness of blogs as instant public communication between authors and readers. Not only can the reader ask questions and obtain information, but other readers can also enjoy the benefits of the exchange when they read the posts. The latter example also shows that instead of just commenting on readers’ responses, Hong Ying also uses her blog to promote her books, as discussed above. In my interview with her in Beijing on 20 May 2008, Hong Ying explicitly stated that she uses her blog to communicate with her readers and she wants to create a “platform” for them to express themselves. To this I would add that her blog has played an important part in providing instant communication between her as author and her readers.

Limitations of the Chinese Blogosphere Ideally, the Internet should be “an unstoppable force for freedom of speech, regardless the political factors involved” (qtd. in Alexanyan and Koltsova 2009, p. 77); however, this is definitely not the case in China, as Yu (2007) has pointed out: People in the West are frequently told about the suppression of freedom of speech by the Chinese government, constraints on politically sensitive websites, arrests of cyber activists, and global Internet search companies (such as Google, Yahoo and MSN) giving in to the Chinese government by imposing stricter censorship to control the flow of Internet Information. (p. 423)

Not only can foreign search engines not be easily accessed in China, but local microblogging services have had codes of conduct imposed on them in order to restrict the posting of opinions on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, on 27 May 2012 (BBC News 2012a). This new policy to control microblogging was due to rumors about mainland Chinese political leaders being spread on Weibo in March 2012. On 15 March, the Communist Party announced that Bo Xilai 薄熙來 had been removed from his post as Chongqing’s 重慶 Chief due to the “Wang Lijun 王立軍

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incident” (BBC News 2012b).10 Because of Bo Xilai’s high position and popularity, netizens posted many comments on different forums and blogs, including Weibo, about his dismissal. Peter Simpson wrote about the online rumors about the “military coup” resulting from the Bo Xilai incident in the UK newspaper Daily Mail on 22 March 2012: Online reports of tanks on the streets of the capital Beijing and shots fired within the secure leaders’ compound – which is located next door to the top tourist attraction, the Forbidden City – are being closely monitored by the international intelligence communities, including the US and the UK. Popular Chinese microblogging sites Sina Weibo, QQ Weibo and the bulletin board of the search engine Baidu, all reported ‘“abnormalities” in Beijing on the night of March 19. (Simpson 2012)

On 31 March 2012, the Chinese government closed down sixteen websites and arrested six bloggers for posting comments that “had maliciously attacked the state leaders” after the outbreak of the Bo Xilai controversy (BBC News 2012c). All the episodes cited above are crucial as they provide concrete facts proving that the Chinese blogosphere is not totally free: Chinese netizens can enjoy the freedom to voice their comments as long as they do not judge the Communist Party or make any comments that would shake the “stability of the Communist Party’s rule”. In “Understanding Men’s and Women’s Political Interests: Evidence from a Study of Gendered Political Attitudes”, Campbell and Winters (2008) commented, based on Kristi Anderson’s 1975 argument on the differences between political socialization among men and among women: We argued that socialization processes are likely to have a complex impact upon men’s and women’s political interest. We claim that the socialisation of girls leads them to focus upon the needs of their family and is likely to increase their interest in social welfare. (p. 53)

Anderson noted that, based on empirical evidence, women are generally less interested in politics than men, particularly in the context of women’s daily concerns and political events (qtd. in Campbell and Winters 2008, p. 53). This does lead to a paradox regarding Chinese women’s blogging: even though the Chinese blogosphere is still under the control of the government, it still provides a new platform for women to speak. In light of Campbell and Winters’ commentary on Anderson’s argument about women’s interest in politics, Chinese women still have “freedom” to speak their opinions as long as they do not include political comments. Hong Ying’s blog is an example of Chinese women bloggers preferring to focus on domestic and social welfare issues rather than making critical comments about the existing government. Unlike their novels or short essays, their blogs are meant to provide a platform to share their personal thoughts on random issues in daily lives and to promote their new works; therefore, they might not have political agendas when they write their blogs. 10 The

Wang Lijun Incident: Wang Lijun used to be Bo Xilai’s subordinate, he was the police chief in Chongqing, however, on 6 February 2012, Wang Lijun fled to the United States Embassy to seek asylum: it is believed that he had found that Bo Xilai’s wife, Gu Kailai 谷開來, was involved in the homicide case of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, in Chengdu 成都.

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Conclusion Hong Ying has created a new space to perform literary creations that are not possible in traditional printed culture. She has the freedom to talk about any topics in which she and/or her readers may be interested, and more importantly, she creates a connection between herself and her readers that reveals the feminist characteristic of her blog. Furthermore, her focus on topics such as motherhood attracts female readers’ attention, as motherhood is exclusive to women; and she is thus also able to present her ideas about women’s rights to her readers. Apart from creating a new space for them to speak, Hong Ying has also created a new platform for her readers to voice their thoughts without carrying any gendered labels. Chinese women have many restrictions in public, as the mainland society is still a patriarchal one. With the help of the Internet, however, Chinese women can express themselves under pseudonyms that do not reveal much about their identities. Hence, they do not need to worry about social criticism and the perceived inferiority of being a woman. Even though Chinese women (and, indeed, men) are not allowed to criticize the Communist party or comment on political issues related to the stability of China, we can still say that Internet blogging, to a certain extent, helps to liberate women from the restraints of traditional print culture as it deconstructs existing gender dichotomies.

References Alexanyan, K., & Koltsova, O. (2009). Blogging in Russia is not Russian blogging. In Russell, & N. Echchaibi (Eds.), International blogging: Identity, Politics and Networked Publics (pp. 65–84). New York: Peter Lang. Adriaens, F. (2009). Postfeminism in popular culture: A potential for critical resistance? Politics and Culture. Retrieved May 5, 2017, from https://politicsandculture.org/2009/11/09/post-feminismin-popular-culture-a-potential-for-critical-resistance/. Articles Base. (n.d.). Divorce rate has increased progressively in China. Retrieved from http://www.articlesbase.com/divorce-articles/divorce-rate-has-increased-progressively-inchina-5764711.html. BBC News. (2012a). China’s Weibo microblog introduces users’ contract, 27 May 2012. Retrieved May 28, 2012, from http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18208446. BBC News. (2012b). Bo Xilai Scandal: Timeline, 25 April 2012. Retrieved May 25, 2012, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17673505. BBC News. (2012c). China arrests over coup rumours, 31 March 2012. Retrieved May 28, 2012, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-17570005. Bodger, L. (2001). 511 things only women understand. Missouri: Andrews MacMeel. Bowen, D. S. (2008). E-criture Feminine: Women’s online diaries and new female discourse. In K. Blair, R. Gajjala, & C. Tulley (Eds.), Webbing cyberfeminist practice: Communities, pedagogies, and social action (pp. 309–326). New York: Hampton Press. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and subversion of identity. London: Routledge. Campbell, R., & Winters, K. (2008). Understanding men’s and women’s political interests: Evidence from a study of gendered political attitudes. Journal of Elections, Public Opinions and Parties, 18(1), 53–74.

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Chapter 7

Visual Manipulation of East Asian Women in American Pop Female Performances Chun-Lung Ma

Introduction Ethnic minorities are often underrepresented and misrepresented in American popular media. East Asian women, who are at the intersection of different forms of discrimination, particularly racism and sexism, are also “gendered” and “racialized” on screen. Media representations are powerfully influential. In his essay “The Whites of Their Eyes”, Stuart Hall (1992) suggests that the media are “part of the dominant means of ideological production” which produce “representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work” (pp. 19–20). Therefore, East Asian female images, seen by millions of viewers worldwide, in the media can perpetuate notions about race, about gender, and about race-and-gender, and have significant implications for the ideology and hegemony at play in society. The media reproduce visual signifiers for the audience to identify members of ethnic groups, and as Hall (1992) points out in his aforementioned essay, the media are a “powerful source of ideas about race” and “these ideas are articulated, worked on, transformed and elaborated” (p. 20). For Barthes (1978), “pictures are more imperative than writing because they impose meaning ‘at one stroke without analyzing or diluting meaning’” (p. 229). In the twenty-first century, YouTube’s spontaneous global reach far exceeds that of any previous visual medium. The video platform has rejuvenated the music video format, and thus the visual manipulation of East Asian women in these videos as viewed by an unprecedented global viewership has pervasive and far-reaching implications.

C.-L. Ma (B) The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_7

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YouTube’s Global Reach and the Revival of the Music Video In this day and age, YouTube has taken over traditional media outlets to become arguably the most influential platform from which to disseminate ideas about race and gender. According to YouTube’s official statistics, the website has over 2 billion users worldwide (“Number of monthly logged-in YouTube Users” 2019), which is over one-third of all people on the Internet (“World Internet Users” 2018). Every day, people spend hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube generating billions of views. The videos that attract the most views are music videos (“Most Popular” 2018). MTV changed popular music in the 1980s, by turning it from a mostly audio format into a more visual one. Pop music has since been as much about the song as it is about the visual presentation of it. The video was predicted to kill the radio, but this did not happen. 25 years later, in 2010, MTV decided to drop the words “Music Television” from its logo; music videos could no longer satisfy its viewers as MTV turned to reality TV, gradually shrinking its percentage of music video programming. The launch of YouTube provided the perfect platform for the revival of the music video. High-speed Internet and YouTube’s free, on-demand nature have democratized popular music, and made music videos available to almost anyone, anywhere in the world. As of October 2018, the top 30 most viewed videos on YouTube are all music videos (“Most Viewed” 2018). This means the music video, with the help of YouTube, has become the most consumed visual medium. And therefore, representations of Asian women in music videos reach far and wide and can influence not only people in America, but viewers across the globe.

East Asian Female Stereotypes American film critic Rosenbaum (1992) observes that Asian stereotypes are often “closer to being false because they’re usually based less on direct observation and more on the perpetuation of clichés that have filtered down about Asians through other examples of popular culture” (p. 65). There is also a general lack of ethnic and cultural awareness about representing people from Asia, with expedient substitutions such as passing Filipino rituals off as Vietnamese ones in the film Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979) or hiring well-known Chinese female actors to play Japanese geishas in Memoirs of a Geisha (Marshall 2005). Two of the most common stereotypes of Asian women found in film and popular culture in general include the “lotus blossom,” the docile, vulnerable, chaste virgin; and the “dragon lady,” who is manipulative, scheming, and is sexually available only to gain advantage for herself. These images are often found in music videos. Generally, North American female pop performers appropriate Asian femininity according to two main strategies: performing racial masquerade and presenting Asian women as regulated, segregated “others.”

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Racial Masquerade: Non-Asian Female Performers in Yellowface The appropriation of Asian femininity often takes the form of yellowface, a long tradition in Hollywood that is documented in the film The Slanted Screen (Adachi 2006). In addition to the “classic” male yellowface figures of Charlie Chan and Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Edwards 1961), examples of female yellowface include Katharine Hepburn’s Chinese woman in Dragon Seed (Bucquet and Conway 2014). In 1982, Linda Hunt, a female actor, won an Oscar playing a Chinese man in the Peter Weir film The Year of Living Dangerously (Weir 1982). Yellowface has not gone away in Hollywood, with the most recent controversy surrounding Scarlett Johansson’s casting as the central character Major Motoko Kusanagi in Hollywood’s adaptation (Sanders 2017) of the Japanese manga series Ghost in the Shell (Masamune 1989–1990), whose producer Steven Paul has publicly defended his casting choice (Cheng 2016). CGI visual effects have reportedly been used to make Johansson look more Asian, which if true, is advanced yellowface using twentyfirst-century technology (Sampson 2016). The prototype of female yellowface in popular media can be traced back to opera. The tragic heroine Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly created the foundation of the “lotus blossom” and the geisha. Another similar figure is Turandot, the dragonlady from the Puccini opera of the same name. In the book Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, Yoshihara (2002) highlights the role of white female performers in the development of American Orientalism. In the nineteenth century, images of Asian women were already established in Europeans’ popular imagination. These images were not based on actual cultural exchange, but on art objects during the aesthetic movements of Japonisme and Chinoiserie, which were popular in Europe and America. According to Yoshihara, the opera Madama Butterfly is a significant source of performative tropes for American Orientalism. This opera marks the beginning of American performers’ “racial masquerade” of Asian women: “[White] women’s participation in Orientalist performances which proliferated in the early twentieth century marked a significant shift in the relationship of white women to the Orient in that these women literally became ‘actors’ of Orientalism” (2002, p. 78). As Yoshihara (2002) points out, this trend of Orientalist performances coincided with the New Woman movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which North American and European women tried to challenge Victorian gender norms; their performances of Asian femininity could be seen as tools to articulate white women’s new sense of empowerment and superiority. By performing Asian heroines on stage and thereby adopting identities other than their own, these performers produced “new, constructed identities for women” that would appeal to the female audience who saw the process as liberation from “fixed categories” (p. 78). In pop music, American female performers’ racial masquerade and adoption of alternative femininity accentuates their new identities as “modern American women.” Mainstream female pop performers often present the image of strong, independent,

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business-savvy American women who fulfill the American Dream. Their star images are validated and highlighted by Orientalist performances of Asian femininity. These performers are not aiming for an authentic representation of Asian women or Asian culture, but are instead aiming at difference. Their occasional race-crossing is meant to highlight the otherness of Asian women, and to reinforce the performers’ superior position as non-Asian American women. The lack of authenticity is to confirm a belief in American superiority. While the audience is invited to, for a few minutes, acknowledge the racial masquerade, they are also expected to see through the illusion, as, in these stage and music video performances, the performer of the yellowface act is well known and is clearly not Asian, and the performance itself is not meant to be convincing. The world of American pop, even to this day, is also devoid of Asian faces. The rise of hip hop, from an underground genre to the now de facto mainstream genre of pop music, has brought black performers to the forefront. Perhaps this is why yellowface performances in music videos are no longer limited to white performers, as the following examples illustrate. Examples American pop singer Madonna has adopted the geisha guise multiple times, in advertisements, music videos, and on stage. She mostly follows the vulnerable Cio-CioSan/lotus blossom prototype in her racial masquerade, wearing the Japanese kimono (Madonna 2009a) and occasionally the Chinese cheongsam (Guillermo De La V 2015), incorporating kung fu elements and images from Japanese pop culture. The closest of her guises to yellowface is perhaps her 1993 music video for “Rain” (Madonna 2009b) in which she mimics the appearance of Japanese-American model Jenny Shimizu, who was widely seen in Calvin Klein advertisements in the 1990s and also appears in the video. “Rain” is a video within a video in which Madonna portrays a performer making a music video with an all-Japanese crew led by a Japanese director played by famed musician Ryuichi Sakamoto 坂本 龍一. In his investigation of yellowface performance in Hollywood, Wong (1977) coined the term “racist cosmetology” to describe the Orientalizing makeup and the unilateral system in which only white actors get to play Asian roles: “Racist cosmetology constitutes a special sub-category of makeup. Un-like racial cosmetology which would allow all performers—regardless of race—to simulate all racial groups, the use of racist cosmetology is limited to white performers only” (p. 20). Madonna adopted this “racist cosmetology” in her attempts to project a female image that deviates from her usual provocative and more unconventional public persona as in the songs “Nothing Really Matters,” “Take a Bow,” and “Rain”, all of which depict the wholesome image of the “lotus blossom”: a heartbroken woman yearning for love and waiting for her man to return, and celebrating the joy and inspiration that a child brings to a mother. All of these themes are compatible with Cio-Cio-San’s story in Madama Butterfly. Pop singer Katy Perry adopted the geisha look for a stage performance of the song “Unconditionally” (Pablo 2013) in 2013. The song is about undying, unconditional love for a flawed man, a deviation from her usual coquettishly provocative persona. In

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the American Music Awards performance of the song, Perry is dressed in a kimonostyle costume with some Chinese cheongsam details, and performs on a set that resembles a Japanese garden backed up by dancers wearing kimonos. The stage design also mimics Japonisme paintings. As hip hop took over the mainstream, racial masquerade is no longer limited to white performers. Lyrically, Coldplay and Rihanna’s 2011 single “Princess of China” (Coldplay 2012) depicts a breakup between a man of unknown nationality, but presumably British, and the Princess of China. The music video suggests that the story takes place in or around the Qing dynasty when the British first arrived in China for trade. Rihanna’s long fingers have been a symbol of nobility in China since the Ming dynasty, signifying the non-working nature of a noble woman. The princess, played by Rihanna in the video, seems to be modeled after Puccini’s Turandot, intimidating and regal yet exotic and sensual, as her Chinese costume is much more revealing than would be historically accurate. The video is a hodgepodge of clichéd East Asian, mainly Chinese, imagery: the thousand-hand Guan Yin dance, the sexualized costume with slits cut up to the waist, the black wig with chopsticks stuck in it, the Chinese dancers, the kung fu fighting, and the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-inspired flying scene, all of which allude to the exotic, mysterious allure of the Chinese woman that closely resembles the domineering “dragon lady.” Female rapper Nicki Minaj’s 2010 video for “Your Love” (Minaj 2010a) opens with her singing against a background of red silk while she is dressed in a bottomless flesh-colored kimono-inspired outfit. She also sports a smooth black wig with bangs that are typical of school girls in Asia. Her yellowface eye makeup makes her eyes look almond-shaped. The video then cuts to a male character, who appears to be a martial arts, possibly karate, coach in a strangely all-female class (separating men and women is not a traditional karate practice.) He is wearing Buddhist malas praying beads, which are unrelated to karate, around his neck. The karategi 空手着 that the characters wear are also modified to include Shaolin 少林 leg wraps. The women also wear red karategi, though karategi are traditionally white. The color red symbolizes passion and lust, as suggested by one of the women’s yearning look on her face. This other woman is a character in competition with Nicki Minaj’s character for the love of their coach. The video then cuts to Nicki Minaj alone, now against blue silk background, singing in a revealing red kimono. These scenes in which she sings alone represent her hidden inner passion that she does not show in public. This is made more obvious when she appears in a dream-like sequence featuring a Japanese garden with a bridge, seemingly inspired by Monet’s painting. This alludes to the Japanese Tanabata 七夕 festival, which originates from the Chinese Qixi 七夕 festival, in which two star-crossed lovers are only allowed to meet once a year. In Japanese culture, the bridge symbolizes the pathway to eternity and paradise. In this scene, Nicki Minaj wears a more “covering” kimono, this time in white, which symbolizes chastity, purity, or goodness in general. Her rival, clad in black, then appears behind her and challenges her to a one-on-one sword fight. Nicki Minaj’s character is killed and she dies in a theatrical fashion, with a red cloth being pulled away from her to represent the blood loss. Like Cio-Cio-San, she dies for her love for a man.

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East Asian Women as Regulated and Segregated Others In his 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said (2003) argues that “the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority” (p. 42) and that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (p. 3). By placing the weak, inferior, enigmatic Orient in a lower position in the hierarchy, Eurocentric American audiences imagine the Occident as strong, superior, logical, and developed. Discussing black popular culture in his essay “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Hall (2009) observes that, often, “what replaces invisibility is a kind of carefully regulated, segregated visibility” (p. 377). This segregated visibility can be seen in some of the Asian-themed music videos which at first seem to represent East Asian cultures and/or feature many East Asian characters. In the following examples, Asian women are prominently featured but appear as an isolated group of “Others”, as the Asian posse of a non-Asian star. They are the chosen Asian wing-women, almost identical in looks and mannerisms, with little discernable individuality or personality. In these videos, Asian women function as a group, not as individuals, to serve their master woman. They are chosen for their skin color, hair color, and looks, to accentuate the lead performer’s Americanness. They also seem to stick together, their servitude suggesting a power inequality based on race. This servitude is manifested in the Asian women’s robotic, synchronized manners and emotionless faces. On the other hand, Said has argued that the Western imagination of the East is often exotic and unchanging. Asian women are often visually presented in a context that is almost one hundred years out of date. However, there is an increasing trend to reference contemporary East Asian pop culture such as Hallyu (which literally means “the Korean wave”), K-pop, anime, manga, and kawaii culture. Incorporating and appropriating new pop cultural trends from Asia may at first seem to update and energize the representations of Asia in Western media. The underlying Othering of Asians, however, seems to persist. Examples In pop music, kawaii culture entered the American popular consciousness with Gwen Stefani’s backup dancers, known as Harajuku Girls, during her “Hollaback Girl” period in 2004. They appear in most of Gwen Stefani’s music videos from the album Love. Angel. Music. Baby (Stefani 2004). Kawaii culture is appropriated and presented in the form of the Harajuku Girls, four Japanese and JapaneseAmerican backup dancers who also doubled as Gwen Stefani’s entourage, performing with her on stage, in music videos, in interviews, and other promotional activities. Reportedly, the Harajuku Girls were contractually obligated to speak Japanese only or remain silent. As a result, the Harajuku Girls were essentially Stefani’s human fashion accessories. Cho (2005), the vocal Korean-American comedienne, commented on the Harajuku Girls:

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[Racial] stereotypes are really cute sometimes, and I don’t want to bum everyone out by pointing out the minstrel show. I think it is totally acceptable to enjoy the Harajuku Girls, because there are not that many other Asian people out there in the media really, so we have to take whatever we can get. […] a Japanese schoolgirl uniform is kind of like blackface, I am just in acceptance over it, because something is better than nothing. An ugly picture is better than a blank space, and it means that one day, we will have another display at the Museum of Asian Invisibility, that groups of children will crowd around in disbelief, because once upon a time, we weren’t there.

