Yuriko Furuhata

Yuriko Furuhata (she/her). Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies, and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She is the author of Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, and Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022), which traces the technological, institutional, and geopolitical connections between Japan and the United States that led to the historical development of artificial fog, weather control, cybernetic environments, metabolic architecture, and networked computing in the 20th century. 

Projects 

Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments expands the scope of media studies to consider technologies that chemically “condition” Earth’s atmosphere and socially “condition” the conduct of people, focusing on the attempts to monitor and modify indoor and outdoor atmospheres by Japanese scientists, technicians, architects, and artists in conjunction with their American counterparts. The book charts the geopolitical contexts of what I call climatic media by examining a range of technologies such as cloud seeding and artificial snowflakes, digital computing used for weather forecasting and weather control, cybernetics for urban planning and policing, Nakaya Fujiko’s fog sculpture, and the architectural experiments of Tange Lab and the Metabolists, who sought to design climate-controlled capsule housing and domed cities. 

I am currently working on two new book projects: the first, titled Into Frozen Archives, explores scientific photographs and films of clouds, snow and ice as storage media in relation to the settler colonial histories of geology, meteorology, and glaciology in Japan, Canada and the United States. The second project, titled Enchanted Consultation, examines the cultural techniques and media of divination and prediction through the cultural histories of pseudoscience, including astrology, geomancy, and parapsychology. 

Activity

I am a member of an international D4 research collective for Research for Ethical Speculative Design, Environmental Media Lab, MIRL , The Platform Lab, and Global Emergent Media Lab.

Publications (selected)

“Weathering with You: Mythical Time and the Paradox of the Anthropocene,” Representations 157 (2022): 68-89.

“Spaceship Earth: Metabolist Capsules, Petro-Economy, and Geoengineering.” The Urbanism of Metabolism. Visions, Scenarios and Models for the Mutant City of Tomorrow, ed. Raffaele Pernice. Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming, 2022.

“Compass: Technologies of Self-Orientation.” Proof of Stake: Claims to Technology, ed. Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Pias. Milano: Lentz Press, forthcoming, 2022.

"Archipelagic Archives: Media Geology and the Deep Time of Japan's Settler Colonialism," Public Culture 33.3 (September 2021): 417-440.

“Of Dragons and Geoengineering: Rethinking Elemental Media,” Media+Environment 1.1 (2019).  https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10797.

“The Fog Medium: Visualizing and Engineering the Atmosphere.” Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, eds. Craig Buckly, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti. Amsterdam University Press, 2019, 187-213.

 “Tange Lab and Biopolitics: From Geopolitics of the Sphere to the Nervous System of the Nation.” Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in Japan, edited by Steve Choe and Mayumo Inoue. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2019, 219-242.

“Architecture as Atmospheric Media: Tange Lab and Cybernetics.” Media Theory in Japan. eds. Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 52-79.

“Multimedia Environments and Security Operations: Expo’70 as a Laboratory of Governance,” Grey Room 54 (Winter 2014): 56-79.

For complete publications list, please visit: http://www.yurikofuruhata.com