Book by Yuji Sone
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2017.
Book Chapters by Yuji Sone
Studies on the Social Construction of Identity and Authenticity, 2020
This chapter considers the authenticity of non-human identity. It discusses the identity of the h... more This chapter considers the authenticity of non-human identity. It discusses the identity of the humanoid robot in the Japanese context, providing a culturally situated perspective on the social construction of identities and authenticity. The figure of the humanoid robot in Japan is an ambiguous avatar of cultural meaning, but in a rather different way that the ‘artificial’ human figuring in Western narratives is. I argue that the humanoid is not an inauthentic, i.e., false, human at all, but constitutes a separate ontological category. It is an entity recognised as having its own identity specifically based in artificiality. I indicate how the notions of kawaii (cute) and kyara (a powerful symbol) help define humanoids this way. This chapter will examine how this Japanese cultural perspective locates the identity of the humanoid robot outside the duality of humans-versus-robots that typifies the Western context.
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, 2019
This essay discusses Clarke and Dawe, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe’s satirical mock interview vigne... more This essay discusses Clarke and Dawe, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe’s satirical mock interview vignettes that appeared on Australian television for nearly thirty years, until Clarke’s death in April 2017. Applying a performance studies analysis to Clarke and Dawe for the first time, I enable examination of the hidden political aspects of this work, revealing it as creating a uniquely trans-temporal aesthetic, thus complicating the usual discussion of their work as simply political satire on Australian television. While Clarke and Dawe is performed on screen, I suggest that the entirety of their work, as recorded in books, DVDs, and the web archive, presents with a kind of performative force that can only be called political. I highlight how a new, composite performative body emerges from the ever-the-same stories of crooked political doings, Clarke and Dawe’s ever-the-same performance characters, and the persistent presence of their ageing bodies over time. I argue that it is the passage of time, evident through the video recordings of their performances, seen as a whole, that evokes a new, political dimension.
In Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen (eds.), Performance and Temporalisation: time happens, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, (2015).
Book chapter in Malcolm Angelucci and Chris Caines (eds.), Voice/Presence/Absence, Sydney: UTS eP... more Book chapter in Malcolm Angelucci and Chris Caines (eds.), Voice/Presence/Absence, Sydney: UTS ePRESS, (2014).
Book chapter in in Rocci Luppicini (ed), The Handbook of Research on Technoself: Identity in a T... more Book chapter in in Rocci Luppicini (ed), The Handbook of Research on Technoself: Identity in a Technological Society, Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2012.
Book chapter in Victor Emeljanow and Gillian Arrighi (eds.), A World of Popular Entertainments, a... more Book chapter in Victor Emeljanow and Gillian Arrighi (eds.), A World of Popular Entertainments, an edited volume of critical essays, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
Book chapter in Jerry Jaffe and Henry Johnson (eds.), Performing Japan: Contemporary Expressions ... more Book chapter in Jerry Jaffe and Henry Johnson (eds.), Performing Japan: Contemporary Expressions of Cultural Identity, Folkestone, Kent : Global Oriental, 2008.
Book chapter in Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall (eds.), The Ends of the 60s: Performance, Media... more Book chapter in Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall (eds.), The Ends of the 60s: Performance, Media and Contemporary Culture, Sydney: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW and Performance Paradigm, 2006.
Papers by Yuji Sone
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2021
Etsuko Ichihara is a media artist who utilises digital media and robotic technologies, exploring ... more Etsuko Ichihara is a media artist who utilises digital media and robotic technologies, exploring Japanese traditional beliefs of the spirit and the supernatural in her recent works. Ichihara repurposes paranormal and folk religious ideas concerning the figure of the shaman, an ogre-like demon that features in some Japanese festivals, and ritual offerings, but reinvents these traditional elements through technological mediation. I discuss Ichihara's distinctive engagement with a contemporised notion of spirituality in Japan. In particular, this essay argues that Ichihara's media art aims to connect Japanese people in order to create sociality and community. Ichihara appropriates Japanese animistic beliefs and tailors them for a mediated and technologised Japan, utilising what might be called a ‘techno-spiritual Japanese-ness’, that is, self-orientalising tropes that paradoxically generate the means for social relations.
