My presentation will use still and video images to enquire into how, in contemporary Japanese performance, media and technology can conjure up spectral experiences. I will examine a range of examples of spectral performance, including those of the vocaloid Hatsune Miku and Ishiguro Hiroshi’s Geminoid F in two plays by Oriza Hirata: Sayonara (2010) and its sequel Sayonara II (2012), mostly recently adapted into a film by Kōji Fukuda (2015). In these works, nonhuman actors serve as mediums in mediatized performances. All these works enquire into the nature of life, “liveness” (Philip Auslander’s term), and the real. The pop idol Hatsune Miku is a video projection that serves as the voice for a synthesizer program; she is a shared imago created by a collective of fans. The nature of life and death is addressed in her Vocaloid opera THE END. 

Zur Person:
Mark Cody Poulton (PhD, U of T) has been teaching Japanese language, literature and theatre in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at University of Victoria since 1988. Currently he is Fellow at the  International Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures”, Freie Universität, Berlin.