Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self by Paul Roquet (review)

Writing about a matter such as “ambient media” could be considered a challenge. Not because of the subject per se, but because of the fact that writing about the state of ambience—a very subjective and affective experience of visual and/or auditory media, such as video, music, or literature—necessarily requires us to “squeeze” the spatio-ephemeral and tangible experience of ambience into the two-dimensional and “cold” textual form. Not very surprisingly, while reading Paul Roquet’s book, I was often reminded of a famous quote by Victor Hugo: “music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” This aptly describes not only my own reading experience but also the potential limits of writing about nontextual, sometimes not even visual, media—about something that functions best not when one is contemplatively looking at it but when one experiences and senses it as something that surrounds or even absorbs the individual. While Hugo’s words refer particularly to music, I am sure Roquet must have felt the same frustration from time to time, given that his book includes auto ethnographical descriptions of his own subjective exposure to ambient media. Nevertheless, readers of Roquet’s book should count themselves lucky that the author apparently adhered to the second part of Hugo’s observation and produced this well-researched and wonderfully written book about the yet neglected subject of ambient media in Japan, thereby masterfully conquering the paradox described by Hugo.

On that note, it might be important to remark that, unlike Victor Hugo in his times, we are nowadays living in the age of a ubiquitous internet connection. I was distracted from reading the book on numerous occasions by watching clips of video installations and listening to the tunes discussed in the book, at one point even reaching a state which might be described as “ambient multimedia reading.” This significantly slowed the process of reading the book and writing this review but was definitely worthwhile. These distractions aside, one wishes the author (or the publisher?) had dared to be more experimental by advancing into the possibilities of digital publishing, or at least into the various possibilities available for integrating the nontextual works discussed in the book into the printed publication in some other way (such as via a supplementary website). One might speculate, however, that the traditional format might be based on the restrictions of what could be called the “academico-commercial complex” among young scholars—driven by their need to publish their dissertations in the traditional medium of the book to get hired or tenured—combined with the growing commercialization of the scholarly book.

Despite these apparently unavoidable restrictions, Roquet’s book takes the reader on a fantastic journey through and across the different forms of what the author calls “ambient media”: ambient music, ambient video/film, and ambient literature. It does so by looking into the subject from at least three different angles. Roquet discusses the specific materiality of each of the different media technologies and looks into their creatively artistic or blatantly commercial content. He also does not neglect discussion of the “effect” of ambient media on what media studies has for a long time expressed through concepts such as “recipient” and “audience.” Accordingly, the book discusses not only different media technologies, their histories, and the kind of environment (“atmosphere”) they create, but also how these media technologies, their contents, and the readers and viewers interlock in a media environment, something Roquet describes as “ambient subjectivation” (p. 3). Put differently, the book successfully manages to be simultaneously a history and an epistemology and ontology of ambient media. Thereby, it productively contributes to the fields of media history and media philosophy/theory alike. Roquet—quoting Nikolas Rose—describes the aim of creating as well as being receptive to this state of ambient subjectivation as that of “personal mood regulation,” namely, the effect of ambient media aligning “political, social, and institutional goals...