Journal of Science & Popular Culture, 2020
This article discusses Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese celebrity roboticist internationally acclaime... more This article discusses Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese celebrity roboticist internationally acclaimed for his creation of androids. While his anthropomorphic machines are intended as models for future human-like robots, participating in work and domestic contexts, Ishiguro also regards them as experimental tools for investigations into questions of human identity. Beyond engineering challenges, he is not afraid to ask philosophical questions, such as 'what is the human?' Ishiguro has even had facial plastic surgery to match the appearance of his robot double, Geminoid HI-1. He has been described as the bad boy of Japanese robotics, an eccentric genius who is recognized as such in Japan, and overseas. While Ishiguro conducts scientific experiments, he has also deployed his anthropomorphic robots in popular entertainment contexts such as film, television, theatre and in museum exhibitions. Although Ishiguro's androids have almost always been included in mainstream western journalism's coverage concerning the development of next-generation robots in Japan, his anthropomorphic machines are often shown along with a photo of Ishiguro in his trademark black clothing, and described as 'freaky' and 'creepy'. I argue that Ishiguro's presentation feeds the western fascination with Japanese robot technology. This article examines the relationship between Ishiguro's larger-than-life public persona and his philosophy concerning his work as a kind of storytelling and upstream engagement in the context of robotic science.
Performance Research, 2018
This essay examines Alter, an android that was developed collaboratively by Japanese roboticist H... more This essay examines Alter, an android that was developed collaboratively by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro and A-Life (artificial life) scientist Takashi Ikegami. Alter is an experimental robot platform conceived as a ‘machine human’. Alter was created at the juncture of Ishiguro’s interest in android appearance and Ikegami’s search for what he sees as internal principles underlying life. While Ishiguro’s anthropomorphic machines are intended as models for future humanoid robots in workplaces and domestic contexts, they are also intended as experimental tools for his investigations on human identity, the ‘soul’, and sociality, and related philosophical questions, such as ‘What is the human?’ In contrast, Ikegami works with a different question: ‘What is natural life?’ Ikegami’s question emerges from his research interest in and development of artificial life systems, which combine computer simulation, chemical experiments, and robotics. Alter, presented as an interactive performance installation at a science museum in Japan in 2016, was intended as a model with which to study human embodiment and sentience. In this essay, I examine how Alter’s 2016 performance was designed dramaturgically to induce a sense of agency hovering between the organic and the inorganic, the natural and mechanical, the random and controlled, and between the autonomous and programmed. I discuss how Alter rehearsed human-machine inter-corporeality, and how its dramaturgical staging contributed to its agency.
This essay discusses Fujiko Nakaya, a Japanese artist who has been known since 1970 for the use o... more This essay discusses Fujiko Nakaya, a Japanese artist who has been known since 1970 for the use of fog in her site-specific installations. Nakaya’s outdoor work is designed for and interacts with a particular site, facilitating spectators’ kinaesthetic awareness through a dynamic visibility and strategies of immersion. This essay discusses Nakaya’s fog work as reflecting her early contact with Western art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, filtered through a particularly Japanese aesthetic. I argue that the underlying principle informing Nakaya’s fog art is one of an imagined natural core that is accessible to the spectator paradoxically through the very artificiality of the environment Nakaya creates, and through the work’s facilitation of a reflexive receptiveness of one’s own transience. Nakaya’s work sustains an irresolvable relation between nature and culture that rejects the simple dichotomy of the human and the natural. Nakaya’s work accentuates the embodied experience of the spectator, giving rise to a new form of participation and ecological awareness.
Contemporary Theatre Review,, 2016
Australasian Drama Studies: Special Focus Issue, ‘Digital Performance Futures in Australasia’, (O... more Australasian Drama Studies: Special Focus Issue, ‘Digital Performance Futures in Australasia’, (October 2014), pp. 255–271.
Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, (2014), pp. 196–222.
About Performance, Vol. 11, pp. 63-81, 2012.
Studies in Theatre and Performance, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 341-353, 2010.
Performance Research, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 32-40, 2010.
The proceedings of the Time, Transcendence, Performance Conference, Monash University, 2010.
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Book by Yuji Sone
Book Chapters by Yuji Sone
Papers by Yuji Sone