For Cho, the Harajuku Girls form an “ugly picture”, which, to her, is better than a “blank space.” The picture is ugly because it is distorted and misleading, but it is still better than being invisible. The distinction between the Asian and the American is further highlighted by blonde wigs and Virgin Queen-style white makeup. This can be seen in Stefani’s performances in this period, which featured Alice in Wonderland-inspired Victorianera fashion in her stage wardrobe. The imperialistic connotations are obvious as Stefani sits on a throne, admired by her Harajuku Girls, who are reduced to infantilized feminine subjects in schoolgirl uniforms. Nicki Minaj’s 2010 “Massive Attack” video (Minaj 2010a) features Asian women as futuristic troopers, but dressed in revealing combat outfits that seem to have been taken from an anime. Minaj plays the commander, and she is clearly the one the Asian women look to for protection. The conflation of East Asia and a high-tech future was first pointed out by Morley and Robins (1995) in their essay “Japan Panic”, in which they coined the term “techno-Orientalism”, of which this video is a striking example. In another of her videos, “Check It Out” (will i am 2010), Minaj appropriates the K-Pop craze. The video begins with a Korean game show host introducing Nicki Minaj and Will.i.am, the featured rapper, and then pans to an all-Asian audience with Asian women seated in the front row, all wearing black dresses and sunglasses. They watch attentively without showing much excitement and they move in unison. For instance, the women in the front row cross their legs all at the same time. This gesture alludes to the belief of East Asian conformity, visually shown to accentuate American individualism. In her 2015 video for “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj 2015), Minaj’s main backup dancers are Asian women, but this time they are given a more contemporary feel and individual looks: they do not all wear the same clothes, and their dancing is not as obviously in sync. The apartment is still decorated with clichéd visual signifiers of the Orient, such as red lanterns, paper umbrellas, and Japanese letters in neon lights à la Blade Runner (Scott 1982). However, these Asian female dancers do not appear in other scenes, and are excluded from a group of racially diverse young people depicted to be out partying. Once again, Asian women remain a segregated group, a backdrop against which Nicki Minaj shines as the star of the show. The setting resembles a Chinatown or an imagined future city, yet the night skyline of downtown Los Angeles reveals that the narrative takes place in America. The visual setting is contemporary or even futuristic, but the underlying otherness of the Asian women remains unchanged.

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Avril Lavigne’s 2013 video for “Hello Kitty” (Lavigne 2014) features a troupe of four dancers with emotionless faces, dressed in the same Japanese anime-style outfits, wearing the same style of wig, and dancing in the same robotic manner, in sharp contrast to Lavigne. The singer is visibly excited just waiting for her sushi meal, while the two Japanese female dancers stand still, with blank faces looking into the far distance. This image suggests a hierarchy in which the Japanese dancers are servants waiting on Lavigne. She then leads them, strutting down the streets of Tokyo, with the dancers following behind. Lavigne waves at people, who then wave back to her. The singer is the only one smiling, while the dancers remain apathetic. She takes a picture of them with a pink Fuji Instax camera, but when she excitedly shows them the picture, they look at it but do not react, eventually forcing smiles. Capturing an image of them and then showing them this image of themselves is a gesture of teaching them to appreciate themselves through her lens, through her white gaze. [The] image Madonna most exploits is that of the quintessential “white girl.” To maintain that image she must always position herself as an outsider in relation to black culture. It is that position of outsider that enables her to colonize and appropriate black experience for her own opportunistic ends even as she attempts to mask her acts of racist aggression as affirmation. (Hooks 1995, p. 29)

Bell hooks’ (1995) statement about Madonna could also apply to how the performers discussed here appropriate East Asian culture for their own profit. What at first seems inclusive, by incorporating contemporary pop cultural references from East Asia, is perhaps just another form of exoticizing and reinforcing the boundary between the Asian and the American. The robotic manners, emotionless faces, uniformity, and readiness to serve all function to perpetuate the myth of East Asian conformity and accentuate these non-Asian performers’ American individualism.

Conclusion The personas presented in music videos, and the visual manipulation of Asian women within, are part of the meta-narrative in the development of these American female pop singers’ so-called star image. According to Goodwin’s (1992) music video theory, each persona presented in a music video is part of the development of what he calls the “star-text,” a pop performer’s “brand” or overall persona. The image presented in a music video adds to that “meta-narrative”. One striking similarity between the mainstream female artists discussed in this chapter is that their overall public personas are individualistic, strong, independent, forward-thinking women, yet at the same time, they are often sexually objectified. The continuing trend of misogynistic depictions of women in music videos, noted by critics since the MTV era of the 1980s, shows little sign of abating (Frisby and Aubrey 2012). In order to for these female artists to construct a sexually objectified yet empowered female star image, they rely on the subjugation of East Asian women and the appropriation of Asian femininity in the visual presentation of their music.

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Another factor to consider for this type of visual manipulation is the lack of East Asian presence in American pop music (Oyiboke 2017). Popular genres such as hip hop/rap, pop, and country are dominated by artists who are not of East Asian descent. The conspicuous lack of East Asian presence in pop music seems at odds with the trend of increasingly diversified representations of East Asians in other forms of popular media in the US. More and more mainstream American films and TV shows are featuring prominent multidimensional Asian and Asian American characters who break away from the traditional stereotypes; some of these characters include Sandra Oh’s titular character in Killing Eve (Wratten and Day 2018) and the Chinese-American family in the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat (Khan et al. 2015). The 2018 blockbuster romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians became the first major Hollywood studio picture to feature an all-Asian cast in 25 years, since The Joy Luck Club (Wang 1993) in 1993. Other recent films that feature prominent East Asian main characters include Searching (Chaganty 2018), Hustlers, and The Farewell (Wang 2019). These productions offer interruptions in East Asian representations in mainstream American media. While the runtime of TV shows and films allows more room for fuller character development and potentially better representations, music videos, for all intents and purposes, work more like advertisements to sell the song and to promote the image of the artist, who in this case is unlikely to be an East Asian woman. To convey messages in such a condensed form, makers of music videos, as with advertisements, must resort to reducing East Asian women into facile, visual abbreviations and immediately identifiable, self-explanatory visual cues. The fact that these are still so pronounced and common in music videos signals that these stereotypes are very much part of the American, and perhaps even global, popular imagination. With powerful social media and video platforms such as YouTube, these stereotypes about Asian women will continue to be perpetuated, reaching an even wider and more global audience than before.

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Part III

Media Engagement in the Digital Age

Chapter 8

Towards a New Unconscious: From the Optical to the Electromagnetic Carloalberto Treccani

Introduction: Optical Unconscious Since the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the key role of photography in how one experiences the world has become clear, so much so that Freud himself, in his writings, referred repeatedly to photographic examples as a metaphor to explain the human unconscious. However, it was not until the publication of Walter Benjamin’s A Short History of Photography (1931) that the relationship between photography and the unconscious became clearer. Indeed, Benjamin introduced the concept of the optical unconscious to explain the effects of the technological evolution of optical media on visual perception. Benjamin’s view is that photography and cinema can show us new worlds that were previously inaccessible to the human eye. These media are able to record the world in a new way, thanks to their technical capabilities, which are precise, fast, accurate, and technologically enhanced, meaning that phenomena hitherto invisible to the human eye become visible, revealing a new nature of the world (Benjamin 2011). In a nutshell, the camera reveals facets of reality that would otherwise remain unknown. It exposes aspects of the world that are registered, but never consciously processed by our senses. Thus, for Benjamin, the role of photography and cinema is to reveal unconscious aspects of the world. Benjamin was fascinated by Karl Blossfeldt’s work Urformen Der Kunst: Photographische Pflanzenbilder [Originary Form of Art: Photographic Images of Plants], which influenced his statement that “[a] geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible… . Only the photograph is capable of this” (Benjamin, qtd. in Smith and Sliwinski 2017, p. 13). In fact, Benjamin saw something in Blossfeldt’s enlargements that went beyond human perception: the opportunity to redefine and extend the human C. Treccani (B) City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_8

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visual field, making visible what was previously invisible. For Benjamin, who found ancient Greek columns and cathedral windows in Blossfeldt’s images, photography and cinema had not only expanded the possibilities of perception, but had also paved the way for a whole new, unexplored, and unconscious visual dimension. This did not refer to the dimension of the extremely small or extremely fast, but as a dimension as yet unknown to our perceptive faculties, and therefore limited to the realm of the unconscious. Indeed, Benjamin recognises a strong analogy with the structure of the unconscious in the ‘distorting’ movements of the camera: “[…] this is a different nature that addresses the camera than the one that speaks to the eye. Different above all in that the space permeated by human consciousness is replaced by one that is unconsciously permeated” (Benjamin 2008, p. 29); and again, “Only the camera can show us the optical unconsious, as it only through psychoanalysis that we learn of the compulsive unconscious” (Benjamin 2008, p. 30). These new technological images, according to Benjamin, bring with them the possibility of characteristics and information that are not taken into account, thought of, or planned by the operator him/herself. The camera, which, with its technological possibilities has expanded human faculties, shows the unexpected, something perceived from a retinal point of view but too fast or too small to be processed and transformed into information by the perceptual system (eye/brain). The operator organizes and mentally prepares the images to be created, but these can surprise and amaze him/her by showing him/her something unexpected. François Arago’s almost prophetic comment on the matter of photography is appropriate here: After all, when observers apply a new instrument to the study of nature, what they had hoped for is always but little compared with the succession of discoveries of which the instrument becomes the source - in such matters, it is on the unexpected that one can especially count (Arago, qtd. in Gingerich 2010, p. 16). However, the new forms of artistic production and reproduction made possible by photography and film lead to a loss of sincerity and of authenticity. In Benjamin, who clearly nurtured a deep sense of nostalgia towards the “aura” (2008, p.7), we can nevertheless find a positive attitude towards the loss of the latter. Influenced especially by Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), Benjamin could thus find something positive in the loss of the aura. The individual is no longer passive and in contemplation of the object of his/her attention; rather, he/she meets that object halfway. The object in question, thanks to the new methods of reproduction, moves away from its natural environment, from the space for which it was designed and engineered, from the hic et nunc that defines its existence at that time and in that place, and it draws nearer to the gaze of its spectator. This is possible thanks to what Benjamin describes as the productive capacity of the camera, intended as the working/productive capacity inherent in the device itself. The spectator thus sees the object in question from the same perspective from which it was produced and becomes part of the process of creation itself. Watching a film, for example, means watching, necessarily, from the point of view of the camera. The eye of the spectator thus becomes the eye of the camera, and part of the creative process. For this reason, the spectator then becomes an active critic, in the same way as a sports fan. The camera can record in slow motion, zoom in and out, and record from angles

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that are almost inaccessible to the human eye; thus, the spectator is in a privileged position because he/she is exposed to the “things” of the world in a new way, which would otherwise be impossible through the human eye. The camera therefore reveals the world as it is, objectively at least; it reminds the individual that things are not necessarily as they have always been seen. So, for Benjamin, the optical unconscious is a revelation of a visibility that can manifest itself only, and exclusively, through the optical mediation of the camera, revealing to the individual what was previously invisible to the eye: While it is quite normal for a person to draw conclusion, even if only in outline, from the way others walk, that person will certainly know nothing of the walker’s posture in the split second of their stepping out. And if we have a rough idea of how we pick up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, we know little of what actually happens when we do so, not to mention how this will vary according to our current mood. Here the camera intervenes with its different aids, its plunging and soaring, its interrupting and isolating, its stretching and condensing of the process, its close-up and its distance shot. (Benjamin 2008, p. 30)

It is therefore interesting, and critical, to evaluate and compare the active position of the spectator from the 1930s with that of the contemporary spectator, who seems to adopt a a rather passive position. Despite an active participation, such as content creation for social media like Facebook or WeChat, the contemporary spectator appears to be essentially uncritical, and therefore passive, regarding the media used. The spectator of the twenty-first century—which in its capacity to both produce and consume content seems to resume the logic of work, understood as production logic, previously expressed by Benjamin—is, on the one hand, in a situation of media interaction and collaboration and, on the other, in a passive position as an involuntary creator of data and information about his/her habits, movements, and daily activities. To use an idea from Matt Ratto, the contemporary individual is also in a situation that is not “‘intra active’, in the sense that we are not allowed to negotiate when and how we take control” (Ratto 2007, p. 25). Although “distracted”, the spectator of the time, for Benjamin, becomes conscious of his/her contemporaneity thanks to the intervention of the camera. The loss of the “aura” has therefore allowed individuals to exercise a critical form on the object of the vision in question, and more generally on the contemporary situation: a “distracted” (Benjamin 2008, p. 33) but also alive, active, and participatory vision. The optical unconscious in this case certainly does not replace the reality of the world; rather, it brings into question the beliefs, rational thought, and consciousness of the world. Therefore, the optical unconscious, as described by Benjamin, becomes the way in which the individual takes full cognisance of his/her contemporaneity, in a historical context that is increasingly industrialized and technologically determined. Even so, the optical unconscious should be understood as the ability to understand contemporaneity through its representation in photography and cinema, and through a continuous process of questioning of reality as it has always been foreseen.

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Electromagnetic Unconscious The optical unconscious seems now to define only partly the complex contemporary situation in which technology has become increasingly ubiquitous and hidden behind interfaces and infrastructures that are themselves invisible, detached from our eyes, and, as Ratto (2007) wrote, creating “a particular kind of passivity and lack of engagement between people and their actions and between people and their social and material environment” (p. 20). Thus, understanding these technological systems that are planned and designed to be invisible, whose characteristics of transparency and invisibility have removed “our knowledge of the glue that holds the systems that make up the infrastructure” (Ratto 2007, p. 25), becomes a challenge. In a world in which these technological systems are fully incorporated, it becomes difficult to formulate any form of dissent or critical thinking; or, as Hjelm (2005) has pointed out, “invisible computer technology appears as a way to normalize, naturalize and rectify computer and information technology. The invisibility creates a power position where it is nearly impossible to criticize or change the prevailing system” (p. 78). For these reasons, the idea of a new kind of unconscious that reflects these new technological qualities has become necessary. An electromagnetic unconscious better defines the properties and characteristics of contemporary devices and reveal the new nature of the world that would otherwise remain unknown and invisible. However, if the preceding definition of the unconscious still has a strong visual dimension, the electromagnetic unconscious has an influence on the invisible. One such example of this influence is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which is used to identify and track objects at a distance. RFID technology is nowadays widely used as a payment method through debit and/or credit cards on apps such as WeChat Pay and Apple Pay, or the Hong Kong Octopus card that grants access to and calculates fares for public transport and can also be used for shopping and/or dining at restaurants. Unlike a barcode, an object does not need to be placed under the direct view of a reader to be identified. At a certain distance, the reader automatically identifies the object. The card is placed near a reader that gives access to, for instance, the chosen transport system. However, what happens between the reading of the card and the opening of the subway gate remains unknown to the user: “you ping a RFID tag with a suitable RF (radio frequency) signal, it returns a unique ID number. Thus, it is much like the familiar barcode, except that it can be read silently, invisibly, and at a distance” (Mitchell 2005, p. 62). The use of technology such as RFID has created a moment in which the human experience of the world, acquired over centuries of development, ceases to be significant, except for a few specialized individuals that have some form of knowledge on the mechanisms and workings of this technology. Latour (1999) has referred to this phenomenon as a “Black Box”: The way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs

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and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. (p. 304)

However, many participants in the Hong Kong protests that began in the summer of 2019 seem to have opted against using the aforementioned card for fear that it could be used as proof of their participation. The card, usually widely used among Hong Kong residents and tourists, can track movements on the urban transport network (underground, bus, and mini-buses) and within different shops in which it can be used to pay. Each card contains a chip that stores transaction history and can be used, indirectly, to determine the movements of the user. Furthermore, the card can be linked to a credit card which can automatically top up the balance, making it easier to be traced. For this reason, protesters have been opting to use single journey tickets, which are available at ticketing machines and therefore not traceable. In addition, many have also been leaving money on top of ticket machines to help other protestors purchase single tickets, all in a bid to prevent tracking. Other antitracking strategies include wrapping identity cards and any other cards in aluminium foil to prevent RFID scanners from reading them, leaving mobile phones at home, avoiding the use of public Wi-Fi, and using encrypted electronic messaging services and code words. Compared to the protestors who participated in 2014’s Occupy movement, 2019’s protestors seem to be more aware of the risks associated with the use of technological devices, and for this reason, are more careful (Hui 2019). It is precisely through this technological awareness that it is possible to catch a glimpse of the new electromagnetic unconscious. By looking at RFID technologies as a semiotic mediation (Arnall 2014), we can better understand their purposes and aims. RFID technologies should in fact be treated “as part of the socio-culturally shaped meanings, understandings and uses” (Arnall 2014). Furthermore, the controversies and debates around this technology should be more carefully studied, as the invisible property of this technology, and others, envisions a future in which identification and connectivity are embedded in everyday objects and environments (Arnall 2014). The example of the Octopus card is just one of many in a landscape that is increasingly technologically defined, in which the technological element seems to disappear so fast that it leaves no trace, almost as if there were an intention to hide its presence. This new kind of space in which human activities are transformed into data is exemplified by Ingrid Hoelzl e Rémi Marie in Brave New City (2016): “Our life in the urban data-space is a life under constant exposure. […] The ‘smart city’, in the end, is not so much about making life in the city more citizen-friendly, but about achieving total control in the management of human and non-human resources” (p. 381). The protestors’ behavior regarding the Octopus card gives rise to new questions and doubts about “smart environments” (Hui 2019). Indeed, it is the individual’s daily interaction with these technologies that defines their environments and mediates their everyday experiences. This set of technologies, as N. Katherine Hayles maintains, are part of our lives but often are not part of our conscious existence. We set ourselves against “active and interactive technologies with cognitive potential” (Hayles, qtd. in Beer 2009, p. 988),

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which operate without the need for a human being: “Most of the communication will be automated between intelligent devices. Humans will intervene only in a tiny fraction of that flow of communication. Most of it will go on unsensed and really unknown by humans” (Hayles, qtd. in Beer 2009, p. 988). We can then say that contemporary everyday experience consists of a series of largely invisible actions, in which the sensory experience becomes more and more meaningless. The technology is, therefore, no longer an extension of our senses, contrary to Marshall McLuhan’s claims, but an extension of itself, functional only to its logics. Moreover, these extensions create a number of problems, such as a lack of understanding in the processes of their functioning as they clash with the expectation of our nervous system, modelled over millions of years of evolution, and the new technological reality. It is, however, in the awareness that technology has profoundly altered human perception and subjectivity that the contemporary unconscious lies. Although it never manifests itself because of its invisible properties, the electromagnetic unconscious still makes its voice heard and calls us to be constantly vigilant and alert to the new nature of the world, much of which is beyond what our eyes can perceive. Nowadays, in fact, these extensions do not primarily intensify or amplify the human experience of the world, nor do they act as a sensory aid, strengthening our senses; rather, they determine our experience. Facebook, for instance, requires its users to be as active as possible to be able to collect as much data as possible. Nevertheless, how these data and information are used and the advantages, if any, for the user remain completely hidden: Facebook is clearly algorithmically driven—we all complain about seeing the same five friends’ posts in our feed, despite having more than 250 friends, right? Interspersed with ads, ads, ads! All of which muddies (and sullies) their intents, seemingly driven by ad sales revenue, not “bringing the world closer.” The experience becomes a mystery. Instead of joyous serendipity, there’s some dubious manipulation, shifting the dynamic and eroding trust and respect for the product—or at least creating some cynical notion of online friends.” These algorithms, however, seem to work autonomously, ubiquitously and in a opaque way. “They go deeper into the sphere of interaction, following inscrutable rules of behavior whose limits or capabilities are rather vague to regular folks—yet seem to be changing as they learn. (Gajendar 2016, p. 24).

The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica case is another clear example. While the illicit collection of data by Cambridge Analytica was first reported in 2015, the case came to prominence in 2018 when an ex-employee revealed how the company had been able to collect data from millions of unaware Facebook users and use those data within the political sphere. Using a quiz app called This Is Your Digital Life on Facebook, which could check the user’s profile and the profiles of the people in their network, Cambridge Analytica was able to collect information from more than 87 million people (Isaak and Hanna 2018). The data were then used to affect voter behavior (Ward 2018), most notably in the 2016 US presidential election. The opaque rules, functions, and behavioral microtargeting methods used by Cambridge Analytica, however, “violated the autonomy of Americans in numerous ways, limiting their ability to make rational voting decisions and thus interrupting the American democratic process” (Ward 2018).

