Welcome to the Asiascape.net news page. Here you will find the latest news and announcements concerning Asiascape events, staff and research. For news about recent and current occurrences in the worlds of East Asian cybercultures and animanga, please refer to our news-blog, vistas.
Asiascape Futures Expo
Following on from our successful exhibition at the Peace Palace in The Hague earlier in 2009, Asiascape is proud to announce that its exhibiiton, 'The Future via Anime' is now on show in the new East Asia Library at Leiden University.
Visitors are welcome in December 2009 until spring 2010.
See poster (pdf).
3 PhD Positions on Asiascape Project -- APPLY NOW
3 fully funded PhD positions are now available on the NWO funded project: Beyond Utopia - New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge and the Science Fictional Field of Japan. Each PhD will focus on a particular medium (anime, manga, video games) and ask questions about their political content and intent.
More info about the project is in this Asiascape Ops publication.
Asiascape Press Release
In December 2008, the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) awarded a major research grant, the prestigeous VICI award for innovational research, to Asiascape director Prof Chris Goto-Jones. The project, which will run for 5 years, is concerned with unearthing the political content and function of Japanese techno-culture.
IIAS Support
Asiascape.net is delighted to be able to announce that the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) has recently decided to provide support for Asiascape and some of its future projects.
Asiascape Press Release
Established in September 2007, asiascape.net is the home of the Contemporary East Asian Media Centre (CEAMC). It is an attempt to build a new international research coalition in the rapidly emerging fields of cyberculture, Video Games and Animanga (Anime and Manga), as especially as they relate to (or orginate from) East Asia.
Asiascape Futures Workshop 2008
Following up on the one-day workshop on the ‘futures of digital technology’ held at Leiden University, 3rd October 2007, this 1- day workshop focussed on the themes of futurism, nostalgia, modes of science fiction imagination and spectacle coalescing around and after the 1970 Osaka EXPO.
Asiascape Futures Workshop 2007
Both the discourses of science fiction and those of global development have relied, in many of cases, on futures imagined as a result of technological change. The futures of digital technology, in particular, are as old as the immediate post-1945 period, and have predicted a number of different social revolutions: freedom from labour through artificial life or intelligence, fantasies of total surveillance and control, fantasies of libertarian life beyond the electronic frontier, even postreligious images of transcending the material.
Inaugural Asiascape Lecture
We are delighted to be able to announce that Prof Susan Napier, a member of our international advisory board, will be giving the inaugural Asiascape lecture in Leiden on 2nd October 2007, 15-17.00. Prof Napier is a world authority on Japanese anime and author of the best-selling book, Anime: From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. Her topic will be: Animation: The Art Form of the 21st Century?
This lecture is co-sponsored by MEARC.
