Dr. Yoshitaka Mori is Associate Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies at Tokyo University of the Arts.  His research interests are postmodern culture, media, art, the city and transnationalism.  His publications include Japanese books 'Karutyuraru Stadeizu Nyumon (The Introduction to Cultural Services)' co-written with Toshiya Ueno and Bunka= Seiji (Culture=Politics).

He also published several English essays including, Culture=Politics: The Emergence of New Cultural Forms of Protest in the age of Freeter' (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol.6 No.1, Routledge, 2005) and 'Subcultural Unconsciousness in Japan: the War and Japanese Contemporary Artists' (Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan, M. Allen and R. Sakamoto eds, Routledge 2006: London). Since 2006, he has worked as one of the directors of NPO, Art Institute Kitakyushu (AIK) and organized contemporary art projects.

Day 2: Saturday 4th October, Session 1: Art, Technology and Public Space

Mobile Technology Culture and the Emergence of 'Mobile' Subjectivities'

The paper will discuss the culture of mobile technology and its relationship with the emergence of new 'mobile' subjectivities, in particular, among young people in Japan. By the term mobile technology, I mainly refer to mobile phones as well as mp 3 players and videogame gadgets such as Nintendo DS and Sony PSP (Play Station Portable), as their functions are increasingly getting similar these days.

It will examine them not only as technological products but also as cultural products, as their technology has developed not by itself, but under a particular social, economic and cultural condition. It is cultural, firstly because it has radically changed a way of everyday life and secondly because it has invented new cultural forms in many ways. Through the analysis of their various practices from listening to music to reading novels (keitai-shosetsu), the paper tries to demonstrate the way in which the formation of subjectivities is being transformed.