Associate Professor Paul Roquet’s work focuses on issues of perception and emotion in emerging Japanese media, with particular attention to the cultural politics of mediated space. His first book, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) explores the use of audio, visual, and textual media to generate therapeutic atmospheres for relaxation and self-care. He examines what it means to use media as a form of personal and collective mood regulation, and how this intersects with larger social transformations in urban Japan and neoliberal culture more broadly.

Listen to an audio Interview on Ambient Media by New Books Network (July 31, 2016)

He has recently turned his attention to the emotions running through virtual reality and augmented reality as they have been imagined and engineered in Japan over the past few decades. Paul has written a couple of articles on this topic: “From Animation to Augmentation: Dennō Coil and the Composited Self” — an essay on growing up with AR glasses in Animation: an interdisciplinary journal ; and “Peripheral Visions” exploring peripheral vision in the VR head-mounted display at Real Life. Real Life is an online magazine about living with technology.

Paul Roquet is spending the Academic Year 2019 in Japan on a Japan Foundation research fellowship. The Japan Foundation is Japan’s only institution dedicated to carrying out comprehensive international cultural exchange programs throughout the world.