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The promise of transparency in the functioning of these technologies turned out to be only a compensatory gesture, as their operations today seem more opaque than ever (Chun 2011). This perspective requires a further evaluation as their operations create a position in which it is no longer possible to negotiate when and how to engage with these technologies. We are in a situation of perennial techno-activity, in which the elements that constitute our “collaboration” with devices seem to disappear, leaving space for doubts, uncertainty, constant control, and surveillance. We are living in a time in which the known computational aspects of technology are no longer so. Technology nowadays even seems to have a mind of its own that evolves over time, anticipating and predicting actions or desired outcomes, supposedly on our behalf. I am of course referring to the current pervasive rise of AI: enhanced algorithms built via machine- and deep-learning systems that thrive on cloud-based networks, copious crowdsourced data, and (perhaps) some momentary human interventions to help correct any errors along the way. Whether embedded within selfdriving cars or the much-hyped Internet of Things (IoT), conversational interfaces, voicebased virtual assistants, and predictive analytics are all profoundly altering the nature of computing. (Gajendar 2016, p. 25)

One such example is Williams and colleagues’ study “My Doll Says It’s OK”: A Study of Children’s Conformity to a Talking Doll (2018), which shows that children between four and ten years old can be directly influenced by a “smart toy” such as a talking doll “to change their judgments about moral transgressions” (Williams et al. 2018). However, the growing number of studies, initiatives, protests, and debates around contemporary technologies such as Artificial Intelligence seems to be a first form of awareness and an attempt to address technological issues and risks. The recent protests in Hong Kong and other parts of the world are once again examples. Protestors, for fear of being identified by surveillance cameras and facial recognition systems, cover their faces with goggles and gas masks. They also use umbrellas to hide their faces, laser pointers to fool police cameras, and reflective tape to dazzle the police. It is here, in these “faceless” strategies, that it is possible to perceive the new electromagnetic unconscious: a sort of revenge or stance towards a reality that gradually becomes more and more ambiguous, a new unconscious able to “rescue” the individual from becoming a nobody; a component of a system that, like all technological systems, is precise, efficient, and productive. However, the electromagnetic unconscious, unlike the optical unconscious that is awakened and made accessible by photography and cinema, can only be conquered laboriously through an awareness of the contemporary techno-dynamics that rule the world. These new “smart toys”, machines, devices, and “intelligent” agents are part of our daily environment, constantly growing and exerting a profound effect on our lives, not merely as extensions of our capabilities, but actively participating in the construction of our perception of the world. They are not limited to acting as intermediaries in the world, but actively, yet invisibly, build a new one, proposing a unidirectional model of the world that is technologically determined or, in the words of Lash (2007a): “[w]hat was a medium … has become a thing, a product” (p. 18), the world itself.

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In this scenario, the human sensory experience seems to be decreasing in significance. Through the senses, the human being has become aware of the world, determining it, constructing it, and modifying it in the most functional way. However, contemporary sensory experience has changed into a techno-driven experience. What individuals experience is an end in itself, predetermined by software logic and algorithms that increasingly attribute a new sense to “the things of the world”, which, however, remain obscure to the human being. These technologies operate on an unconscious level, quietly, and without ever manifesting themselves. The real risk is the chance of the destruction of all forms of dissent and the promotion of self-censorship, conformity, and other forms of discrimination and power inequality. We are faced with a new situation “in which power is more and more in the algorithm” (Lash 2007b, p. 71). These new algorithmic media are no longer limited to mediation between the world and human beings in a continuous form of collaboration. They instead create both the meaning and the reality, establishing a unidirectional message that creates a single vision suitable only for the system by which it is produced: the “stuff” that makes up the social and urban fabric has changed—it is no longer just about emergent properties that derive from a complex of social associations and interactions. These associations and interactions are now not only mediated by software and code, they are becoming constituted by it (Burrows, qtd. in Beer 2009, p. 987)

The change that the contemporary individual faces is therefore substantial. These algorithmic media—if it is still possible to use this definition—do not merely act as mediators between the world and humanity, but rather participate actively in building and defining reality, and the perception of reality, itself. In this way, technology seems to have more to do with magic than with the scientific world. Just as in a magic ritual, one passes instantly from a cause to an effect without having to go through long and complex procedures, this is how technology proceeds today. Magic completely ignores the transitions between an action and its consequences, and it all happens instantly; for instance, if I stick a pin into the arm of a puppet and the enemy dies, or if I utter a spell and the rabbit disappears, or I ask Alexa, Amazon’s vocal assistant, to dim the lights, and like magic, the lights dim. As expressed by Eco (2016), the desire for simultaneity between cause and effect has been moved from magic to technology (p. 154), which nowadays seems to be doing everything it can to hide its mechanisms and operations. As further exemplified by Eco, the first computer users programmed in BASIC, though not in machine language, in which programs are written to be executable by computers, allowing or obliging, depending on the point of view, a glimpse of the operation of the machine. With the introduction of interfaces by clicking on an icon, the user gets an action without knowing anything that has happened, if not a finished and immediate result. The contemporary technological individual thus lives his/her relationship with technology in the same way that a person in the Middle Ages relied on a series of magical practices. Curiously, even the gestures we make to interact with our technologies, such as smartphones or smart earphones, are movements similar to those of a magician. We

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touch, swipe, pinch, and say special words as if with a single gesture, quite literally at our fingertips, anything can be realized.

Conclusion For centuries, human beings have learned to deal with images and technologies that were around them, to draw some meaning from them and build an idea of the world through them. However, to use an idea expressed by Paglen (2016), theoretical concepts that have been used to understand and make sense of these images and technologies, from a representational, semiotic, or spatiotemporal perspective, appear to no longer be functional today: Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop. The advent of machine-to-machine seeing has been barely noticed at large, and poorly understood by those of us who’ve begun to notice the tectonic shift invisibly taking place before our very eyes. (Paglen 2016)

Machines “see” and “sense” things through different spectrums and different frequencies. They see radio waves and Wi-Fi networks; they can sense and measure heart rate and body temperature, and their findings and products are alien and unreadable to us, with the result of creating a new reality sitting between our expectations and the new reality. However, the terms “see” and “sense” must be understood in a broad sense, as skills or abilities, as intended by Michael Baxandall in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1988), or as ways of seeing and sense, as similarly intended by John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1972) and previously by Benjamin. However, the use of this terminology may be misleading or inaccurate due to its anthropocentric nature, which may or may not be applied to machines. There is, therefore, an implicit abandonment of the continuous reference to “see” “humanity” in favour of an observation point towards the technological devices. Technological devices and technological products that remain in an area of unconscious understanding, which, however, cannot be denied or omitted because they participate fully in defining the contemporary society. The transition from optical/visible media to algorithmic/invisible media should be further addressed, since new technological solutions and possibilities, as Longo (2003) observed, do not change our view of the world, nor the action we take towards the world. Instead, they act on a deeper level, affecting our primary references, modifying our epistemology and, in turn, our ontology (Longo 2003, p. 45). Possibilities, however, can only be understood within a posthuman context, in which humanity loses its world-anthropocentric vision in favour of a collaborative vision and perception “distributed across species, that is, between machines/robots and humans/animals and any intermediary forms (cyborgs, biomachines, etc.), and the postimage comes to be defined as the collaboration of visioning humans/animals, data/algorithms and, increasingly, autonomous machines” (Hoelzl and Marie 2017, p. 73).

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However, the idea that images, acts of vision, and more generally, all perceptions are still essentially human characteristics still exists. Such an anthropocentric vision, nevertheless, seems no longer functional, or at least seems to be increasingly losing importance: The point here is that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine visual culture, we need to unlearn how to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like. But it’s not just as simple as learning a different vocabulary. Formal concepts contain epistemological assumptions, which in turn have ethical consequences. The theoretical concepts we use to analyze visual culture are profoundly misleading when applied to the machinic landscape, producing distortions, vast blind spots, and wild misinterpretations (Paglen 2016).

These technologies operate on an unconscious level, quietly, and without ever manifesting themselves. The contemporary human, paraphrasing Paglen, must, therefore, begin to understand this change, these new forms of invisible power that pass through our culture and which embrace all aspects of human life. Understanding these technological systems, which were thought and designed to be invisible, is a challenge because their invisibility prevents us from formulating any form of dissent or critical thinking. The long-term consequences of an environment filled with sensing “intelligent” technologies are not clear at the moment. However, in this invisible and technological regime, the electromagnetic unconscious offers us a first, albeit partial, form of awareness of our contemporaneity, undermining the conventional understanding of things and exposing the individual to the complex dynamics and logics that rule the world.

References Arnall, T. (2014). Making visible: Mediating the material of emerging technology. Oslo: Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Baxandall, M. (1988). Painting and experience in 15th century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society Copyright, 11(6), 985–1002. Benjamin, W. (2008). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. London: Penguin Books. Benjamin, W. (2011). Piccola storia della fotografia (Italian trans. of A short history of photography). Milan: Skira Rizzoli. Berger, J. (2008). Ways of seeing. London: Penguin Classic. Eco, U. (2016). A passo di gambero: Guerre calde e populismo mediatico. Milan: La Nave di Teseo. Gajendar, U. (2016). Empathizing with the smart and invisible: Algorithms! Interactions, 23(4), 24–25. Gingerich, O. (2010). The general history of astronomy, volume 4. Astrophysics and twentiethcentury astronomy to 1950: Part A. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hjelm, S. (2005). Visualizing the vague: Invisible computers in contemporary design. Design Issues, 21(2), 71–78.

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Hoelzl, I., & Marie, R. (2016). Brave new city: The image in the urban data-space. Visual Communication, 15(3), 371–391. Hoelzl, I., & Marie, R. (2017). From softimage to postimage. Leonardo, 50(1), 72–73. Hui, M. (2019, June 13). Why Hong Kong’s protesters were afraid to use their metro cards. Quartz. Retrieved September 5, 2019, from https://qz.com/1642441/extradition-law-why-hong-kong-pro testers-didnt-use-own-metro-cards/. Isaak, J., & Hanna, M. J. (2018). User data privacy: Facebook, Cambridge analytica, and privacy protection. Computer, 51(8), 56–59. https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2018.3191268. Lash, S. (2007a). Capitalism and metaphysics. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(5), 1–26. Lash, S. (2007b). Power after hegemony: Cultural studies in mutation. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 55–78. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Longo, G. O. (2003). Il nuovo Golem. Come il computer cambia la nostracultura. Milan: La terza. Mitchell, W. J. (2005). Placing words: Symbols, space, and the city. Cambridge: MIT Press. Paglen, T. (2016, December 08). Invisible images (Your pictures are looking at you). Retrieved May 01, 2017, from https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. Ratto, M. (2007). Ethics of seamless infrastructures: Resources and future directions. International Review of Information Ethics, 8, 20–27. Smith, S. M., & Sliwinski, S. (Eds.). (2017). Photography and the optical unconscious. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Williams, R., Machado, C., Druga, S., Breazeal, C., & Maes, P. (2018). “My doll says it’s ok”: A study of children’s conformity to a talking doll. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction, Design, and Children (pp. 625–631). https://doi.org/10.1145/3202185.3210788.

Chapter 9

The Digital Entanglement of Humanities, Literacy, and Storytelling Natalia Churchill and Caroline Barratt-Pugh

Introduction: Communication Through Multimodal Texts in the Digital World Digital literacy learning is a requirement imposed by the wide development and application of new technologies for communication and representation. The Internet and emerging tools and technologies are transforming the way we work with information and the way we communicate. Today, the Internet is flooded with digital text that is consumed, produced, and published not only by traditional information authorities but also by ordinary Internet users. Individuals can now easily publish and distribute digital text to millions of others around the world via the Internet, which significantly enhances these individuals’ ability to be heard and seen. In addition, the speed at which new information is published and updated has dramatically increased, while emerging mobile phone applications allow individuals to remotely publish content as and when they wish to do so. This means that ordinary people are now able to provide new information by expressing themselves creatively through digital multimodal texts. According to Lane (2012), “The expectations and learning and thinking styles of students exposed to these technologies sets expectations on academics to change the way they teach” (p. 68). The availability of mobile technologies provides opportunities for lessons with iPads and other mobile devices, thus changing the way teachers plan and deliver their lessons (Barton and Trimble-Roles 2016). Consequently, how can traditional literacy skills be extended to include the ability to work with digital information in the classroom settings? N. Churchill Singapore International School, The University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] C. Barratt-Pugh (B) School of Education, Edith Cowan University, Mt. Lalwley, Western Australia 6050, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_9

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Due to the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies, the traditional language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking have been extended to include representing. This additional category in literacy learning is a response to the recent developments in representation and communication. A paradigm shift from textbased materials to multimodal texts started taking place less than two decades ago. For Kress (2004), one key aspect of these developments is a move from the dominance of writing as “the culturally most valuable form of representation” (p. 5) towards the new dominance of images. Similarly, Barratt-Pugh (2000) emphasizes that images help to convey meaning. An image does not replace text, but rather complements it, which results in a blending of modes in multimodal representation or multimodal text. Each mode affords specific potential and limitations for communication (Kress 2004) and images and texts enter into a powerful intersemiotic relationship with each other. Martinec and Salway (2005) suggest three possibilities for the text-image relationship: text supporting image, image supporting text, and the two being equal (that is, the whole image is related to the whole text). In addition, Jewitt (2008) argues that all modes of communication contribute to the construction of meaning in some ways and “no one mode stands alone in the process of making meaning; rather, each plays a discrete role in the whole” (p. 247). There has been a shift in education to include and accommodate the latest technological developments into teaching and learning. Classrooms of today provide opportunities for students to access and use digital tools for research and inquiry (Åberg and Åkerfeldt 2017). Therefore, educators must teach their students how to use multimedia and currently available technology more effectively, particularly in their educational endeavors. To be digitally literate, students need to develop a set of digital competencies; a person who is a confident digital technology user and consumer of information may not necessarily be digitally literate. In addition, Kress (2004) underlines a move from the dominance of the book, or print-based media in general, to the dominance of the medium of the screen, the computer screen in particular. Elsewhere, Kress (2006) argues that the new medium of the screen makes it “easy to use a multiplicity of modes, and in particular the mode of image, still or moving images, as well as other modes, such as music and sound effects” (p. 5). This raises the question of how, and in what ways, should literacy learning be extended to encompass skills required to communicate meanings through digital multimodal texts. Digital literacy is not an alternative or replacement to traditional literacies; rather, it is an extension that contributes to an overarching literacy required for working, learning, and socializing in the contemporary world. This chapter examines digital storytelling as a strategy to develop or promote digital literacy learning, and digital humanities as a suitable context for such learning.

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Digital Storytelling: The Spectrum of Definitions In his critical essay “Digital Storytelling: New Opportunities for Humanities Scholarship and Pedagogy”, Barber (2016) examines the role of digital storytelling through the lens of humanities and how technology affordances enhance humanities learning. He introduces multiple types of digital storytelling and claims, “If we grant that humanities scholarship and pedagogy may be grounded in stories of human cultural and creative endeavors, then the use of digital media to help create and share such stories may help engage academic research with creative practice to promote critical thinking, communication, digital literacy, and civic engagement” (p. 2). Barber further argues that approaches to digital storytelling vary from Lambert’s 2–3-minute videos composed of narration, images, text, and music (Lambert 2002; Lambert and Hessler 2018) to the more recent that include oral/aural histories such as personal narratives in forms of videos, voice mails, and interviews related to an important historical event, podcasting audio-recorded personal stories, interactive/locative narratives featuring combinations of audio narrative, digital media, and GPS technology with which users may interact in a specific location, multimedia narratives combining multiple media and requiring skills such as text-editing, coding, interface design, and video production, and transmedia narratives that use various media platforms to tell the same story (pp. 4–8). He suggests that some future forms of digital storytelling might include gaming, ebooks, and mobile devices to promote collaboration and sharing, thus enriching learning experiences, particularly those related to humanities subjects. This chapter’s discussion of digital storytelling relies on Lambert’s Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community (2002), and the fifth edition of the book, written in collaboration with Hessler (Lambert and Hessler 2018). Digital storytelling is a strategy for the creation of digital multimedia content to express ideas, represent knowledge, and otherwise communicate information through digital artifacts or digital stories. The digital story as the final product of digital storytelling has also been referred to as a photo story (Microsoft 2007), slide-show-style video (Salpeter 2005), conversational media (Lambert 2007), multimedia sonnet (Meadows 2003a), and even radio-with-pictures (Meadows 2003b). In the production of digital stories, students integrate modalities such as music, sound effects, text, transitions, graphics, recorded narrations, and images. Although not common, videos and animations can also be part of digital story productions. Digital storytelling, when appropriately applied in the classroom, may effectively meet the challenges of digital literacy learning and can provide a strategy for teachers to effectively move beyond print-based texts and engage students in working with digital multimodal texts. Digital storytelling requires students to bring together various modes, such as typewritten words, images, narrations, and sounds, in their own multimodal representations. Barrett (2006) claims that the effects of digital storytelling on student learning include increased motivation, engagement, development of technology skills, and reflection. Barrett further suggests that digital storytelling might benefit all learners in all schools. The affordances of digital

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storytelling have been examined in the literature and include increased student engagement and student-centeredness, catering to students’ different learning styles, enhanced creativity and research skills, increased focus on digital multimodal texts, and provisions for a multimodal assessment strategy. Until recently, creating a digital story was not necessarily easy. Tools required technical skills and powerful computers, and delivering content online was a troublesome process. However, the development of computers with greater processing power, tablet devices with a wide range of user-friendly applications, and easy-touse, effective, and inexpensive digital cameras, camera-enabled mobile phones, and computers with inbuilt cameras have allowed anyone to become a digital photographer and videographer. These advances in technology have empowered ordinary Internet users to not only consume but also create multimodal digital content. For example, user-friendly and often free tools such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie allow user-friendly environments for the effective production of digital stories. At the same time, Internet applications under the umbrella term “Web 2.0” have opened many possibilities for online content publishing via blog sites such as Blogger, social repositories such as YouTube, online social networks such as Facebook, online video editors such as Wevideo, and similar Internet-based services that allow millions of ordinary Internet users to become publishers and distributors of video and other kinds of digital content. There is also a wide range of free applications for mobile devices that make the creation of digital texts simple and accessible for students. Digital storytelling can be conceptualized as constructionism or learning by making. Constructionism builds upon the theories of constructivism, which hold that students actively construct knowledge out of their experiences, but adds that such construction of knowledge occurs when students are engaged in building personally meaningful objects (Kafai and Resnick 1996). Knowledge construction in this context occurs when students are consciously engaged in constructing an external artifact that they can reflect upon and present to others. Han and Bhattacharya (2001) suggested that “learning by design” is a form of constructionist learning. In this type of learning, students design an artifact for a pre-selected target audience. A digital story can be understood as such an artifact. In learning by design, students are more engaged in learning as they become more accountable for their learning through designing, piloting, sharing, evaluating, modifying their work, and reflecting on the process. Such learning often includes collaboration. Studies on digital storytelling in humanities, particularly in the language arts classroom, have been conducted in various parts of the world. For instance, Karakoyuna and Kuzub (2013) studied digital storytelling in terms of twenty-first-century skills. Their research, conducted in a private elementary school, examined the development of learning and innovation skills, information skills, media and technology skills, and life and career skills. Their data analysis included the use of descriptive statistical methods, and their findings showed that sixth-grade students believed that digital storytelling activities supported their skills, particularly their technology skills. An experimental study by Yang and Wu (2012) examined tenth-grade students in two English-as-a-Foreign-Language classes that were taught the same content via different approaches: one with digital storytelling and the other with lecture-type,

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information-technology-integrated instruction. They evaluated the students’ Englishlanguage achievement and critical-thinking scores, as well as their motivation for learning. Yang and Wu found that the group that learnt with digital storytelling performed better in terms of academic achievement, critical thinking, and motivation for learning, and concluded that the use of digital storytelling in the English-asa-Foreign-Language classroom created an effective learning environment. Nguyen (2011) examined how three graduate students used digital storytelling to create digital stories in two linked courses, one focusing on hands-on multimedia technology and the other focusing on using popular culture in the classroom. The findings of this study revealed that digital storytelling is a powerful instrument for literacy development in the age of digital technology, and that the creation of a digital story is a complex process, requiring different skills and literacies to produce a meaningful digital story.

Affordances of Digital Storytelling for the Development of Digital Literacy Engagement Contemporary pedagogical approaches suggest that teachers need to plan studentcentered activities in which learning is more situated, active and engaging. The transformation to student-centered practices requires technology to be placed in the hands of learners as a tool to learn with rather than as a tool to learn from (Hokanson and Hooper 2000; Jonassen and Reeves 1996). Digital storytelling activities harness the participants’ interest in learning with technology and promote engagement through continuous iteration and manipulation of the various media.

Meaningful Context Digital storytelling activities involve authentic activities that help students build a greater understanding of the content and skills developed by engaging with the tasks. These activities help them merge their existing knowledge and skills with the skills and competencies outlined in the general objectives of the lesson. Thus, digital storytelling provides a meaningful context for developing students’ digital literacy.

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Structure to Work with Media Storyboarding by students as a form of scaffolding and a story map, or what Ohler (2007) calls a “visual portrait of a story”, become visual representations that display the key events and progression of the story: beginning, tension, conflict, resolution, and closure. The storyboards provide information about each scene from the story, the media that needed to be included and the narration to accompany the scenes. The storyboards may be subjected to review and revision.

Work with Technology Tools Digital storytelling encourages the students to work with technology and may use a wide spectrum of technology tools to plan, produce, present, and review a digital story. Digital storytelling activities help the students increase their skills in working with technology and, in turn, to increase their digital literacy. In such context, technology is seen as a tool to support learners’ “cognitive operations that they might not have been capable of otherwise” (Lim 2006, p. 3). Technology used in this way is a tool for students to create digital artifacts that represent their knowledge and ideas. The transition from teachers being in control of technology and technology as instructional tools, to learners as active technology users is an important strategy for student-centred learning. It can lead not only to advancements in the learning of curriculum content in subjects such as language arts, history, or others, but also to the preparation of students for the world outside the school environment.

