Ambient Media examines music, video art, film, and literature as tools of atmospheric design in contemporary Japan. Paul Roquet traces the emergence of ambient styles from the environmental music and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the more recent therapeutic emphasis on healing and relaxation to make a case for portraying ambient media as a neoliberal response to older modes of collective harmony.
Paul Roquet studies the use of media as personal technologies of perceptual and emotional self-regulation. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minnesota, 2016) explores how music, video art, film, and literature came to be used as tools of individual atmospheric mood control, theorizing what it means to treat media as a sensory resource for self-care. His new book, The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan (Columbia, 2022) critically rethinks the cultural politics of consumer VR as a project to perceptually recenter individuals within a privatized virtual space. Roquet’s work engages closely with materials and social contexts from Japan, drawing on the country's history with media technologies to offer new perspectives for a global media studies. His essays have been published in journals including Animation, Journal of Japanese Studies, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Representations, Sound Studies, and the Journal of Visual Culture. For more details visit proquet.mit.edu.
Paul Roquet
