Transpacific Experiments: Intermedia Art and Music in 1960s Japan

How intermedia art and everyday life in 1960s Japan shaped an unexpected transcultural avant-garde Intermedia art—an avant-garde multimedia practice that combines sound and moving images—took root in Japan alongside other places in the 1960s. In Transpacific Experiments, Miki Kaneda analyzes intermedia as a practice that gives form to errant possibilities, unfolding in spaces of the everyday, to offer nuanced insights into the global flow of ideas, influence, and discourses of appropriation. The stories of intermedia art throughout the study offer feminist and transnational perspectives on experimental music and art that disorient existing narratives about the experimental and political in unexpected ways. Transpacific Experiments contends that social, cultural, and political arrangements local to Japan had a greater influence on the transnational experimental music scene than previously acknowledged. Kaneda’s perspective extends, exceeds, and at times unsettles frameworks for experimental practices, revealing the limitations of any single political or aesthetic lens.