Research Skills When planning their stories, students must locate and evaluate pertinent information and media while developing an awareness of copyright issues. Conducting research also promotes the use of technology to copy, paste, save, and retrieve information and media. The enormous growth in information available on the Internet, as well as the spectrum of engaging Web 2.0 applications, has resulted in an increase in the information needs and expectations of ordinary people. For example, individuals now expect information to be rich in modalities and to be delivered not just via computers, but also via a range of mobile devices. Many of these individuals are students who may have been active users of technology such as electronic toys, digital games, mobile phones and the Internet, and digital “content creators”, from a very early age (McLellan 2006). To keep up with the information age, students should be engaged in a variety of research techniques to improve their research skills, especially when searching for information online.

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Critical Thinking and Problem Solving The digital storytelling practices in the context of this chapter are examined as a design-type problem-solving project. For Jonassen (2000), design-type problems have unclear goals and no predetermined solution paths, and they require the integration of multiple knowledge domains as well as commitment and self-regulation by students. Hence, Jonassen recommends that students develop their own system for evaluating their emerging designs. This leads to increased independence and self-regulation in problem solving and learning during each subsequent project that includes the use of technology. In addition, digital storytelling provides opportunities to design activities in which students learn to manage the complexity of ill-structured problems.

Traditional Literacy Digital storytelling allows students to communicate their ideas with more complexity than in traditional writing. The increase in complexity enhances students’ traditional literacy skills. Sylvester and Greenidge (2009) support this point by stating that digital storytelling potentially can help students “reposition themselves from struggling writers to competent writers” (p. 291). Thus, traditional literacy skills relevant to language arts, such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking, may significantly improve after students’ engagement in digital storytelling.

Curriculum Changes Changes in language usage and, consequently, the methodology of teaching languages such as English, are reflected in the syllabus. In the context of rapidly changing teaching and learning technologies, there is an emphasis on meaningmaking through viewing and representing with the means of multimodal texts. The four language micro-skills of listening, reading, writing, and speaking have been extended to include the new literacies reflecting the changes in the world of the learners. Thus, traditional language literacy is being extended into a new literacy that is critical for consuming, creating, and communicating contemporary print and digital texts. However, this new literacy differs from that required to work with static images and layouts in combination with text, as is found in printed material, as it includes the ability to work with modalities such as audio, animated sequences, transitions and video, which the related literature refers to as ‘multimodal texts’ (Kress 2006).

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Various other associated terms have been used in the literature to describe this extended idea of traditional literacy, such as “new literacies” (Bruce 1998), “multiliteracies” (Cope and Kalantziz 2000), “new media and popular culture” (Howard 1998), “digital literacies” (Merchant 2007) and “new media and online literacies” (Hagood 2003). Overall, it has been argued that students “should be taught how to construct, control, consume and manipulate the wide repertoire of text” and that to do this, “traditional reading practices and resources in the classroom should now include media text, hypertext” as well as “other forms [that] may soon be invented” (Koh 2002, p. 260). All curricula are subject to change, and a number of significant changes have been taking place across the globe. Practices reflecting viewing and representing with digital multimodal texts are found in the language curricula of many countries. For a number of years, most Australian states have implemented curricula that emphasize using and composing multimodal texts (Vincent 2006). For instance, the New South Wales Board of Studies in Australia has issued an English- language syllabus for K–10 that includes new learning outcomes related to viewing multimodal texts. “Viewing” in this case refers to skills for “observing and comprehending a visual text, e.g., diagram, illustration, photograph, film, television documentary, multimedia” that might or might not include reading accompanying written text (Board of Studies Teaching and Educational Standards 2015). The syllabus refers to these meta-skills as “language modes” and introduces an additional mode, “representing”, which is given prominence in the secondary-school syllabus. Similar developments are occurring in other countries. The primary school “English Language Syllabus 2010. Primary & Secondary (Express/Normal [Academic])” was developed and introduced by the Singapore Ministry of Education (Curriculum Planning and Development Division 2010). This syllabus emphasizes the importance of the learner’s receptive and productive skills in such a way that listening and reading are supported by viewing, while speaking and writing are aligned with a new domain, representing. Viewing and representing are not considered separate skills; rather, they enhance traditional literacy. In the syllabus, these skills are paired, and examined, as follows: listening and viewing; reading and viewing; speaking and representing; writing and representing. According to the syllabus, English-language curricula should be enriched through “the use of a variety of print and non-print resources that provides authentic contexts for incorporating the development of information, media and visual literacy skills in the teaching of listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing, and representing” (pp. 9–16). These developments demonstrate that English-language curricula for schools around the world have been revised to allow new literacy practices involving technology to enter classrooms. For centuries, traditional storytelling has been used in schools to help students develop their literacy skills by improving their reading, writing, listening, and speaking. However, the emergence of new technology has created opportunities for students to express themselves digitally, or create digital stories for a specific purpose (Olher 2007). Studies by Sweeney-Burt (2014) and Barron and Darling-Hammond (2008) indicate that digital storytelling may be an important strategy in digital literacy learning

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and teaching in a primary-school English-language classroom, for a number of reasons: it supports student engagement; provides a meaningful context for learning; offers structure for working with media; enhances students’ creative expression in multimedia formats; provides opportunities to work with technology tools; helps consolidate aspects of digital literacy learning; and helps students develop research and critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. In contrast, however, a 2015 a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that schools around the world that use ICT for education have not seen a noticeable improvement in their students’ performance in reading, mathematics, or science. In fact, in the countries in which technology is used in classroom the most, such as Sweden and Australia, the students’ reading performance declined between 2000 and 2012 (OECD 2015). The report also suggested that students sometimes have too much computer time in schools, so that they may miss out on other important aspects of learning such as face-to-face group work, handwriting, and solving real-life problems. The report recommended that the way technology is used in the classroom be rethought. These two opposing views demonstrate a lack of consensus regarding the effectiveness of the use of digital technology in teaching and learning. Therefore, it is important to continue exploring whether storytelling with the use of technology (digital storytelling) is beneficial for students’ development of digital literacy. The first author of this paper undertook her PhD research by engaging her students in the process of digital storytelling, and discovered that different literature genres used to set a context for digital storytelling activities, demonstrate indicators of digital literacies and include different elements of humanities subjects, thus making the digital storytelling creation process transdisciplinary in nature.

The Digital Entanglement It is important to understand the extent to which explicit teaching of digital technology relevant to digital storytelling tasks is necessary. Furthermore, the creation of a digital story is a non-linear process that instigates inquiry and research in a specific authentic or real-life context. Digital humanities examined in this chapter may serve as a context for digital literacy learning, including operating technological tools, with digital storytelling. For Burdick et al. (2012), “Digital Humanities represents a major expansion of the purview of the humanities, precisely because it brings the values, representational and interpretive practices, meaning-making strategies, complexities, and ambiguities of being human into every realm of experience and knowledge of the world. It is a global, trans-historical, and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-making” (preface). Furthermore, in their practical guide for educators, “Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom”, Battershill and Ross (2017) suggest, “As proponents of using digital humanities in the classroom, we do not recommend the use of technology for its own sake. Rather in this book we hope to show the many ways in which it can not only introduce new line of inquiry, but also help

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answer the cultural historical, literary, philosophical, or anthropological questions that you and your students are already posing in your course” (p. 11). Accordingly, the digital storytelling task discussed in this chapter aimed to ignite a spark of interest in students and to promote independent study and evaluation of a given literary genre and of a preselected historical event introduced to the students through a carefully worded scenario for the project Digital Story Review, a digital essay responding to literature. The task is discussed in more detail in the next section of this chapter. So far, it has been possible to assert that humanities tasks prescribed by a given syllabus may be completed through the use of strategy such as digital storytelling, thus shifting the angle from the study of a humanities subject such as language arts towards digital humanities. If digital storytelling is a strategy for digital literacy learning, digital humanities may become a context that provides opportunities for creative expression through digital multimodal texts. Studies of texts are no longer limited to text analysis that only requires a conventional handwritten or typewritten output. The symbiosis of the digital humanities, digital literacy, and digital storytelling is illustrated in Fig. 9.1. In this model, an area of digital humanities taught at school, such as language arts, history, film studies, philosophy, or cultural studies, provides a meaningful context based on the requirements of the syllabus. The context contains a task formulated as a scenario in which a student becomes an active participant of an imaginary situation (realistic or fictional) and needs to solve problems in order to achieve learning outcomes. An example of a scenario in the context of a philosophy unit is: “You are a news reporter investigating whether extra-terrestrials actually exist. Your task is to travel to Roswell, New Mexico, in order to find out about the incident in which, supposedly, a body of an alien was found in 1947. Present the findings in the form of a digital story.” In the given scenario, the aim is not only to create a digital story; but to also engage in research and inquiry in order to investigate a phenomenon

Fig. 9.1 The digital entanglement of humanities, literacy, and storytelling

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and formulate their own judgment about the reliability of the existing information. English language skills include script-writing and narration, while video-recording and editing, effects generation, image sourcing, and sound effects are technical skills that are not taught explicitly. Since the students must collect different opposing opinions about the existence of extra-terrestrials, they will eventually form their own point of view about the given problem. While engaging in the creation of their final digital artifacts of knowledge (digital stories), the students develop or improve digital literacy skills activated in the process. In the centre of the figure, the circle that underpins the digital entanglement of humanities, literacy, and storytelling is the learning outcome, which is defined by the syllabus and achieved by the students in the end of the digital storytelling project. The learning outcome depends on the subject and unit of study. Thus, the whole teaching and learning process becomes transdisciplinary in nature. Another example of transdisciplinary approach to facilitating a humanities project is taken from an international school in Hong Kong, at which an integral part of the Pastoral Care curriculum emphasizes respect as a moral value that the students develop through their schooling in order to become conscientious members of family, society, and world. Teaching about respect encompasses various realms (specific learning objectives) such as respect to self, friends, the elderly, family, country, nature, and religion. The digital humanities field offers an opportunity to examine respect in the context of these different subjects. Some examples include a social studies unit of inquiry about respect for country, a drama skit about respect for the elderly, health education about respect for the self, an art collage about respect for nature, language arts focusing on respect for religion, and so on. The students use digital storytelling to address a specific scenario created by a subject teacher. The legend of William Tell, a fourteenth-century Swiss hero, was identified as suitable to teach respect for parents and country. In traditional interpretations, William Tell is presented as the embodiment of hundreds and thousands of Swiss people who resisted the Austrian domination of Switzerland. Although conventionally, a history topic would be taught in a social studies lesson, the story of William Tell was included in an upper-primary Language Arts unit of study that focused on writing literature-response essays. The students were engaged in inquiry about the character via online research and storytelling. A suitable, age-appropriate text was identified in an English resource book, and this text served as a starting point for the inquiry, as through text analysis and review, the students developed predictions about the main character, William Tell. The scenario suggested by the teacher was: “You live in the fourteenth century in a small village in Switzerland. One of the villagers whose name is William Tell disobeyed the orders of the village authorities and committed murder. Find out why he did it and form an opinion about the case from the point of view of …” Different groups of students were given a role: that of William Tell, his father, a blacksmith, or an Austrian soldier. The students were asked to create story maps and storyboards of the story. They were made familiar with storyboarding as a cognitive tool that helped them plan the media resources required for the story review. For the storyboarding activity, they provided simple sketches of the photographs that they planned to find on the Internet. The sketches served the purpose of visualization

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and provided students with an opportunity to plan ahead and narrow their search for photographs on open source platforms such as www.flickr.com/ creativecommons. The students collected their own media and, in some cases, drew images for use in their digital stories. Finally, the class published, shared, and discussed the digital artifacts of their learning in the form of digital stories created with iMovie. In their digital stories, the students expressed their views on the story of William Tell, its historical context, and the significance of respect for country and family. Students’ voices were projected by means of the digital entanglement of digital humanities, with the language arts curriculum content as a context; digital storytelling, as a teaching and learning strategy; and digital literacy skills, including information, visual and media literacy, and technology tools skills, activated throughout the duration of the project.

Conclusion Digital literacy may be viewed as an integral part of learning a humanities subject, but more importantly, it should be seen as an essential skill that prepares students for effective engagement in the curriculum and in aspects of modern life in which representing through digital multimodal texts is required, such as in work, learning, or socializing. The literature has increasingly supported the need for educational institutions to accommodate the development of emerging technology in teaching and learning, in order to prepare students to function in the world outside of school. Educational and other institutions across the globe must be conscious of the rapid developments in information and communication technologies. Media houses that are particularly affected by these developments no longer have a monopoly over news creation and distribution. The voices of ordinary people are now becoming as powerful as the voices of the major news houses: users decide what to read, edit, and publish, and they use a variety of online platforms to share information. Thus, it is becoming increasingly important to find opportunities to teach students how to become effective and knowledgeable digital citizens able to navigate through their studies and life, and digital storytelling taught in humanities lessons may become an effective strategy. The approach to knowledge construction and transfer is reflected in transdisciplinary teaching and learning approach that uses digital storytelling discussed in this chapter.

References Åberg, E. S., & Åkerfeldt, A. (2017). Design and recognition of multimodal texts: Selection of digital tools and modes on the basis of social and material premises? Journal of Computer Education, 4(3), 283–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40692-017-0088-3. Barber, J. (2016). Digital storytelling: New opportunities for humanities scholarship and pedagogy. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3, 1–14.

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Chapter 10

A Contagious Thrill: Identifying Experiential Factors for 2D Graphic Art Appeal Through Character Design for Video Games Stephen Poon

Introduction As society shifts away from the classical machine age toward a digitally connected realm, real-world activities, problem-solving, and social learning have joined together in interactive visual media. Creativity in visual communication becomes important and relevant in the era of active media engagement. As the curious, sociable, and highly self-directed digital generation increasingly demand the inclusion of creative elements in the classroom and their lifestyles, the role of video games as a leisure activity needs some rethinking. Current research calls for objective analysis of both positive and negative development of human intelligence through behavioral and perception analysis of game and media interaction, and to rationally examine and investigate areas where technological input and digital learning systems have impacted creativity substantially (Pew Research Center 2012). Scholarly research on the use of games as architectural bases for social engagement and as learning tools has been undertaken within sociocultural contexts: a growing body of studies on game empowerment aims to understand its ideological, non-cognitive benefits through socio-emotional engagement and behavioural modification such as improved communication with others (Ekman 2003). The convergence of knowledge fields from biology, psychology, design and computer mediated communications (CMC) in digital media design and visual storytelling, from the range of immersive technologies and hybridization in animation, video games, television, and film. Scholars are seriously considering how video gaming encourages the development of alternative learning strategies and skill outcomes such as problem solving, risk-taking, perseverance, and collaboration (MacArthur Foundation 2009; Stanford News 2013). S. Poon (B) Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_10

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Cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioral approaches in evaluating games are examined beyond calculating return on investments for game developers and video game marketers, substantiating current literature that demonstrates the increasing cultural acceptance of video games as a cornerstone of the modern knowledge economy. The key assumption for this study is that 2D character design directly increases the appeal of video games. The primary research aim of this project is to provide a deeper understanding of the role of two-dimensional (2D) character design, and to explore sensorial design appeals through characterization that attract audiences. Another objective of this chapter is to critically examine the positive and negative impact of character design practices using cognitive and behavioral design principles such as socio-emotional engagement, immersion and behavioral modification theories of character and content realism. Questions guiding this paper include: What appeals enhance 2D character design in video games? What factors influence the commercial game market’s appreciation of character design? How do effective design principles improve audience engagement with 2D characters? The following section reviews a selection of related literature on the subject.

Literature Review The study of media as tools for engaging children and families has traditionally been subject to biased treatments that connote the futility of media impact: for instance, public educators chiefly focus on the adverse effects of television viewing and video games on cognitive learning due to violent components that affect behavioral and emotional developmental aspects of growing children (American Academy of Pediatrics 2001). In this regard, the cognitive implications of Howard Gardner’s classical theory of multiple intelligences (logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatialvisual, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic) has been extensively cited by scientists, psychologists, and cultural, media, and educational scholars studying the impact of multiple intelligences on behavioral aptitudes, habits and traits (Kleiner 2013). The analysis of attributes related to technological skills learning is also crucial (Pew Research Center 2012). Where cognitive problemsolving had once correlated to logical-mathematical intelligence and linguistic aptitudes, today’s technology-based digital domains such as computers, game applications and multimedia increasingly demand higher capitalization on spatial and visual intelligences (Diezmann and Watters 2000). Significantly, computer and video games are visually oriented media that challenge users to enhance their spatial intelligence through the development of the ability to perceive, map, manipulate, and represent the world of images accurately (Diezmann and Watters 2000; ESA 2017). Hamilton (2009) argues, using social psychology frameworks, that unlike watching films, conceptual realism found in interactive visual and virtual content challenges graphic artists, developers, and the audience to embrace the “partial

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transference of the self into screen-space” graphically. He iterates the Heideggerian concepts of “intentionality” and “ready-to-hand” in the study of self-existence, essentially a performative system of “embodied interaction” that involves mouse, cursor, and hand movements in controlling, selecting, composing and navigating avatars (p. 10). Seen from a modernist perspective, the virtuality of what appears on the screen is designed to invoke responses within the mental, affective, linguistic and psychological faculties of the active audience or player, proving that digital media design and visual communication studies relate more to human psychology, and the sociology of emotions, than technology (Serrano-Puche 2015). Because emotions are pliant, however, it is crucial for graphic designers to train their perceptual faculties in order to understand, respond to, and even formulate their own theories by studying how emotions and sensations are evoked through visual imagery and sentiment analysis (Serrano-Puche 2015, p. 5). As design manifests in multifarious assemblages, audiences wishing to participate (play, watch, read, consume) must learn the core skills for accessing the multiple entry points, thus requiring flexible, hybridized designs for multimodal media systems (MacArthur Foundation 2009, p. 87; Turner et al. 2016). These reflexive skills are opportunities for child and adult audiences to improve their mental and physical dexterity by offering a sense of challenge, control, goal-setting, creativity in decisions, competition, peer learning, identity experimentation, relaxation through alleviating anxiety and depression, fun from roleplaying and extroversion for otherwise repressed emotions (Bateman 2009; Dillon et al. 2006; Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 2016; Koole 2010).

Theories of the Behavioral Influence of Games on Emotions Ijsselsteijn et al. (2007) suggest measuring reflective and reflexive responses to define characteristics of the digital game experience more fully. Ackerman et al. (2009) used a constructivist context to view the intersection of personal, historical, psychological, and cultural perceptions of creativity, acknowledging social difficulties to present a coherent creative movement, because “what is novel, surprising and valuable” can be meaningful when conceived through various filters (p. 5). Concurrently, educators are cautioned not to be entranced with the pervasiveness of creative practices in which entertainment masquerades as education, as this comes with real risks of manipulative and unethical processes (MacArthur Foundation 2009, p. 57). What makes video games so important for digital environment design and CMC research? First, game design, from virtual reality hardware such as headsets to character designs, fosters hypermedia realism through the mapping of affective behaviors in intimate details. This includes a range of emotions in depth, showing expressive capabilities such as annoyance, empathy, resentment, or envy (Serrano-Puche 2015, p. 10). Bethke (2003, p. 67) provides a case study of early adoption of The Sims, particularly among women players who were engrossed with crafting and personalizing the behavioral eccentricities of their characters (Fig. 10.1). Some older players

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Fig. 10.1 The Sims (2000). (PC CD)—Pc-Cd Rom CD. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/ Sims-PC-CD-Pc-Cd-Rom/dp/B00005A3H4

have reacted negatively in certain circumstances, blaming the rise of 3D interactive games and the push for realism over style, detail accuracy over creativity, for what they perceive as ruining the pure fun and joy of playing simple games (Dillon 2013; Bethke 2003, p. 96). Second, game design is a critical form of narrative architecture to understand which factors and contexts influence people’s social interaction. Elaborating on this, Salen and Zimmerman (2016, pp. 34–38) cite Henry Jenkins’ concept game environments as evocative spaces, in which events become the arena for relevant, real-world settings and experiences.

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In the political context, game environments have been criticized for reducing people’s abilities to sustain political narratives, as pushing buttons and tracking programmed animations do not help individuals develop the skillset necessary for discernment, organization, coordination, argumentation, or relationship-building for serious governance matters in the real world (Braman, qtd. in Pew Research Center 2012, pp. 9–10). Third, the addictive allure of screen-based social interactive gaming has raised profound cultural and ethical questions about the primacy of “designed” effects responsible for entertaining audiences in the form of “behavioral surrender”, simultaneously promoting and reducing players’ self-control, sense of time, sense of responsibility, and anxieties related to real-world problems (Lidwell et al. 2003, p. 134). All these issues lend weight to the statement of Canadian programmer and creator of the game Civilization Sid Meier that “games are a series of interesting choices” (Bateman 2009, p. 4). Digital and video gaming platforms seductive and exploitative political weapons, designed with comparable capabilities as any legitimate propaganda system to influence the social, moral, and cultural fabrics of society (Bateman 2009; Facer et al. 2003). Recognizing the integral characteristics of games that have gained lifestyle acceptance, induced social interaction, changed behaviors and given us a better understanding of our socio-emotional states, for negative and positive end goals, are important in enabling game designers to develop products and programs to tackle the challenges of today’s global participatory culture by creating more socially responsible and sustainable media education, including the commercial games genre (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 2016; MacArthur Foundation 2009; Serrano-Puche 2015). Third, questions of perceptual processing and of the link to emotions and behaviors are inevitable when discussing game designs. Style and personal tastes aside, the interpretive dimensions of design and media or semiotics must be critically understood to identify the meanings of signs and symbols, denoted or connoted, to view how, and how far, they are perceived by intended audiences for positive or negative interactions. The video gaming genre is thus a site of conflicting, multilayered, yet profoundly rich experiential behaviors, and especially observable behaviors demonstrating selfhood and identity formation among children (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 2016; Koole 2010). Finally, the value-added component of design processes provides a tangible measure of audience and consumer satisfaction, and of efficient resource management versus production costs, which results in maximizing revenues, longer product lifecycles, and greater market desirability. As the marketing of video games depend substantially on distinctive characterization, the franchising of commercial or iconic character images from screen to products and merchandise spin-offs is a subject of extensive cultural and marketing studies on emerging or dominant taste trends (Slater 1997; Valentine and Jensen 2016). Even nostalgia can be viewed as a socio-emotional aspect of classic gaming. For instance, studies suggest that one distinct advantage of less elastic 2D characters over interactive 3D designs is its evocative ability. Nostalgic fans of retro gaming,

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for instance, attest to pixel graphics as a primary reason for turning away from 3D games, because to them, pixel art “simply looks better” (Wright 2006, p. 11). For newly-launched games, marketing research shows that creative branding appeals are essential for long-term survival, because these appeals transcend demographics to sustain consumer interest in the game franchise “before and between” game releases (Wolf 2012, p. 394). Competitive game development and marketing strategies must align revenue and marketing strategies with strong craftsmanship, narrative storytelling, and the psychological impact of game art and design (Bethke 2003, pp. 77–80). Ijsselsteijn et al. (2007) published a key paper in the Journal for Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) which identifies commercial performance standards based on usability metrics as the heart of successful games, but notes that affective and intrinsic experiences such as reward, immersion, and social engagement components, are less investigated. Other measures of game franchise success that should not be taken lightly include evidence of sustained design performance, extensive market studies, and analysis of gamers’ experiential learning. Current scholarship is limited in this area; hence, game artists and designers should question all possible behavioral outcomes covering issues from a human-centered design perspective rather than merely quantifying them in terms of commercial production, to enable them to understand the social and cultural impacts of game design before product development and launch (Valentine and Jensen 2016).

Immersion Theory and Content Realism: Pros and Cons When we examine how games are designed to evoke a range of human emotions and instincts, we must understand their affective elements. Games are crucial enablers of a variety of stimuli and conditions that challenge a player’s cognitive and perceptual skills without being exceeded, and this becomes an intense state of mental focus known as immersion. Lidwell et al. (2003) posited that cognitive depth in creative works derives from designing sensory experiences that are shared, intricate, time-managed, and richly rewarding. Gaming environments and characters seek high emotional engagement, and this requires the right balance of spatial, stimuli and storytelling elements, otherwise known as the operant conditions that modify, reinforce and exact punishment as necessary (p. 174). Content analyses over the past two decades have attempted to trace the effects of mediated realism via dramatic games imagery, graphics and audio components. Studies have found that the emotive appeals of video games were associated with watching similar acts in real life, including boxing, kicking, and slapping (Möller and Krahé 2009, p. 76). Tendencies towards physiological arousal and aggression have become a natural concern even in game industry debates centering on exposure to fictional violence and the socialization of children (Bateman 2009). Characters who behave violently assume socialization roles as agents with the potential to

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demonstrate to, and thus teach, players that aggressive behavior are socially acceptable, resulting in distorting worldviews and increasing the likelihood of defiance of cultural representatives of authority such as police or parents (Piepenbrink 2005). Psychologists Möller and Krahé (2009) reviewed social-cognitive learning theories as antecedents of aggressive motives and behaviors in a study involving 295 German secondary school students. Aside from their observational analysis of players who skill; fully execute “finishing moves” to get rewards and extra points in games (p. 78), they hypothesize that frequent and direct exposure to violent video games predicts aggression and normative acceptance of aggressive behaviors and beliefs (p. 79). The study found that violent video games increased acceptance of physical aggression over a 30-month span of study, whereupon subjects were questioned on their social behaviors based on rhetorical scenarios (“Imagine you are … ”). Möller and Krahé’s (2009) longitudinal analysis demonstrated that their teenage subjects fully accepted and believed that aggression was a normal conflict-solving strategy (p. 86), suggesting links between direct exposure to violence and hostile attribution, confirming earlier personality development studies that in times of ambiguity and crisis, often the basis of realism in games, children who learned to behave aggressively tend to express similar aggressive future behaviors as adolescents. Thus, social hostility can become a normative belief that extends into adulthood (Huesmann and Guerra 1997). User interface (UI) design is often the most challenging aspect of game development, since it puts control into players’ hands. From a critical cognitive architecture perspective, the development of high-caliber content increases the need for investments and research into better quality UI design, while differentiating aspects of design systems using virtual agents such as believable characters and psychological motivation for virtual characters to interact with human users. Poorly designed UI can spoil the user’s experience of good game concepts (Turner et al. 2016). To overcome this design challenge, the type of play must first be identified. Richard Bartle (1990) posited in providing commercialized choices of mediated experiences, game designers must identify the motivation that underlies consumer engagements, regardless of needs, values, and identities. Realism is another reflection of successful product positioning for 3D games that are worth billions in the competitive video, online, and digital game applications markets. In an interview for Game Over, an educational documentary that delves into gender, race, and violence portrayed media and video games, Erica Scharrer of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, discussed the social and psychological damage from the aspect of control over each players’ own motions and motives: The use of realistic graphics and realistic animation is sort of a bragging rights … for the industry, so that they can say our game is most realistic. (Huntemann 2000)

The social acceptance factor may not necessarily reflect the critical findings of virtual world communications scholars such as Martey and Consalvo (2011), who studied stereotyping of characters on gaming platforms such as Second Life, based on transference of sexual and gender norms as the currency of conforming to others’ expectations, resulting in tensions. Herold (2005), however, argues that video game

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violence, though potentially threatening to children’s cognitive and behavioral traits, provides harmless enjoyment that is not even remotely comparable to real-life daily aggressions. In CMC research examining the influence of gaming on youth behavior, Anderson et al. (2001, 2003) reported studies attributing aggression and hostility to pervasive displays of real emotions in the content of media texts such as films, music, video games, and television. Despite criticism of digital game experiences, CMC scholars are encouraged to move away from assumptions of stringent virtual morality and to adopt a less skeptical stance towards the negative effect of digital realism. Consequently, many relevant studies have shown that most players can tell reality from fantasy and have a level of common sense that prevents them from emulating violence; such players perceive games as helpful emotional outlets, just as other forms of competitive sports might be (Willis 2005, pp. 169–74). Dillon (2013), for instance, studied the importance of common psychological triggers that enable subconscious engagement, and differentiates these from real-life interactions in arousing meaningful experiences. Dillon, Wong and Ang (2006) cite a case study involving the prototype game platform, Virtual Orchestra, developed by the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. They describe how young music students and beginners learn to appreciate their competitive and protective instincts by playing together virtually in a symphonic orchestra and learning gesture recognition through realistic mimicry, such as “conducting” with a wireless device as a baton. In theories investigating the rules of representation, various denotation systems for visual-spatial intelligence have also been subject to critical analysis. The way human imagination engages multi-sensorial dimensions takes different forms; for instance, sounds can be music or background noise, depending on the perceiver, and this affects the choices of representation tools used to communicate and signify their environment (Facer et al. 2003). As a form of emotional processing, cause-and-effect relationships in game design, such as representations of anger via facial expressions and racialized group identification, have many triggers (Cacioppo et al. 2005, p. 359). Popular cultural texts often bring various oppositional views out for open debate (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 2016). Cross-cultural media studies by Anderson et al. (2010) have presented a unified meta-analysis from which to examine and compare the effects of violent media in Japan and Western countries. Their findings suggest that although susceptibility is a variable factor dependent on cultural bias, gender, and social differences, some evidence has increasingly pointed at longitudinal findings that across societies, long-term exposure to violent video games can lead to aggressiveness, decreasing players’ empathy and discouraging the development of pro-social behavior. In regarding the cultural impact of video games, there are bound to be detractors, suspicious of manipulation or fretting over the prospects of socialization migrating to digital platforms; meanwhile adaptors and supporters seek opportunities to use and master the tools and skills of game design to identify “patterns of social interaction and relations” via immersive technologies (Lankoski 2010, p. 139). Studies that embrace the beneficial aspects of gaming behavior consider human intelligence capacity by studying the advantages of cognitive flexibility. One such study (Glass et al. 2013) performs a Bayesian meta-analysis on game tasks and

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Fig. 10.2 StarCraft (2017). Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/StarCraft/

actions that require rapid thinking and manipulation of multiple information sources, observing female volunteers playing StarCraft, a real-time strategy game (Fig. 10.2). Glass et al. found that agility and accuracy were dependent on quick mental shifts in response to changing goals and environmental conditions, a form of engagement that could prove useful in teaching decision making, confidence building and negotiation skills to women. Other studies corroborate with Glass et al. in demonstrating benefits of gaming. Mental health researchers have shown the viability of clinical intervention programs through predictive models of gaming disorders to treat negative behaviors such as neuroticism and compulsive online gaming and gambling (Wittek et al. 2015). Interdisciplinary teams from the University of Texas Austin and Porto University conducted studies showing the potential of using games that feature virtual character representations to teach socially-disadvantaged children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), how to recognize and express personal emotions better with real-time facial animation through a prototype game (Fernandez et al. 2011). Video game advocacy has earned its badge of scholarly honor, as suggested in recent digital media scholarship. For instance, Christopher J. Ferguson of Texas A&M University (Pew Research Center 2012, p. 21), has dismissed fears of claims that harmful violent games lead to aggression as an unfounded “moral panic”, a generational pattern of transitional reaction over new technologies and digital media, just as had happened in the pioneering eras of novels, protest comics and rock and roll music. Igarashi (2010) has also taken a positive stance, demonstrating how nonprofessional, untrained users use 2D and 3D graphical authoring and modeling techniques to create learning applications. From clothing manipulation to toy designs, interior space simulations and representations of real-world objects and identities can be designed, and the technological skills learned by amateurs or child users enable them to gain access to creative and interactive ideas. Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. (2016, p. 163) cited recent psychological triggers on public perceptions of gaming as “unhealthy escapism”, believing our innate “positive curiosity” should be accounted for, before criticizing the media’s ability to regulate socially-acceptable behaviors and realities. The authors state their belief that social resistance towards games’ influence is likely not the best method for open discussions and meaningful exchanges,

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since the acceptance of video games remains the driving factor. In extending the work of Richard Bartle, Sutton-Smith (2009, qtd. in Valentine and Jensen 2016, p. xxiii) has theorized that studying the positive and negative impact of video game influences include closely understanding players’ needs, whether they are playing for collective benefit (progress), for power, for fantasy, or for self (learning or entertainment). How they play with objects, rules and other players reveals what they seek (Salen and Zimmerman 2016, p. 6). Analysts have also argued that video games take unfair blame as the cause of aggressive behaviors, considering that other entertainment media such as cartoons, reality shows, and movies have been seen as just as influential in behavioral manipulation (Blanchard 2007). Literature, in summary, has pointed to immersion and realism as mainly positive appeals for marketing video games, boosted by promotion of shared experiences such as emotional investment, social acceptance and the notion of games as totally immersive cultural representations (Ijsselsteijn et al. 2007). Negative instances in the crossover adaptability of games do exist, among audiences who may or may not have the benefit of multimodal platform exposure: the 2016 adaptation of the successful game franchise Assassin’s Creed did not impress British film reviewers (Fig. 10.3), who called it “an interminable, lifeless mess” (Bradshaw 2016). The debate as to whether society, through political strategies, media advocacy or educational initiatives, could counteract the influence of video games implies that the hypothesized relationships between issues and behavioral outcomes remain largely under the scope of social sciences, but hardly leads to idealized solutions.

Fig. 10.3 Assassin’s Creed (2014). Ubisoft Entertainment ® Unity—Notre Dame Edition. Retrieved from https://store.ubi.com/nl/assassin-s-creed–unity—notre-dame-edition/56c4947a8 8a7e300458b45d4.html

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Research Design and Methodology This section outlines the research procedures for this study’s investigation of the Malaysian perspective of the relationship between creative game characters and game appeal to users.

Research Design and Sampling Method The research was performed in three phases. The first phase was a review of print and online literature about the social, political, cultural, and economic influences of video games, focusing on 2D character design and game art theories and principles. The literature review set up a theoretical framework for the application of ground research, which is crucial to understand the “nature of meaning of an experience [as encountered by] a particular group of people … stressing open processes rather than fixed procedures” (NIU 2000). In the second phase, personal interviews were administered to a chosen segment of preschool teachers and children. The choice of Malaysian preschool environments as the sampling site was representative of the segments whose cognitive and behavioral perspectives were sought: young children and adults. The third phase involved the analysis of data that had been gathered in the previous stages and the qualitative review of the findings (NIU 2000), resulting in the analysis of behavioral findings in the Discussion section. In conducting sampling, preschools and kindergartens were sought to identify participants in two age segments. Fifteen students aged four to six years and five kindergarten teachers with a minimum of one year’s working experience in kindergarten classes in the Petaling Jaya and Subang areas of Selangor, Malaysia, were selected randomly through face-to-face communication for teachers and focus groups for students. In the end, twenty participants were chosen in total, consisting of five teachers and fifteen children. The sampling of adult participants from kindergarten classes was a notably challenging aspect of the project, as several proposals for personal interviews were rejected, while parental permission had to be obtained during the selection process for child participants.

Research Instrumentation The instrumentation is a prepared set of questions for interviewing teachers and children from the kindergarten classes, consisting of seven open-ended questions intended to enable subjects to focus critically on their own levels of understanding about 2D character design and appeal, while encouraging personal feelings and opinions to be expressed and documented. The interviews were not separately assessed for comparison study, as the age ranges of the subjects (four to six years) were too close.

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Data Collection Procedure Secondary data gathering enabled in-depth study and review of the evolution of video games and the impact of video games on society. The secondary sources for this project included journals, web articles, books about game interface composition, and visual communication systems for character designs and pixel art. Interview questions enabled gathering of primary data focusing on the types of interface design for 2D character and pixel art awareness and appeal. A set of seven open-ended questions were developed for child and adult participants respectively. The following section provides a critical discussion of insights from the interviews.

Findings and Discussion When 2D pixel characters were shown to the teachers, nine of the fifteen participants answered that they did not know about pixel art and that they did not show 2D features or movies to their students, claiming “such kinds of animation would not be interesting for them … as many cannot sit still”. Six participants, however, said that they knew, appreciated and loved 2D art still, “although it is a given for this type of graphic cartoon to die eventually”. When asked about the reasons for their responses, one stated that 2D art is “trendy, classic, and a phenomenon of the past”. Among the participants, 2D design was less-commonly understood as an art form, but merely represented a memory of the adults’ childhood experiences, “like some of those oldfashioned cartoons we watched on TV”, which suggests that public appreciation of its evolutionary importance for 3D form is quite low. Apart from that, all the participants agreed that “good design idea with strong appeal for kids” influences the creation of 2D characters. One participant stated, “In my mind, without graphic art, no 3D characters can be created”. This suggests a simple cognitive understanding of 2D art as the main foundation of every visual illustration and design. Two adult participants stated a preference for characters in 2D form, demonstrating that classic graphic designs were still appreciated. Another adult participant mentioned that although 3D characters are complicated and realistic today, they do have some of the same appeal as their 2D counterparts: “3D is very popular and trendy. They are easier to access and enjoy, such as through playing games”. The rapid proliferation of trendy character designs and exciting game formats that cross from game platforms to cinema, television cartoons, animation, anime, or comic series is a direct result of multiple channel exposures. These responses bode well for improving public appreciation of 2D, as one participant said, “To me, 2D interfaces are not really that outdated”. This concurs with the findings of Lidwell et al. (2003), Salen and Zimmerman (2016), Turner et al. (2016), Wright (2006), and Pew Research Center (2012) that video game designs have become the ‘trending’ circuit for social activities such as playing, expressing emotions, adapting to change, and responding to others and to

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Fig. 10.4 THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER review (2015). Scottshak. Retrieved from http://straightfromamovie.com/the-spongebob-movie-sponge-out-of-water-review/

the environment. Four adult participants felt that 3D characters appeals to players chiefly from their popularity as social trends. One participant mentioned the interaction of animated characters in live-action sequences on realistic surfaces, such as Nickelodeon Movies’ SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (Art of VFX 2015; see Fig. 10.4) which was endearing to global cartoon audiences but not, as one reviewer notes, “as comfortable as fit as a pair of symmetrical trousers” (Lemire 2015). Inversely, when approached individually and asked to compare between the appeals of 2D and 3D designs, all fifteen child participants remarked that they did not find 2D character designs as interesting as 3D, the latter of which they regarded as “attractive, cute, interesting, and creative”. As earlier literature has noted, the instinct towards appetite fulfillment and emotional escapism implicates cultural, psychological, and moral frameworks of filtering, limiting, and censoring information. Certain forms of visual entertainment such as 3D games could distract children from devoting more attention to social learning strategies such as accurately recognizing feelings of others through facial expressions (Diezmann and Watters 2000; Ekman 2003). Accordingly, the study found that design appeal affects motivational behaviors such as increasing the level of desire to interact with the characters, as well as social acceptance: that is, a specific well-liked character will inspire the students to imitate the character’s speech and behavioral patterns. This implies that too much realism in the design of game characters and icons may translate into acceptable reality through behavioral emulation, regardless of the socio-emotional and behavioral frameworks mentioned above (Bateman 2009). When asked about their favorite games, all the child participants expressed preferences for games such as Angry Birds (Fig. 10.5) and Temple Run (Fig. 10.6), which implies that 2D character design is by default a less popular conceptual representation of “a good game”, while none chose pixel-based characters or 2D art. This suggests

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Fig. 10.5 Angry Birds (2011). The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/techno logy/video-games/8303173/Angry-Birds-the-story-behind-iPhones-gaming-phenomenon.html

Fig. 10.6 Temple Run (2016). Pinterest. Retrieved from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/templerun02/ games-temple-run-2/?lp=true

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that character design influences children in many ways, some of these ways revealing aspects of cognitive and emotional engagement between mediated communication and behavior that occurred only during direct observational sessions. Among the child participants, those who played Angry Birds were observed to show greater aggression tendencies, such as rough and harsh hand gestures, as compared to those who played Temple Run. Angry Birds requires the player to hit and attack the opponents with projectiles (bird characters), which may promote the idea that hitting something or someone else is acceptable. Temple Run requires players to focus on the character in order to avoid obstacles while running thus, the children who played Temple Run were more focused and quiet than the Angry Birds players. This observation suggests a possible correlation, as in previous theories, between video game content and the idea that violence is acceptable, potentially inspiring aggressive behavior among the players. This could implicate the need for longitudinal research outcomes as conducted by Möller and Krahé (2009), in which prediction of player aggression was seen to be possible through studying the combined effects of violence exposure, normative beliefs, and hostility bias in adolescent subjects. A question mulled on throughout the observational segment was whether children’s natural tendencies towards gratuitous emotion-led behaviors may lead to marketing of products featuring characters that appeal to children’s affinity with creative character designs. For instance, many 3D character designs feature fullyformed hands and legs, complete with shadows and tones that add substance and weight, while 2D images may not be executed as completely, using abstract lines to indicate form and shape and represent notions such as happiness or puzzlement. These two different aspects of character design were shown to the children, who were asked which they preferred; all the participants chose 3D characters with conventional or regular hand and leg design, although three out of the fifteen chose the irregular, abstract character design because of its “cuteness”. This finding suggests that children’s absorption of media realism begins pointedly with exposure to visual characters. One adult participant mentioned that character designs, even in 3D animations and games today, seemed flat and not much different from the previous era, when only 2D printed illustrations were available. For many middle-class Malaysian children, illustrated books featuring 2D artwork are standard provisions by preschools aimed at augmenting curricula teaching of oral fluency and reading skills, rather than de facto visual literacy tools. Unaffordable pricing, stock unavailability, and the lack of translated materials hamper visual literacy optimization among local kindergarten students; hence, many turn to media such as TV, video games and online channels such as YouTube to “catch the latest game trends”. Illustration appeals of 2D were a factor found to determine stylistic preferences. When shown artwork for comparison between styles, six of the fifteen children preferred characters in “paper-cut” styles, two chose 2D illustrations, and one found the “sketchy” style of illustration appealing. These variations were based in part on the different sorts of cartoon shows to which they had been exposed. The fifteen child participants were then requested to draw a character based on their imagination.

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Fig. 10.7 Hand-drawn character based on children’s imagination

Only five participants, who showed a greater understanding of drawing as a means of communication and self-expression, were selected (as seen in Fig. 10.7a–e). Based on the findings of this study, we can suggest the potential for a character design program that could enhance the appreciation of game art among the Malaysian public, especially children. Such a program would showcase mainly 3D character designs, but would also involve non-digital forms such as conventional 2D characters, hand-drawn anime, and comic art, which are still the predominant core concepts from which larger digital trends develop. This project’s inductive research process and qualitative analysis have also produced several suggested outcomes, which will be discussed in the concluding section, along with several practical suggestions for future industry development.

Conclusion and Recommendations Future studies may take a more calculated approach to examining the influence of 2D realism and character designs that purportedly educate children. Based on the results from the qualitative study conducted for this chapter, regardless of socialization differences across cultural environments in Malaysia the perception endures that illustrated storybooks, rather than art and games, are still the most effective interactive content to enhance children’s mastery of reading and other linguistic skills. The use of 2D illustrations in storybooks, along with merchandise marketing and branding strategies, could be further explored. The design of 2D characters can be directly inspired by children’s sketches, depending on the findings and needs of market research on educational games. In addition, the influence of characters from specific games and television shows, such as Angry Birds, Tom and Jerry, and Pocoyo, particularly the question of behavioral emulation or mimicry, should be studied in order to gain fuller insight on the perception of players’ engagement with characters. Other future research directions could also study the preference of target audiences for specific character color schemas, such as blue, green or pink palettes, and how these interplay with secondary colors in the background elements to enhance the game’s visual appeal. With the tremendous uptake of media technologies in lifestyles,

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multimodal digital literacies among consumers and content producers seem to be shaping the coming phase of cultural media development. This study found evidence through literature that suggests that the appeal of basic 2D designs in video games has shifted in many cultural and social settings, from lessappealing 2D systems to 3D interactive games and online multi-playing modalities, and the evolution of these phases has influenced the appeal of characters to users. Based on qualitative research, however, this chapter concludes that at present, general Malaysian appreciation for 2D game artistry is still in its infancy; the perception of its contribution to local cultural development is purely driven by simple nostalgia (for the older generation) and the simplicity of graphics (for the younger). These findings are consistent with Wright’s claim (2006, p. 11) that 2D art’s “distinct charm” evokes adult memories of retro culture, resulting in limited appreciation for 2D artistry in digital interactive media, despite the advancements of the latter. The direct influence of 2D character design on the appeal of video games was assumed at the beginning of this study. The analysis of child and adult participants demonstrated that 2D character designs influence users’ engagement with and love of games by generating positive appeal factors for the characters’ personalities. Although overall findings supported the notion of 3D games’ gradual rise in popularity among locals and global cultures, the causal relations between quality deterioration of 3D trends and 2D artistry have received less attention. Thus, this section makes several recommendations to improve the marketing and cultural potential of video games. First, collaborative initiatives for project-based learning (PBL) involving interface designers, animators, 2D and 3D artists, storytellers, and digital marketing specialists should lead the way in the design process, as PBL requires active participation of stakeholders to produce market-feasible, compelling, and competitive games based on user-centered design (Bethke 2003; Ijsselsteijn et al. 2007). Second, for educators, capstone design curricula could be implemented at tertiary levels to enable students to learn how to develop non-digital or digital prototypes, or to provide online courses for professional, peer-to-peer evaluation of game processes, iterations and marketing (see, for instance, Michigan State University n.d.). These educational initiatives could also involve examining diversity issues such as gender roles in game design teams, as well as idea-generation methods such as game theories. Finally, early child institutions, schools, and creative play specialists should work collaboratively with a focus on building and strengthening the visual-spatial intelligence dimensions of children via non-digital learning, including the construction of structural forms, shapes, space and concepts, using a variety of narrative systems and skills; as Ackerman et al. (2009) state: Creativity does not simply “happen”. [It takes] perceivable forms: as a beautiful section of music, a finely-crafted perfume, a delicious cake, a well-told joke, a scarf with an interesting texture, or an attractive sculpture. … we appreciate the way in which an individual (or group) has channeled their creative talents within the rules, norms and structures …, the constraints of a medium, knowledge of a genre.

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On that note, it is crucial that game designers, graphic artists, cultural anthropologists and CMC scholars continue to research and seek further field insights into the behavioral modification contexts and emotional appeal of 2D and 3D game designs. Their aim must be to harness, unleash and optimize this creative appeal through 2D and 3D user interface designs, making them culturally relevant, entertaining, motivating, adaptable, accessible, imaginative, pivotal, and personalized, in order for game art design to play a sustained role in delivering “the stuff of legends” and to surprise every conceivable audience of the burgeoning video games industry.

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Chapter 11

Reconceptualization of Historical Reality: The D¯ojin Game San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei Zhuan Henry Sze Hang Choi

Introduction Using American role-playing game (RPGs) as examples, Mackay (2001) suggested that the reasons for the appeal of computer-based war RPGs to their players are due not only to excitement about leading armies into battle and defeating their opponents, but also the feeling that they have won the battle. In other words, this fictional game scenario gives players the opportunity to experience an alternative historical world. Alternate history, a genre among whose best-known works is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, is sometimes known as alternative history, though the latter term can also refer to historical analyses from nonstandard perspectives, such as, for example, examining the roles of women during the Italian Renaissance. The term “alternate” has the same meaning as “counterfactual,” a less popular term among historians, which suggests a parallel world in which events occurred differently than in the actual world. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 is often considered a “turning point” of history and thus a popular subject for alternate history: what if he survived? Alternate history is also “a critique of the metaphors” in discussing history by making readers rethink how the current world has become what it is (Shapiro 1998; Hellekson 2001). Causes, explanations, and counterfactuals are the trinity that historians cannot ignore. Counterfactuals or “what if” questions are concerned with why history happened along a particular development path, one of the main aims of historical study apart from discussing what did happen (Bulhof 1999). Alternate history is a popular phenomenon in contemporary Western culture, especially in America, as seen in various novels, films, video games, and comic books produced since the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War made deterministic worldviews less appealing. Westwood Studios’ 1996 computer game Command & H. S. H. Choi (B) Hong Kong Shue Yan University, North Point, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. W. Kung (ed.), Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Digital Culture and Humanities 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4642-6_11

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Conquer: Red Alert, in which Albert Einstein travels back in time to kill Adolf Hitler before he became German Chancellor, is one such example (Rosenfeld 2002; Schneider-Mayerson 2009). The genre had been less popular in East Asia until 2000, with the appearance of the Japanese manga series Ikki Tousen 一騎当千, whose main characters are female Japanese secondary students named after male heroes from the work of Chinese historical fiction, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The game not only became controversial in the Sinophone world for its seeming distortion of Chinese history and literature, but it also departed somewhat from the category of alternate history, with inventions of the historical past rather than borrowing historical elements for a present narrative. The D¯ojin game San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan 三國志姜維傳 (JWZ) is a war RPG produced in 2012 by a member of the Taiwanese public forum hosted by the PTT 批踢 踢實業坊 of the National Taiwan University who used the pseudonym “ratchet.” The game was modeled on the board game system and format of Sangokushi Sousouden 三國志曹操伝 (SSD), first released in 1999 by Koei & Co, a leading computer game producer of various series of Chinese and Japanese historical turn-based strategy games and RPGs such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition and Taik¯o Risshiden 太閤立志伝. Zheng Li 鄭立, an expert on historical board games and RPGs, argued that the board game format of SSD “has become the platform for derivative works of Chinese historical computer games” (Zheng 2014). Among a dozen modified versions of SSD including famous Chinese historical figures such as Lü Bu 呂布, Yue Fei 岳飛, and others, JWZ is one of the most successful RPGs, attracting many fans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, SSD, and online forum members in Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong. For example, between January 2004 and 16 September 2019, the PTT forum featured 26,674 posts in the category of “Old-Games” in PTT forum, 1126 of which were related to JWZ since ratchet announced the public trial of JWZ for interested forum members on 6 April 2010. This is second to the leading icon of Chinese martial arts fiction and mobile games, Louis Cha 金庸, who has 3280 posts in the forum. The most important element of D¯ojin games is that they are not made for profit, but are meant to provide new experiences that are not available to players in the original version of the game. Therefore, the software of the D¯ojin game is always freely downloadable from the internet, and fans are welcome to reprogram or edit it. When JWZ was offered for purchase on the Apple App Store in mainland China during the Chinese New Year holiday in 2015, it aroused much controversy on the Internet because this online public sale was not authorized by the original author of JWZ. Ratchet argued that what was important to him was not the profit lost in this unauthorized sale, but the arising of copyright infringement disputes with Koei & Co when JWZ became a product sold for profit (Yi 2015). In other words, the status of a D¯ojin game provides JWZ, ratchet, and other programmers with a grey zone in which they can present and publicize alternative views of the historical narratives of the Three Kingdoms period and of current politics in Taiwan.

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Role-Playing Games and the Relearning of Ancient History This chapter will not discuss in detail the history of the Three Kingdoms period, when Jiang Wei succeeded Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 to become the key military leader of Shu Han 蜀漢 from 234 to 263. Rather, it intends to use JWZ as a case study to examine how the conversations between the historical and fictional characters in the game, key characteristics of RPGs, help Chinese Internet users develop an interest in the history of the later period of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is often neglected both in history lessons and in Chinese fiction, and posit significant political discourses that are then transmitted, interpreted, and reinterpreted by users across China. JWZ provides two alternative historical discourses about this time period. First, under the doctrine of “revival of the Han dynasty,” the Shu Han regime involved a complex power struggle between four parties: the old followers of Liu Bei 劉備, the Dong Zhou 東州 faction, the local Sichuanese, and the Southern barbarians. Second, in contrast to the norm of military conquest and unification of all-under-heaven that has been depicted in previous board games and RPGs, JWZ suggests another way of overcoming the cycle of political chaos by making a correct decision on moral and ethnic issues rather than relying solely on military strategy. Hence, JWZ “is a game, but also a legend; it not only gives you the opportunity to play, but also the space to think” (Zheng 2014). RPGs, like many other computer or video games, have attracted criticism from parents’ groups who have dismissed them as “electric heroin” (Xia 2000). Between 2000 and 2014, the Chinese government prohibited the public sale of video game devices. The G-cores, one of the most influential computer and video game online forums in mainland China, argued that addiction to video games depends on the player’s mindset rather than on the game itself. The forum members further suggested that computer games can be seen as the hitherto unrecognized “ninth art”. Various video games, including BioShock, were used as examples of the educational value of games, including philosophical discussion of universal values or controversies such as peace, genetic modification, and reflections on human nature. Furthermore, given the long history of literature and the century-long evolution of film, it is unfair to criticize a relatively new medium that is still developing for a perceived lack of artistic or educational merit (Ya 2016). The production of a successful RPG with high humanistic and educational value cannot be solely built on fantasy that transcends historical context or logic. Therefore, when ratchet wrote the historical and fantasy storylines and the conversations for JWZ, he used references from 61 Chinese and Japanese primary and secondary historical and literary sources. The historical storyline follows the nine northern expeditions of Jiang Wei and the fall of Shu Han; meanwhile, the fantasy storyline traces the successful defeat of the southern expedition of Deng Ai 鄧艾 by Zhang Ni 張嶷 and Zhuge Zhan 諸葛瞻, the son of Zhuge Liang, which did not happen in actual-world history (Tian 2016). In history, Zhang Ni was killed in the seventh northern expedition led by Jiang Wei in 254. However, in JWZ, the player can choose either to follow the historical

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storyline of Zhang Ni defending against the enemy armies at Xiang Wu 襄武, or the fantasy storyline in which Jiang Wei decided to give up the conquest of Di Dao 狄道 county and mobilized the whole army of Jiang to save Zhang’s life. In JWZ, ratchet used the brotherhood of Liu Bei and Guan Yu 關羽 to symbolize the reason Jiang chooses to save Zhang. Although Zhang was the subordinate of Jiang, the game follows a romantic discourse that portrayed Zhang as the most important comrade of Jiang on his northern expedition. The game storyline thus becomes a parallel world, comparable to the revenge mission of Liu Bei against the Eastern Wu regime in 221– 222. Despite the controversy over Liu’s intentions, the so-called “revenge war” was meant to build his military achievements since he became the first emperor of the Shu Han regime, rather than to take revenge for his brother. Therefore, the game story emphasized the humanistic values of brotherhood and friendship, not only in keeping with the Confucian doctrine of benevolence and righteousness, but also to provide a twist to the original history by demonstrating that providing unconditional support to your comrades by rendering immediate and obvious political and military gains will lead to an unexpected positive result in the end. Thus, in the fantasy storyline, Zhang Ni would become instrumental in defeating Deng Ai and would pave the way for the success of Jiang Wei’s northern expedition.

Reconstruction of Historical Narrative Through Conversations Anime has frequently engaged with the material vestiges of the past through imaginary temporal scenarios in which time is not remembered in the sense that it is “recalled,” but rather that it is literally re-membered: endowed with new members, a new body (Cavallaro 2009). By clicking through the limited choice of response(s) to conversations between different characters within the RPG, the player is, more or less, both the narrator and the audience within the story-telling process in the game. In other words, the player experiences the game as a strong structured narrative (Heliö 2004). However, as argued by Cavallaro (2010), this element of RPGs challenged the conventional notion of authorship by requiring the player to actively engage with the game’s narratives with rich imaginative and strong interpretive skills. Therefore, Cavallaro noted that a RPG can be a game only when interactivity between the player and the narratives truly exists. Because the game’s narratives are based on conversations between different characters, a good game design should translate the character’s specific motivations into the player’s motivations; the player would then consider the gaming process meaningful (Lankoski and Heliö 2002). Lankoski (2004) further suggested that the game character’s goals must be clear in order for the player to immerse him/herself in the RPG and experience it through the eyes of the character. Song (2013) discussed the phenomenon of zhainan 宅男, the Chinese pronunciation of the Japanese term Otaku otoko 御宅男, in both Japan and mainland China.

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Otaku otoko are young people who are fond of Japanese Animation-Comic-Game (ACG) culture. They tend to stay at home and are fascinated by online games, animation, and comic role-playing characters. According to forum member Wu (2016), the author of JWZ can be seen as an exemplar of Otaku culture, apart from his solid academic background on history. It is necessary to make JWZ attractive to those zhainan, especially the post-1990s generation, whose interest in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is only secondary to that of Otaku culture. JWZ demonstrates two main features of Otaku culture: the use of background music from Hong Kong and Japanese ACG productions, and the development of love stories influenced by the player’s decisions. Digital media on the Internet involves a crossing of text, images, video, and sound to provide a “surrogate experience” to arouse thoughts and emotions in the audience that are not as efficiently presented by the text alone (Wang and Torrisi-Steele 2016). This observation is also applicable in the case of JWZ, which borrowed various popular Japanese anime or film songs that matched well with various storylines and war scenes in the game. RPGs commonly use popular culture in order to attract players (Heliö 2004), especially if the players are already fans of Japanese ACG and popular culture. For instance, Unicorn, the theme song of the Japanese anime Mobile Suit Gundam, is used as the theme music of Jiang Wei’s army in the game. Atsuhime 篤姫, the theme song of the Japanese TV series of the same name, also reappears as the theme music of Cao Ling 曹綾, the granddaughter of Cao Cao 曹操 (founder of the Wei regime) and the potential lover of Jiang Wei. Several tracks from Final Fantasy, one of the most popular science fiction RPG series in Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan, are used as background music for the battle scenes of JWZ: Kefka, the theme song of Kefka Palazzo, the final boss of the game Final Fantasy VI, starts with a light beat before progressing to a louder drumbeat, which makes it appropriate to accompany the rising power of Zhong Hui 鍾會, the final boss in JWZ’s fantasy storyline (Wu 2016; Hui 2015). Because many zhainan experience difficulty sustaining long-term relationships, JWZ features three main female charcters—Yang Lan 楊蘭, Zhuge Guo 諸葛果, and Cao Ling—to appeal to young male players. Yang Lan, a powerful and vivid character, was inspired by Mesuji, a character from the Japanese manga Sekirei 鶺 鴒. Her mantra, “I am forever 17,” is a reference to Japanese voice actress Kikuko Inoue 井上 喜久子, who often dresses like a student despite being much older. Zhuge Guo, the daughter of Zhuge Liang, was named after a historical figure from Chinese Daoism who became a supernatural being, but also was modeled on the character Ame Ochibana 堕花 雨 from the Japanese light novel series Denpa teki na Kanojo 電波的な彼女 (Electromagnetic Girlfriend). She shows unconditional loyalty to the game’s male lead, even to calling him “master”, and also demonstrates influence from the maid café culture that originated in Japan and has spread to Taiwan and Hong Kong. The storyline of Cao Ling, especially the treatment she endures from her natural-born father Cao Pi and her step-mother, was probably inspired by Cosette from Les Misérables: Sh¯ojo Cosette レ・ミゼラブル 少女コゼット, a Japanese anime series by Nippon Animation inspired by Victor Hugo’s novel (Feng 2015).

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Alternate histories provide the opportunity to reevaluate and reimagine the positions of minorities in historical narratives. For instance, Steven Spielberg’s 2012 historical film Lincoln overlooked the role of African Americans in the abolition of slavery, while Timur Bekmambetov’s fantasy film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, released in the same year, provided screen time to William Johnson, an actual African American servant of Lincoln who took up the sword to fight on behalf of his slave brothers (Elliott 2015). Cao Ling in JWZ can be seen in this respect as an analogue to William Johnson in Bekmambetov’s film. Women do not generally have important roles in traditional Chinese historical narratives, but the fantasy storyline of JWZ depicts Cao Ling as an important ally of Jiang Wei in his battle against the Sima clan, who launched a coup d’état against the Wei regime. The influence of Hong Kong film and comic culture can be seen in several minor characters in JWZ, reflecting the influence of Hong Kong popular culture in Taiwan since the 1990s. Liu Min 劉敏, nicknamed “tripitaka dharma master” because of his cumbersome manner of speaking, is based on the character Xuan Zang 玄奘, played by Hong Kong comedian Law Kar Ying 羅家英 in the film A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella. Another Hong Kong comedian, Stephen Chow 周星馳, also played a main character in that film and is referred to in JWZ; for example, the names of the poisons used by Zhang Ni to defeat his enemies, “The Greatest Drug in the World” (一日喪命散) and “Tong’s Killing Pill” (含笑半步顛), were all taken from Chow’s 1993 film Flirting Scholar. The last words of Guan Tong before his death in the battle of Duan Gu, “Brilliant is not beautiful, the rise and the fall are the norm” (精彩不 亮麗, 起落是無常), were quoted from Chan Mou’s 陳某 comic series The Ravages of Time, which is a fanciful retelling of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms from another point of view. The names of some of the characters’ combat moves were also taken from Hong Kong comics such as Legend of Emperors (Feng 2015; Qlz 2012). Xiaoyui (2011), a member of Shuimu Tsinghua 水木清華, an online forum for post-secondary students in mainland China that is hosted by Tsinghua University 清 華大學, compiled a lengthy post outlining how JWZ’s storyline of the later period of Shu Han is closer to the historical truth than the fictional Romance of the Three Kingdoms and JWZ’s three predecessors Sangokushi Eiketsuden 三國志英傑伝 (1995), Sangokushi Koumeiden 三國志孔明伝 (1996), and Koei’s SSD (1999). The author of JWZ drew upon actual conversations, letters, and memorials of the historical figures in the time period recorded in the Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government 資治 通鑑. Thus, the Taiwanese JWZ is a more useful text than its Japanese counterparts because it is derived more closely from its historical sources. In Koei’s SSD, apart from the military struggle and political conspiracy between the competing regimes of the time, comrades within the same regime did not experiences power struggle with each other, and always supported either the northern expedition or the unification campaign led by the main characters. However, most of the conversations in JWZ storyline focus on the power struggles between different people or factions within each regime. For instance, in the case of the Shu Han regime, except for a few loyal followers of Jiang Wei, the northern expedition was opposed by pro-Sichuanese generals and officials who criticized Jiang’s repeated military campaigns as against the wishes of Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang in reviving

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the Han dynasty, and as only to satisfy his greed for personal political and military power. In the game’s storyline, after Jiang Wei assassinated Sima Zhao 司馬昭, the real ruler of the Wei 魏 regime, at Zi Wu Gu 子午谷, the Shu Han emperor Liu Shan 劉禪 envied Jiang’s increasing fame in the northern campaigns, and tried every means to remove Jiang from the army and even wanted to kill him. This is not far removed from history, as Liu Bang 劉邦, the founder of the Western Han Dynasty, killed almost all his generals, who had contributed to the foundation of the dynasty, after the end of the unification campaign in 202 BC. Liu Shan only mimicked what his ancestor had done four centuries ago. Another example of the reworking of history in JWZ is that the game placed the Uprising of the Five Barbarians of 304–316 thirty years earlier than it happened in the actual world. When Jiang Wei had successfully conquered the Eastern Wu regime in the south, the barbarian armies enlisted by Liu Shan, who were originally meant to fight against Jiang in the south, rebelled against the fledgling Han dynasty in the north. The remaining Eastern Wu 東吳 and Wei regimes in the south and Hebei 河北, respectively, became the vassal states of the new Han dynasty. Realistically, Eastern Wu and Wei regimes should not have sent armies to help Jiang’s 5000 strong armies to rescue Liu Shan if they wanted to eliminate this strong influence over their internal self-governance from the Han central court. However, they predicted that if the barbarian armies succeeded in this rebellion, these barbarians would soon invade their territories; thus, they finally decided to send armies to support Jiang’s military move. Zhong Hui, who was behind the rebellion, used Sima Zhong 司馬 衷 as the puppet for the supposedly revived Jin dynasty that was in fact under Zhong’s control. Even the Sima clan, who had already stepped down from the political scene, sent a small number of private soldiers to help Jiang stop Zhong’s conspiracy. This historical narrative in the context of the game suggests that China can overcome the repeated cycles of the rise and fall of dynasties with sincere cooperation between various factions or interest groups in different regions of China, rather than political conspiracies and military conquests by the victorious regime.

The Relationship Between Historical Narrative and Current Political Discourse Cavallaro (2009) discussed the anime series Rose of Versailles as an example of the Japanese fascination with European lifestyles and customs from before the French Revolution. The series was an example of the process of “overt historical reinvention” of a speculative and exotic version of pre-Napoleonic Europe seen through Eastern eyes, “the Paris of our dreams.” The series, loosely based on the life and character of Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), was not a historical documentary, but a reflection of the appeal of the history, manners, and fashions of eighteenth-century France in present-day Japan; maid cafés, noted earlier in this chapter, featuring waitresses dressed as eighteenth-century French maids are another such example.

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How can we make sense of the relationship between actual history and popular fascination with a highly selective element of historical records within the practice of present popular culture? Bourdieu (1977) quoted Durkheim’s (1938) elaboration on the second nature of the sociological term Habitus, which refers to the “unconsciousness” by which people identify themselves with their current social context, to explain this linkage: in each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result. Yet we do not sense this man of the past, because he is inveterate in us; he makes up the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently we are led to take no account of him… .

In other words, people are always part of the past. In order to solve the questions of our political, social, or cultural identity, or to make sense of current political and social contexts, we should refer to actual historical records, or reinvent or reconstruct historical and political discourses, to suit our present needs. According to Rosenfeld (2002), alternate histories concern the “fundamental subjectivity” of collective historical memory that historians may dismiss as useless, but is in fact useful in illuminating the broader views of a society about its past. This section examines the revised or reconstructed historical narratives in JWZ to highlight its hidden political discourses relating to contemporary Taiwan, and the reasons behind such historical revisions. JWZ includes particularly sarcastic commentary about former Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian 陳水扁, and his family, in its reinvention of characters and conversations in the game (Hui 2015; Feng 2015). Four examples are discussed below. The first such commentary is in the form of two fictional additions to the story: Ma Bian 馬扁 (combining these two Chinese characters yields the word 騙, which literally means “deceive”), who came from Yi Zhou 夷州, the old name of Taiwan in the period of the Three Kingdoms, who represents Chen Shui-bian; and Qiu Ben 丘本 from the Romance of Three Kingdoms, who represents Qiu Yi 邱毅, legislative counselor of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) who disclosed the evidence that led to the conviction of Chen and his family for corruption. In JWZ, after the barbarian rebellion failed, Ma Bian, advisor to Sun Hao 孫皓, the last emperor of the Eastern Wu regime, joined the rebellion and was sent to Guishan 龜山 Prison, the same prison in which Chen Shui-bian is serving his sentence. The following conversation between Qiu and Ma is one of many such ironic dialogues: Qiu: I already made the investigation at Jian Ye 建業 [the capital of Eastern Wu]. Although Sun Hao has burned many government records, there is still evidence of your corruption left. Did you benefit from the National Confidential Affairs Expenditure [國務機要費]? Did you secretly receive commission fees during the Second Financial Reform [二次金改] in Eastern Wu? Besides, did you receive bribes during the reconstruction process in Guishan Prison? Ma: Damn, never hear about the Theory of Big Reservoir [大水庫理論]? Although A Bian [阿扁] has used public money, eventually the amount of official expenditure is equal to the amount of misappropriation of public money, so this is not corruption.

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Qiu: You are such a scum who makes lame arguments for your wrongdoings! After pacifying this chaotic world, you should be sentenced to prison for life until you die.

After Jiang Wei finally defeated Zhong Hui and rescued Liu Shan, the conversation between Ma and Qiu continued as follows: Ma: Ouch! A Bian is very unlucky, I have failed the rebellion and am even being sent to the very prison I built. My God, is A Bian doing something wrong? Is A Bian doing something wrong? [阿扁錯了嗎?] … Ma: Damn, please kill A Bian with one cut of the knife. Why do you dare to announce my sentence to prison for a dozen years? I will be put to death in prison indeed. Qiu: You seem to have some sort of fascination. This [punishment] is only due to your crime in the case of land purchase at Long Tan 籠談. The punishment for your crimes in the cases of the National Confidential Affairs Expenditure and the Second Financial Reform has not yet been announced.

To understand the dialogue, readers should know about the political scandals during the reign of Chen Shui-bian (2000–2008), as well as Mandarin phonics and written Chinese morphology. The corruption cases of the land purchase at Long Tan, the National Confidential Affairs Expenditure, and the Second Financial Reform happened in 2004, 2006, and 2010, respectively. The Chinese characters 籠談 share the same pronunciation as the real place 龍潭, located at Taoyuan 桃園 City, Taiwan. Similarly, when Sima Yi 司馬懿 launched his coup d’état and controlled all the armies at Luoyang 洛陽, known in the game as the Incident at Gaoping 高平 Tombs, the Wu Wei 武衛 camp, which was loyal to the founder of the Wei regime, refused to suppress the coup because they were afraid to commit the crime of “soft coup d’état” (柔性政變). This term refers to Chen Shui-bian’s accusation that Lien Chan 連戰 and Soong Chu-yu 宋楚瑜 had staged a “soft coup d’état” after their losses in the presidential election of March 20, 2004. They advocated that some of the generals who were loyal to KMT in the past take sick leave in order to avoid taking orders from Chen, who was the commander-in-chief of the Taiwanese army. Subsequently, Chen lost the lawsuit against Lien and Soong. The reference in JWZ to Chen’s manipulation of legal procedure to lay charges against his political enemies is an ironic criticism disguised in a historical narrative. Because the term coup d’état is considered politically sensitive in mainland China, a member of the forum referred to the hidden political message by using the same Mandarin characters but different tones, so that zhèng biàn 政變 became zh¯eng biàn 爭辯 (Feng 2015), which means “debatable” and suggests that the incident could be seen either as a righteous uprising or a selfish coup. In actual history, Chen Qian 陳騫, the son of Chen Jiao 陳矯, was an important official in the Wei regime. In the game, Chen Qian serves as an avatar for a commentary on Chen Chih-chung 陳致中, the son of Chen Shui-bian. Chen Qian’s speech at the beginning of the battle of Xi Ping 西平 in JWZ hints at similarities between Chen Qian and Chen Chih-chung, even though Chen Qian did not historically exhibit either corruption or lust for women:

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Chen Qian: Qian Hong 牽弘 is brave, but has no mindset of strategic planning, and is selfcentered. So, he cannot be assigned any important duties. We can defend Xi Ping without any great difficulties, but the casualties are not predictable. However, Jiang Wei is really, damn, I have uneasily made an appointment with “Ni Ke” (尼可); he is daring enough to choose this moment to attack Xi Ping. The pressure is really great…Who decides? My father is from a good family background, but he is only able to reach a high social status with the support of his wife’s family. I have never been able to compare with Chen Tai 陳泰, so I cannot become an important official. As a result, I can only pretend to be a moral gentleman and secretly get a prostitute. I am really exhausted. Oh well…Cheng Zhi Zhong [誠摯終]…

Cheng Zhi Zhong is pronounced similarly to Chen Chih-chung, while “Ni Ke” is the Chinese pronunciation of Nicole, the name of the prostitute whom Chen hired in the scandal of 2010 (Feng 2015). The Chinese characters that form the name Cheng Zhi Zhong literally mean the end of honesty, indicating that the honest image of Chen’s family was lost after their many scandals. The passage quoted above demonstrates another similarity between Chen Qian and Chen Chi-chung. The original surname of Chen Qian’s father was Liu, but he was adopted by his mother’s family and used his mother’s surname, Chen; Chen Shui-bian was from a poor Minnam 閩南 family background and his wife Wu Shu-chen was from a wealthy family. After their marriage, his father-in-law financially supported Chen in the establishment of his own law firm, the starting point for his successful legal career that included his defense of the legal and democratic rights of the victims of the Meilidao 美麗島 Incident in 1979. Chen’s success as a lawyer led him to join the Tangwai 黨外 Movement that opposed the autocratic rule of the KMT in Taiwan. Ma Bian’s dialogue in JWZ also includes many references to Taiwanese selfdetermination. A Bian is the nickname Chen Shui-bian used for himself, especially when establishing friendly relationships with local Taiwanese who speak the Minnam dialect and who are mostly located in the southern part of Taiwan. “Is A Bian doing something wrong?” was the slogan of Chen Shui-bian when he spoke at the memorial ceremony for the February 28 Incident in 2006. The February 28 Incident happened in 1947, when the KMT government of Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 tightened political and social control over local Taiwanese. This eventually led to an anti-government uprising that was suppressed by the KMT army from mainland China, resulting in the massacre of thousands of citizens. This marked the beginning of several decades of a resistance movement fighting for democracy and self-determination of local Taiwanese. In this historical context, Chen’s aforementioned speech was an argument that his decision to end the Guidelines for National Unification and the function of the National Unification Council, part of the KMT’s political agenda since the 1990s, was not wrong, but only reflected his respect for the principle of self-determination for 23 million Taiwanese. However, this does not suggest that JWZ supports the independence of Taiwan. According to a mainland forum member, ratchet, the author of JWZ, is a “pro-blue” or KMT supporter, with the color blue representing the KMT party in Taiwan (Wu 2016). Therefore, in Ma Bian’s dialogue, the question “Is A Bian doing something wrong?” does not refer to Ma’s support of Sun Hao in his fight for the independence of the Eastern Wu regime from the newly-formed Han dynasty in the north, but emphasizes Ma’s wrongdoings in fighting against Yi Zhou’s 夷州 right

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to independence, involving the massacre of Han Chinese people in the north during the barbarians’ rebellion. In other words, the independence of Yi Zhou or Taiwan does not support the harmony of different ethnic groups within China. However, the author of JWZ also does not support unification as a satisfactory political solution for China. In the game, after Jiang Wei’s defeat of Sima Zhao at Zi Wu Gu, the two leaders discuss the limitations of the grand unification 大一統: Sima: Jiang Wei, do you think all-under-the-heaven will be pacified after you kill me? … what all-under-the-heaven needs is a person like me, who is capable of solving all our problems and leading the people forward. A capable leader, a strong central government, and a unified all-under-the-heaven, are the only ways to end this chaos for almost a hundred years. Jiang: I am not great, the emperor is not great, the officials in the central court are also not great, but I believe the wisdom of all the people can solve these problems. Sima: Hahaha, so you can show me right now how you can grant these stupid civilians wisdom! Jiang: Sima Zhao! Is this really your belief? Sima: Indeed! When the Han emperor was powerless, he was replaced by Cao Pi 曹丕; when the Wei emperor was powerless, we of the Sima clan replaced him; this fulfilled the demands of the civilians of all-under-the-heaven. This is the trend of the current time. If you kill me now, all-under-the-heaven will continuously be divided, and we will no longer have anyone with the capacity to rule over all-under-the-heaven. Wars and chaos will never end. Is this what you want? Jiang: You rather overestimate yourself. Were the abilities of the Qin Emperor inferior to yours? How long did his empire last? A unified empire creates idleness; a harmonious environment overshadows different voices. Is this the world we really want? A grand unification and absolute monarchical power can make a good emperor, but the possibility of the appearance of a tyrant is also very great. Do you want the common people to put their hope on such an uncertain factor? Facing an absolute monarch without any checks and balances, the common people can only pray to heaven while the officials can only admonish the emperor at the risk of losing their lives. Is this the all-under-the-heaven you really want?

At the end of the game, Jiang Wei successfully rescued Liu Shan from the barbarian rebels, but he decided to end the “uncertain factor” in the chaotic cycle of China’s dynasties: when an incapable emperor comes to power, the empire falls. He forced Liu to abdicate his throne, even making Liu promise to name him as the lord, second only to the emperor. Jiang made Liu’s son Liu Chen 劉諶 the new Han emperor and Zhuge Zhan, a less capable military official than Jiang, the head of the new central government. Furthermore, Jiang faked his death, making others believe he was killed by the rebels, and fully retired from the army and the government. In this sense, the decentralized and less authoritarian Han central government would have shown more respect toward the semi-independence of both the Wei and Eastern Wu vassal states and granted full self-governing rights to the local Sichuanese. In actual history, Liu and Zhuge were killed in the southern expedition by Deng Ai in 263 in actual history; in the game, they say of Jiang Wei’s real intentions:

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Liu: The all-under-the-heaven he [Jiang Wei] wanted should be how it looks today. An allunder-the-heaven that can continue to move forward with the support of common people for each other. Zhuge: Yup, in other words, in the past we always wanted to rely on heroes. As a result, everyone is lazy about thinking, so they give all the power and responsibility to such a hero. After enjoying the benefits of power, the hero will be afraid to lose what he has already possessed, and will then start to oppress the common people. Then they will feel angry and attack the hero. Therefore, if the hero is victorious, he will continue the oppression, while if the people are victorious, they will kill the hero, and become idle again and wait for a new hero. This cycle will never end, and both sides will continue to suffer.

Conclusion White (1973) noted that the difference between history and fiction is that the historian “finds” the stories buried in chronicles while the writer of fiction “invents” the stories. He also emphasized the role of “invention”, that is, of choosing the best elements for the story, in historians’ work. Hellekson (2001) further elaborated on White’s theory by pointing out that alternate histories are combinations of history and fiction that derive their historical basis from primary sources while also adding fictional characters and events in order to rewrite the history. Therefore, alternate history is different from historical fiction, which still upholds the “true” version of history despite its occasional invention of unimportant characters, while alternate history simply deconstructs the “accepted” history so that the path of historical development must be changed. JWZ further enhanced the storytelling element of SSD so that players may take over an hour to get through all the characters’ dialogue boxes in order to reach the next round of the game. This plays on the interest of many Chinese Otaku otoko in history. Based on White’s and Hellekson’s theories, this chapter argues that JWZ is a type of alternate history that reflects on current politics for a web-aware public. Some of the comments on the game have expressed agreement with the idea expressed in JWZ that co-governance by the two different governments of China is better than unification via military conquest, or that the D¯ojin game successfully promotes the ideal of democracy to mainland Chinese users (Wu 2016; Hu 2016). Brinkerhoff’s (2009) study of “Digital Diasporas” has argued that the Internet helped to provide a sense of understanding among diasporic populations that had not previously been possible. The interactive elements of the Internet, such as online forums, are effective tools for diaspora storytelling and sharing, which can also facilitate and enhance discussion and mobilization about local issues (Hampton and Wellman 2003). As Vertovec (1997) argued, diasporas imagine themselves as a group by identifying with a particular history and cultural tradition; therefore, online forum members of PPT and Shuimu Tsinghua are necessarily local people in Taiwan and mainland China, respectively, rather than ethnic-minority group in the host country as in the case of what Brinkerhoff has called “Digital Diasporas.” This chapter demonstrates that both the alternate historical narratives of JWZ and the discussions on various online

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forums both allow the “Digital Diasporas” of Chinese web-generation to tell stories and share cultural identity in ways that are not possible for them in the physical world. The “virtual communities” supported by the Internet are more heterogeneous in terms of members’ races, genders, and ages, but are more homogeneous in terms of their interests and values (Putnam 2000). Schneider-Mayerson (2009) argued that the alternate history genre is not a “marginal subculture” but a reflection of the anti-libertarian unconscious in mid1990s America. Similarly, the story-telling of JWZ should not be viewed as a marginal subculture of Chinese Otaku otoko, but a partial reflection of the undercurrent political beliefs of Taiwanese in the 2010s. The central theme of JWZ is neither unification of the different regimes of China nor independence of a particular regional regime. Rather, it endorses respect towards different systems and interests of different regions and ethnic groups. In order to strike a balance between these differences, a strong central government or a very capable hero is always the worst solution, as both the actual history and the game story both suggest. Humble, open-minded, and unselfish representatives from different interest groups, who can cooperate, communicate, and work with others in settling disputes, will be the best solution to the problems of unification. In terms of the cross-strait relationship between mainland China and Taiwan, we can say that ratchet, the author of JWZ, does not appear to support either unification with mainland China or independence for Taiwan.

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Index

A Ackerman, E., 171 Adriaens, F., 96 Agency, and positive visibility through selfies, 87–88 Age-related development, 13 Aggression, and video games, 160–62, 169 Aitken, Ian, 31, 51 Algorithmic media, 136, 137 Alternate/alternative history, 175–76, 180, 182, 186, 187. See also San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan (JWZ) American pop female performances, manipulation of East Asian women in, 115, 122–23 East Asian female stereotypes, 116–22 YouTube’s global reach and revival of music video, 116 Anderson, C. A., 162 Anderson, Kristi, 110 Ang, R., 162 Angry Birds, 167–69 Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (Dalí), 55 Appeal, 156, 160, 164–167, 169–172 Apple Pay, 132 Arago, François, 130 Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus (Dalí), 69 Architectural narratives of museums, 5 Arnheim, Rudolf, 56 Asian representation, 123 Assmann, Aleida, 4 Audio tours, evolution of museum, 9–10 Augmented Reality (AR), 66 and phygital aided museum narration, 7

differences between virtual reality and, 66–67 to virtual reality in Surrealism in 4D, 66–68 Aura, loss of, 130, 131

B Bachofen, Jakob Johann, 5 Barber, J., 143 Barratt-Pugh, C., 142 Barrett, H., 143 Barthes, Roland, 115 Bartle, Richard, 161 Battershill, C., 149–50 Baxandall, Michael, 137 Bazin, André, 31 Becoming, Lebenswelt as, inStudy Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers, 38–40 Bedford, Leslie, 5 Behm-Morawitz, E., 82 Benjamin, Walter, 129–31 Berger, John, 137 Bethke, E., 157–58 Bhattacharya, K., 144 Black Box, 132–33 Blank, P., 89 Blogging in China, 98 Blogs. See also Hong Ying, blog of as platform for author/reader correspondence, 107–9 as promotional tool, 101–2 in China, 97–98 limitations of Chinese, 109–10 publicity through, 98 written by women, 99

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190 Blossfeldt, Karl, 129–30 Bodger, L., 104 Body, 17–28 Body-as-spectacle hypothesis, 18 Bourdieu, Pierre, 182 Bo Xilai, 109–10 Branding, and behavioral influence of video games on emotions, 160 Bruner, Jerome, 5 Buñuel, Luis, 61 Burdick, A., 149 Burns, A., 79, 80, 84 Butler, Judith, 96

C Cambridge Analytica, 134 Cameron, David, 81 Campbell, R., 110 Cao Ling, 179, 180 Castells, Manuel, 101 Cavallaro, D., 178, 181 Certeau, Michel de, 86 CGI. See also digital visual technology, 17– 18, 20, 24, 28 Chang Cheh, 24 Chan, Kwok-bun, 103 Channeling, 6 Chan, Peter, 27, 28. See also Wu Xia Character design. See video games, character design and appeal of “Check It Out” (Minaj), 121 Chen Chih-chung, 183–84 Chen Qian, 183–84 Chen Shui-bian, 182–84 Cheval, Ferdinand, 63 Chien Andalou, Un, 61, 62 China. See also American pop female performances, manipulation of East Asian women in; Hong Ying, blog of; San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan (JWZ) Cho, Margaret, 120–21 internet usage in, 95 limitations of blogosphere in, 109–10 views on divorce in, 100 women Internet users in, 97–98, 99 Choi, G., 82 Chow, Stephen, 180 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 4 Ciechalski, S., 79 Cinematic surrealism, 54, 62, 63, 65 Cognitive flexibility, 162–63 Coldplay, 119

Index Collective memory, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 14 and memory institution, 11 museum as institute of, 4 Command & Conquer: Red Alert, 175–76 Computer-mediated communications, 155, 169 Connectivity, through blogging, 101 Consalvo, M., 161 Consent, selfies and, 79 Constructionism, 144 Constructivism, 157 Content realism, in video games, 160–64 Copyright law, selfies and, 79 Critical thinking, and digital storytelling, 147 Cyberfeminism, 96–97, 102–3, 105–7

D 4D, 54, 55, 62, 64, 69, 70 Dai Jinhua, 103 Dalí, Salvador and creative development and production of Surrealism in 4D, 62–63 and Gestalt theories of visual perception, 56–60 and surrealism in film, 61–62 and virtual reality in Surrealism in 4D, 67 as pioneer of surrealism, 54 concept of time and memory, 60–61 double imagery and optical illusion in works of, 55–56 dream-like images in works of, 63–64 Dreams of Dalí spectacle, 69 Danger, caused by selfies, 77–78 3D Animation, 65, 66, 68 Dann, S., 86 2D character design, 156, 165, 167, 171 Deaths, caused by selfies, 77–78, 81–82 Design choices, and patterns in museum visitor behavior, 13 Design Life—Art Retrospective of Lei Kueiyuan, Founder of Modern Design Education in China, 8 Destino, 62 Deuze, M., 89 Dewey, C., 77 “Dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci,” The 4th Art & Science International Exhibition, 7–8 Digital, 17–20, 22–24, 26–29 Digital art, 54, 70

Index Digital culture, 89 Digital diasporas, 186 Digital humanities, 142, 149–52. See also digital storytelling Digital literacy, 141–143, 145, 146, 148–152 Digital literacy learning, 141–42, 152. See also digital storytelling affordances of digital storytelling for development of, 145–47 and language curricula, 147–49 digital humanities as context for, 149–52 Digital storytelling, 142–152 affordances of, for development of digital literacy, 145–47 and digital humanities and digital literacy learning, 149–52 definitions of, 143–45 Digital technology in surrealism, 54, 70 Digital visual technology, 17–18, 28. See also Augmented Reality (AR); selfies; video games, character design and appeal of; virtual reality (VR) and body-as-spectacle hypothesis, 18 and cinematic expansion of surrealism, 54 and medical gaze, 19–20 and regulation of wuxia body in Wu Xia, 23–25 in Wu Xia, 18–19 Dillon, R., 162 Disabled heroes, 24–25 Discipline, 24 Discourses, analysis of, 76 Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, The (Dalí), 61 Divorce, 100 D¯ojin games, 176, 186. See also San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan (JWZ) Door, symbolism of, 64 Double imagery in Dalí works, 55–56 in surrealism, 62–63 in surrealism in 4D, 68 Douglas, K., 82 Dragon lady, 116 Dream-content, 53–54, 61, 62–63 Dreams of Dalí , 69

E Eagar, T., 86 East Asian women. See also American pop female performances, manipulation

191 of East Asian women in; Hong Ying, blog of as regulated and segregated others, 120– 22 lack of, in American pop music, 123 stereotypes concerning, 116–22 Eco, U., 136 Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S., 163 Electromagnetic unconscious, 132–38 Embodied interaction, 157 Emotions, theories of video games’ influence on, 157–60 Empowerment, through selfies, 75–76, 78– 79, 84–86 Endless Enigma, The (Dalí), 55–56, 57f , 67 Eng, K. K., 98 Essences,Lebenswelt as relating to, in Study Eight: Intercity, 43–45 Excess, 20, 23–25, 27, 28 Exhibition narratives of museums, 5–6 Eyeballs cutting of, 61, 62 symbolism of, 63, 68

F Facebook, 131, 134 Facebook, and electromagnetic unconscious, 134 February 28 Incident, 184 Feminism, 96–97, 102–3, 105–7 Ferguson, Christopher J., 163 Filmmaking. See Life-World Series; martial arts cinema Flow of life, in Life-World Series, 43–46 Fortuity, in Life-World Series, 37–40 Foucault, Michel, 19–20, 21–22, 23, 24, 76, 80, 84–85 Freud, Sigmund, 53–54, 55, 61, 62, 129 From Monet to Soulages: Paths of Modern Western Painting (1800–1980), 8 Furong Jiejie, 98

G Gajendar, U., 135 Gajjala, R., 97 Game environments, as evocative spaces, 158–59. See also video games, character design and appeal of Games, 155–167, 169–172 Gardner, Howard, 156

192 Gender. See also American pop female performances, manipulation of East Asian women in and mother/daughter relationships, 104– 5 and political socialization, 110 and post-feminism, 105–7 Genz, S., 105 Gestalt theories of visual perception, 56–60 Giroux, H. A., 87 Glass, B. D., 162–63 Goldberg, G., 82 Gómez-Cruz, E., 76 Good Children of Flowers (Hong Ying), 108–9 Goodwin, A., 122 Governmentality, 85 Graphical narratives, 7 Greenidge, W., 147 Grizzly Man, 40 Gunthert, A., 81

H Habitus, 182 Hall, Kira, 97 Hall, Stuart, 115, 120 Hamilton, J. G., 156–57 Hampton, C., 85 Han, S., 144 Harajuku Girls, 120–21 Hayles, N. Katherine, 133, 134 Hellekson, K., 186 “Hello Kitty” (Lavigne), 122 Heroic body. See wuxia body Herold, C., 161–62 Herzog, Werner, 40 Hitchcock, Alfred, 61–62 Hjelm, S., 132 Hoelzl, Ingrid, 133 Home, in Life-World Series, 48–50 Hong Kong Octopus card, 132, 133 Hong Kong, protests in, 132–133, 135. See also Life-World Series Hong Kong: Study One, 33–35 Hong Ying, 96, 97, 99–111 Hong Ying, blog of, 95–96 and emergence of post-feminism and cyberfeminism, 96–97 as platform for author/reader correspondence, 107–9 as promotional tool, 101–2 content of, 99–101

Index feminist ideologies of, 102–3 genesis of, 99 motherhood in, 104–5 post-feminist approach to, 105–7 Hooks, bell, 122 Horse Saddled with Time (Dalí), 68 Humanities learning, and digital storytelling, 143 Hunt, Leon, 21, 23, 26 Husserl, Edmund, 32, 32

I Identity, and Internet use, 95–96 Igarashi, T., 163 Ijsselsteijn, W., 160 Immersion, in video games, 160–64 Indeterminate, in Life-World Series, 40–43 Instagram, 81, 83, 89, 90 Intelligences, multiple, 156 Interactivity, 54, 55, 69 Internet, 3, 6, 11, 75, 81, 86, 88, 95–99, 101, 108, 109, 111, 116, 135, 141, 144, 146, 151, 176, 177, 179, 186, 187. See also Hong Ying, blog of and digital literacy learning, 141 and digital storytelling, 144 and materiality of memory, 11 identity on, 95–96 usage in China, 95 women users in China, 97–98, 99 Invisible Afghan with the Apparition (Dalí), 55, 58

J Jacobsen, Stine, 24 Jewitt, C., 142 Jiang Wei, 177–78, 180–81, 185–86 Johansson, Scarlet, 177 Jonassen, D. H., 147

K Kaye, Barbara, 108 Keren, Michael, 101–2 Knight, Dana, 27 Knowledge attainment of, 5 produced through discourse, 76 Kracauerian Cinematic Realism (KCR), 32, 35n2, 51 Kracauer, Siegfried

Index and Lebenswelt as subject matter ofLifeWorld Series, 31–32 and quotidian in Hong Kong: Study One, 34–35 on film and home, 50 on films covering vast expanses of physical reality, 49 on film shots as ignition sparks, 42 on inscrutability of cinematic image, 43 on material situations and psychophysical correspondence in cinematic film, 43 on qualitative transformation through film medium, 46 on spiritual life, 47, 50 on street, 37–38 on surface phenomena, 36 Krahé, B., 161, 169 Kress, G., 142 K: The Art of Love (Hong Ying), 102–3, 107 Kuni, V., 96–97 L Lane, J., 141 Language curricula, and digital literacy learning, 147–49 Lankoski, P., 178 Lash, S., 135 Latour, Bruno, 132–33 Lavigne, Avril, 122 Law of similarity, 58 Lebenswelt as becoming in Study Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers, 38–40 as central to Husserlian phenomenology and Kracauerian cinematic realism, 32 as cyclical inStudy Five: Rain, 45–46 as expansive in Hong Kong: Study One, 33–35 as flowing in Study Seven: The Street, 37–38 as meaning-laden in Study Six: Return Home, 48–50 as multi-layered in Study Nine: Yard Life, 35–37 as relating to essences in Study Eight: Intercity, 43–45 as resonantly intersubjective inStudy Three: Floating Notes, 40–42 as subject matter ofLife-World Series, 31–32, 50–51 as thing of beauty in Study Ten: Under the Bridge, 42–43

193 as transcendent inStudy Four: Resilient Textures, 46–47 “thick” and “thin” concepts of, 32, 35 Lee, Bruce, 26 Lee, V., 18 Lei Kueiyuan, 7–8 Lekach, S., 79 Leonardo Da Vinci, 7–8 Lien Chan, 183 Life flow of, in Life-World Series, 43–46 spiritual, in Life-World Series, 46–50 Life-World Series Lebenswelt as becoming in Study Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers, 38–40 Lebenswelt as cyclical inStudy Five: Rain, 45–46 Lebenswelt as expansive inHong Kong: Study One, 33–35 Lebenswelt as flowing in Study Seven: The Street, 37–38 Lebenswelt as meaning-laden inStudy Six: Return Home, 48–50 Lebenswelt as multi-layered in Study Nine: Yard Life, 35–37 Lebenswelt as relating to essences in Study Eight: Intercity, 43–45 Lebenswelt as resonantly intersubjective in Study Three: Floating Notes, 40–42 Lebenswelt as subject matter of, 31–32, 50–51 Lebenswelt as thing of beauty in Study Ten: Under the Bridge, 42–43 Lebenswelt as transcendent in Study Four: Resilient Textures, 46–47 Liu Bei, 178, 180–81 Liu Min, 180 Liu Shan, 181, 185–86 Longo, G. O., 137 Lotus blossom, 116 “Lotus blossom” stereotype, 118 Lucas, S., 87–88 M Ma Bian, 182–83, 184–85 Machine-to-machine seeing, 137–38 Madama Butterfly (Puccini), 117 Maddox, J., 77, 81 Madonna, 118, 122 Magic, cause and effect in technology and, 136–37 Magritte, René, dream-like images in works of, 63–66

194 Mamidipudi, A., 97 Marie, Rémi, 133 Martey, R. M., 161 Martial arts cinema. See also Wu Xia and body-as-spectacle hypothesis, 18 as body genre, 23 digital visual technology in, 17–18, 28 and digital visual technology inWu Xia, 18–19 and medical gaze, 19–20 sub-genres of, 17n1 Martinec, R., 142 “Massive Attack” (Minaj), 121 Mayne, Judith, 27 Media literacy, selfies and, 88–90 Medical gaze, 19–22, 28 Meier, Sid, 159 Memory creation of, in museums, 12 Dalí’s concept of, 60–61 materiality of, 10–11 Memory institution, 4, 10–11 Microblogging, 109–10 Minaj, Nicki, 119, 121 Mixed Reality (MR), 70 Mobile technology and digital literacy learning, 141 and surveillance, 132–33, 135 Möller, I., 161, 169 Moraine, S., 83 Moral panic selfies and, 83 and violence in video games, 163 Motherhood, 104, 111 Motherhood, in Hong Ying’s blog, 104–5 MTV, 116 Multimodal texts, 141–42, 147–48 Multiple intelligences, 156 Mulvey, Laura, 27 Museum narration co-creation of, 8–10 phygital aided, 6–8, 12–13 Museum(s) co-creation of narration, 8–10 as institute of collective memory, 4 memory-driven storyscapes in, 5–6 phygital aided narration, 6–8 Music video, 115, 116, 118–120, 122, 123 Music video, revival of, 116. See also American pop female performances, manipulation of East Asian women in Muzimei, 98

Index N Narcissism, selfies and, 82 Narrative agency, and positive visibility through selfies, 87–88 Nature, andLebenswelt, 32 Nayar, P. K., 87 Ndalianis, A., 18 Netnography, 84 New Woman movement, 117 Ngan, Lucille Lok-Suk, 103 Nguyen, A. T., 145 Nida (typhoon), 46 “Night Is Still Young, The” (Minaj), 121 Noppari, E., 86 Nostalgia, as socio-emotional aspect of gaming, 159–60 Nouraie-Simone, F., 95 O Occidentalism, 103 Octopus card, 132, 133 Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages) (Dalí), 57f , 60 One-Armed Swordsman, The, 24 Operant conditions, 160 Optical illusion in Dalí works, 55–60 in digitally reconstructing surreal dream world, 62–63 in Magritte works, 64 inSurrealism in 4D, 68 Optical unconscious, 129–31, 132, 135 Orientalism, 103, 117, 118, 120, 121 Otaku culture, 179 Otaku otoko, 178, 186, 187 Others, East Asian women as segregated, 120–22 Outrenoir (Beyond Black) (Soulages), 8–9 P Paglen, T., 137, 138 Perry, Katy, 118–19 Persistence of Memory, The (Dalí), 60 Personal empowerment, through selfies, 75– 76, 78–79, 84–86 Personal Values (Magritte), 64 Phenomenology, 31–33, 51 Photography, and optical unconscious, 129– 31 Phygital, 3–4, 6, 8, 14 and co-creation of museum narration, 8–10

Index and materiality of memory, 10–11 and memory-driven storyscapes in museums, 5–6 and museum as institute of collective memory, 4 phygital aided museum narration, 6–8, 12–13 Poletti, A., 82 Political socialization, 110 Popular culture, and Role-Playing Games (RPGs), 179, 180 Popular music, 116 Positive visibility, through selfies, 86–88 Post-feminism, 96–97, 102–3, 105–7 Post-structuralist feminist ideologies, 97 Power versus empowerment, 86 Foucault on self and, 84–85 Power relations, 75, 84, 85, 88, 90 Pras, Bernard, 59f , 63 “Princess of China” (Coldplay and Rihanna), 119 Problem solving, and digital storytelling, 147 Project-Based Learning (PBL), 171 Q Qiu Yi, 182–83 Quotidian, inLife-World Series, 33–37 R Racial masquerade, 116, 117–19 Racist cosmetology, 118 Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), 132, 133 Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies, 132–33 “Rain” (Madonna), 118 Ratto, Matt, 131, 132 Rayns, Tony, 26 Realism, 31, 32, 51, 156–158, 160–162, 164, 167, 169, 170 Realism, as video game design challenge, 161 Realist film theory, 31–32 Reiche, C., 96–97 Representing, and traditional literacy, 148 Research skills, and digital storytelling, 146 Respect, and transdisciplinary approach to humanities project, 151–52 Rettberg, J. W., 82–83, 97 Ridder, S., 90

195 Rihanna, 119 Role-Playing Games (RPGs), 175, 177. See also San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan (JWZ) and alternate history, 175–76 appeal of, 175 criticism of, 177 and interest in and relearning of history, 177–78 reconstruction of historical narrative through conversations in, 178–81 relationship between historical narrative and current political discourse in, 181– 86 Romance of Three Kingdoms, the, 182 Rosenbaum, J., 116 Rosenfeld, G., 182 Rose of Versailles, 181 Ross, S., 149–50 Rower, C. J., 97

S Said, Edward, 103, 120 Salway, A., 142 Sangokushi Sousouden (SSD), 176 San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan (JWZ), 176, 186–87 and interest in and relearning of history, 177–78 reconstruction of historical narrative through conversations in, 178–81 relationship between historical narrative and current political discourse in, 181– 86 Scharrer, Erica, 161 Schehr, R. C., 27 Schneider-Mayerson, M., 187 See/seeing, 137–38 Segregated visibility, of East Asian women, 120–22 Selfies, 75–76, 90–91 critiques of media discourses on, 80–84 and cultural filters regarding photographs, 82–83 empowerment through, 75–76, 78–79, 84–86 media discussions on, 76–77 media discussions on regulation of, 79– 81 and media literacy, 88–90 negative media discussions on, 77–78 positive media discussions on, 78–79

196 positive visibility through, 86–88 uses of, 83–84 Self, technologies of the, 84–85 Semiotics, 159 Semiotics, and behavioral influence of video games on emotions, 159 Sense/sensing, 137–38 Seppanen, J., 86 Siegfried Kracauer, 31, 32 Shipley, J. W., 90 Sima Yi, 183 Sima Zhao, 185 Sima Zhong, 181 similarity, law of, 58 Simmons, R., 78–79 Simpson, Peter, 110 Sims, The, 157–58 Sina.com, 98–99, 101, 102. See also Hong Ying, blog of Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (Dalí), 58 Social co-creation, 8–10 Social-cognitive learning theories, and violence in video games, 160–61 Social media, 75, 81–83, 86, 88–91. See also Facebook, and electromagnetic unconscious; Instagram; selfies;WeChat; Weibo and co-creation of museum narration, 8–9 and digital storytelling, 144 and electromagnetic unconscious, 134 and graphical narratives, 7 Social media site, 3, 7–9 Socio-emotional, 155, 156, 159, 167 Sohu.com, 98 Sommeil, Le (Dalí), 66f , 68 Song, G., 178 Son of Man, The (Magritte), 65 Soong Chu-yu, 183 Soulages, Pierre,Outrenoir (Beyond Black), 8–9 Spatial intelligence, 156–57 Spectatorship, 26–28, 131 Speers, L., 89 Spellbound, 61–62 Spider of the Evening (Dalí), 60 Spiritual life, inLife-World Series, 46–50 Star-text, 122 Stefani, Gwen, 120–21 Storyboarding, in digital storytelling, 146 Street, Kracauer on, 37–38 Student voice, 152

Index Study Two: Young Filipino-Hongkongers, 38–40 Study Three: Floating Notes, 40–42 Study Four: Resilient Textures, 46–47 Study Five: Rain, 45–46 Study Six: Return Home, 48–50 Study Seven: The Street, 37–38 Study Eight: Intercity, 43–45 Study Nine: Yard Life, 35–37 Study Ten: Under the Bridge, 42–43 Subconscious mind. See also unconscious conscious behavior and, 69 dream-like images as symbols of, 63–66 surrealism and, 53–54 Sucksdorff, Arne, 42 Supermoon, 50 Surrealism, 53–56, 60–65, 67–70 and creative development and production ofSurrealism in 4D, 62–63 and Dalí’s concept of time and memory, 60–61 digital technology and cinematic expansion of, 54 and dream-like images in works of Dalí and Magritte, 63–66 history and overview of, 53–54 influence on film, 61–62 Surrealism in 4D, 54–55 Augmented Reality and virtual reality in, 66–68 creative development and production of, 62–63 and Dalí’s concept of time and memory, 60–61 and double imagery and optical illusion in Dalí works, 55–56 and dream-like images in works of Dalí and Magritte, 63–66 and Gestalt theories of visual perception, 56–60 interactivity in, 69 optical illusion in, 68 Surveillance, technology and, 132–33, 135 Sylvester, R., 147

T Taiwan, 176, 179, 180, 182–187 Tangible Interaction, 7 Target-audience-oriented storytelling, 12 Tasker, Yvonne, 26 Technological awareness, and electromagnetic unconscious, 132–34

Index Technologies of the self, 84–85 Techno-Orientalism, 121 Teleportation, 64 Tell, William, 151–52 Temple Run, 167–69 Teo, Stephen, 24 Text-image relationship, 142 Thornam, H., 76 Tifentale, A., 82, 83 3D video game character design, 158, 159– 60, 161, 166–71, 172 Tiidenberg, K., 83, 84, 89 Time, Dalí’s concept of, 60–61 Tourism, and selfies, 79 Transcendence, ofLebenswelt inLife-World Series, 46–47 Transdisciplinary approach, 151 Trivundža, I. T., 79, 82 Tsinghua University Art Museum (TAM), 4, 7–10 2D video game character design, 156, 159– 60, 165, 166–71, 172 Typhoon Nida, 46

U “Unconditionally” (Perry), 118–19 Unconscious. See also subconscious mind electromagnetic, 132–38 optical, 129–31 Undrum, L. V. M., 89 Uprising of the Five Barbarians (304–316), 181 User interface, 161, 172 User Interface (UI), as video game design challenge, 161

V Vainikka, E., 86 Vergeront, Jeanne, 12 Vertovec, S., 186 Veum, A., 89 Video game advocacy, 163–64 Video games, character design and appeal of, 155–56. See also San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan (JWZ) conclusions and recommendations concerning, 170–72 findings and discussion on, 166–70 and immersion theory and content realism, 160–64, 169 and marketing and franchising, 159–60

197 research design and methodology, 165– 66 scholarship on, 156–57 and theories of behavioral influence of video games on emotions, 157–60 Video game environments, as evocative spaces, 158–59 Violence, and video games, 160–62, 169 Virtual Orchestra, 162 Virtual Reality (VR), 55, 64–67, 70 commercial use of, 70 differences between Augmented Reality and, 66–67 differences between cinema and, 65–66 and interactivity inSurrealism in 4D, 69 and phygital aided museum narration, 7 Visibility, 18, 20, 26–28 Visibility, through selfies, 86–88 Visitor behavior, patterns in museum, 13 Visual intelligence, 156–57

W Wang, Jimmy, 26 Wang Lijun Incident, 109–10 Warfield, K., 84, 89 Web 2.0, 142, 144 Weblog, 97 WeChat, 8, 9, 131, 132 Weibo, 99, 109–10 White, H., 186 Whitehead, A. N., 47n6 Wilding, Faith, 97 Williams, Linda, 23 Williams, R., 135 Williams, Tony, 26 Winters, K., 110 Wong, E. F., 118 Wong, G., 162 Wright, L., 171 Wu Shu-chen, 184 Wu, W. I., 144–45 Wu Xia, 18–28 casting and spectatorship of, 26–28 digital effects and regulation ofwuxia body in, 23–25 and digital visual technology in martial arts cinema, 28 and medical gaze, 19–20 observing gaze in, 20–23 success and ground-breaking features of, 18–19 Wuxia body

198 and body-as-spectacle hypothesis, 18 and casting and spectatorship ofWu Xia, 26–28 digital effects and regulation of, inWu Xia, 23–25 and digital visual technology in martial arts cinema, 17–18, 28 and digital visual technology inWu Xia, 18–19 and medical gaze, 19–20 and observing gaze inWu Xia, 20–23 X Xia, 22, 26 Xiaoyui, 180 Y Yang Lan, 179

Index Yang, Y. C., 144–45 Yellowface, 117 Yellowface, in American pop female performances, 117–19 Yen, Donnie, 25–27 Yoshihara, M., 117 “Your Love” (Minaj), 119 YouTube, 115, 116, 123 YouTube, global reach of, 116 Yu, H., 109

Z Zhainan, 179 Zhang Ni, 177–78 Zheng Li, 176 Zhong Hui, 181 Zhuge Guo, 179 Zhuge Zhan, 185–86